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Young Forensic Scientists Forum Newsletter - July 2000 Forensic
Information on the Internet |
| The following was written by Zeno Geradts, author and Webmaster of the popular and extremely well-read forensic resource guide, Zeno's Forensic Site. Zeno works for the Ministry of Justice in the Netherlands Forensic Institute. In 1994 I started using the Internet for forensic information. That was when the idea of Zeno's Forensic Site was started with less than sixty links. The reason for starting this site was that it was sometimes hard to find forensic information on the Internet, and not many forensic scientists were on the Internet. Afterwards other sites also provided the same type of information, like Reddy's Forensic Site,1 which appeared to be an excellent alternative to Zeno's Forensic Page 2. The number of visitors to Zeno's Forensic Page was growing, and I was looking for other ways of providing information. For this reason Zeno's Forensic e-mail list was developed to keep track of new Web sites. Further, an on-line discussion forum appeared to be working, since I received many questions on forensic subjects that I could not answer, but knew there were others who could. Since the number of visitors and the number of Web sites grew, there was some need to automate the submission process and the checking of the Web sites. For this reason the site changed with perl-scripts in 1999. The number of visitors on average is over 500 a day, and there are presently over 600 links. One thing that is important to keep track of is all of the changes on the Internet. For this reason the sites on the list are checked weekly to see if they still exist. The Web is getting more commercial now, and many laboratories and other forensic services are on the Internet. Further, lawyers and other people who prepare for court cases often refer to the Internet as a source of information. It is good to see that the bibliographic information is becoming available for free on the Internet from the different literature sources .3 The sources that are of interest, like Medline,4 provide their information at no fee. Some years ago this may have cost over sixty dollars an hour to search in these databases. Also, the patent searches are free now and even the complete patents are available at no cost, whereas several years ago this was very expensive. The publishers of journals are also looking at how they can use the Internet so they might have ways for subscribers to search for a one-time fee in their complete journal full text and to retrieve the full-text articles. These types of searches might also be charged by credit card. Furthermore, it has been the interest of the forensic scientists to form discussion groups and exchange information over the Internet. The only problem is the ease to use secure tools for exchanging information on the Internet. The number of online image databases is growing very rapidly. The information of forensic cases can be shared easily, and other forensic scientists can search through the online databases. An example is the Dutch database of drug pills.5 However, there are many other databases that might communicate via the Internet. Increase in bandwidth is necessary for these types of applications. Encryption will also be used as a standard, and the communication of e-mails and other information will be secure. For this is it necessary to have standards on encryption. At the moment there are several solutions, like PGP. However, Microsoft is also including encryption in their packages and it is expected that this will become a standard. With the wireless communication standards that have been implemented, more and more people throughout the world are using the Internet. In criminal cases it is expected that much evidence can be collected by loggings of these devices. The interpretation of IP-taps for evidence is also a new field in forensic investigations; however, it depends on the law system if it is admissible as evidence to court. For crime investigation, it is recommended to have a computer evidence unit in the forensic laboratory. Throughout the world there are such departments, and it is expected the number of crimes on the Internet and the need for forensic evidence in courts will be more important. Also the numbers of cases where hackers become active will grow. 1. Reddy's Forensic Site http://haven.ios.com/~nyrc/homepage.html 2. Zeno's Forensic Site http://forensic.to/forensic.html 3. Zeno's Forensic Literature overview http://forensic.to/lit.html 4. Medline http://www.nlm.nih.gov/databases/freemedl.html 5. Dutch Forensic Database of Drugs Pills http://forensic.to/links/cgi-bin/jump.cgi?ID=572 |
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© 1999 Young Forensic Scientists Forum / American Academy of Forensic Sciences |