Brian A. Jackson

Identifying Law Enforcement Needs for Access to Digital Evidence in Remote Data Centers

L aw enforcement increasingly needs to have access to data residing in remote data centers, and investigators frequently face multiple barriers in this process. As more data routinely collected by investigators have come to reside in remote locations, these barriers have become a growing challenge for stakeholders. On behalf of the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) and as part of the Priority Criminal Justice Needs Initiative, the RAND Corporation, in partnership with the Police Executive Research Forum, organized a workshop in May 2017 on Challenges with Law Enforcement Access to Digital Evidence Held in Remote Data Centers. The workshop brought together experts on the acquisition and use of digital evidence and on relevant law and technical issues from around the United States to discuss challenges associated with law enforcement requests for digital data held by third parties that may reside across state or national boundaries. Discussions focused on ambiguities in U.S. law and procedure, challenges associated with using the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) process, issues stemming from inadequate cooperation between law enforcement and service providers (the companies and organizations providing remote storage, communication, and computing services), and technical issues related to evidence residing in the cloud. During the workshop, participants discussed specific problems they faced and identified 36 needs for mitigating those problems. Needs, in this case, are the means of solving a key problem or improve performance over the baseline. As such, a need includes both a problem or an opportunity, as well as a related solution or innovative idea. Following this discussion, the needs were prioritized using the Delphi Method to produce a ranked list of high-priority needs (RAND Corporation, 2017). The highest-priority needs revolved around the creation of information exchange systems, better online training and standards, and incentives • Expert panelists on the acquisition and use of digital evidence and

Using Social Media and Social Network Analysis in Law Enforcement: Creating a Research Agenda, Including Business Cases, Protections, and Technology Needs

I n April 2017, the National Institute of Justice convened an expert panel to assess, and identify high-priority needs for, law enforcement’s use of two closely linked technologies that have potential to provide key information needed to address crime risks, hold offenders accountable, and ensure physical safety: social media analysis and social network analysis. Social media analysis consists of methods and tools to collect and analyze text, photos, video, and other material shared via social media systems, such as Facebook and Twitter. Social network analysis is a type of data analysis that investigates social relationships and structures as represented by networks (which can also be called graphs). Social media, given that it reflects relationships inherently, is a key source of data for social network analysis; conversely, social network analysis is one key type of social media analysis. In all, the panel discussed five core business cases for employing social media analysis and social network analysis in law enforcement:

Future-proofing justice: building a research agenda to address the effects of technological change on the protection of constitutional rights

A s changes occur in society, fitting the effects of those changes into existing legal structures and practices is not always smooth. When changes are gradual, law and precedent have time to react, using analogies to earlier situations or cases to build and understand how today’s world might differ from the world in which those precedents were set. When changes are sudden, however, thinking through how to address them can be tougher, and large-scale shifts can make it difficult to navigate the present based solely on analogies to the past. Shifts in technology—in which new innovations can produce rapid differences in what is possible—can create these types of challenges. As part of a multiyear research effort sponsored by and supporting the National Institute of Justice, the Priority Criminal Justice Needs Initiative has focused on identifying innovations in technology, policy, and practice that would be beneficial to the U.S. criminal justice sector. To do so, we convened expert panels and held other structured discussions with practitioners from law enforcement, courts, and corrections. During these discussions, practitioners identified changes in technology or new ways of doing things that might save money or enhance performance but also flagged innovations that might threaten the ideals that the criminal justice system is charged with protecting. An example that arose more than once in discussions with court practitioners was virtual presence. Teleconferencing has evolved from an expensive technology transmitting low-quality images to a technology so cheap that it is included as a standard feature in most new mobile communication devices. Today, on higher-end professional systems, a person can appear life size and at high enough resolution that a viewer can read facial expressions and body language. In the future, virtual reality • Panelists convened to craft a research agenda to ensure that advances in technology inside and outside the criminal justice system do not adversely affect the protection of individuals’ constitutional rights and identified a variety of needs for the near and longer terms.