PRECEPT: A Framework for Ethical Digital Forensics Investigations.

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Cyber-enabled crimes are on the increase, and law enforcement has had to expand many of their detecting activities into the digital domain. As such, the field of digital forensics has become far more sophisticated over the years and is now able to uncover even more evidence that can be used to support prosecution of cyber criminals in a court of law. Governments, too, have embraced the ability to track suspicious individuals in the online world. Forensics investigators are driven to gather data exhaustively, being under pressure to provide law enforcement with sufficient evidence to secure a conviction. Yet, there are concerns about the ethics and justice of untrammeled investigations on a number of levels. On an organizational level, unconstrained investigations could interfere with, and damage, the organization’s right to control the disclosure of their intellectual capital. On an individual level, those being investigated could easily have their legal privacy rights violated by forensics investigations. On a societal level, there might be a sense of injustice at the perceived inequality of current practice in this domain. This paper argues the need for a practical, ethically-grounded approach to digital forensic investigations, one that acknowledges and respects the privacy rights of individuals and the intellectual capital disclosure rights of organisations, as well as acknowledging the needs of law enforcement. We derive a set of ethical guidelines, then map these onto a forensics investigation framework. We subjected the framework to expert review in two stages, refining the framework after each stage. We conclude by proposing the refined ethically-grounded digital forensics investigation framework. Our treatise is primarily UK based, but the concepts presented here have international relevance and applicability. In this paper, the lens of justice theory is used to explore the tension that exists between the needs of digital forensic investigations into cybercrimes on the one hand, and, on the other, individuals’ rights to privacy and organizations’ rights to control intellectual capital disclosure. The investigation revealed a potential inequality between the practices of digital forensics investigators and the rights of other stakeholders. That being so, the need for a more ethically-informed approach to digital forensics investigations, as a remedy, is highlighted, and a framework proposed to provide this. Our proposed ethically-informed framework for guiding digital forensics investigations suggest a way of re-establishing the equality of the stakeholders in this arena, and ensuring that the potential for a sense of injustice is reduced. Justice theory is used to highlight the difficulties in squaring the circle between the rights and expectations of all stakeholders in the digital forensics arena. The outcome is the forensics investigation guideline, PRECEpt: Privacy-Respecting EthiCal framEwork, which provides the basis for a re-aligning of the balance between the requirements and expectations of digital forensic investigators on the one hand, and individual and organizational expectations and rights, on the other

The Burger Court: Discord in Search and Seizure

The accession of Mr. Chief Justice Burger to the Supreme Court of the United States was expected to signal the limitation of constitutional doctrines by which the Court had enhanced the rights of the criminal defendant. The fulfillment of this expectation has been generally marked by decisions which have been readily and quickly comprehensible. For example, the prosecution was prohibited by the Warren Court from employing any products of the defendant\u27s custodial interrogation in the absence of a warning of his right to counsel and his right to remain silent; the statement so procured is still barred in the case in chief but can be used to impeach the defendant\u27s trial testimony. Post-indictment confrontation by an identifying witness was established as a critical stage at which the suspect was absolutely entitled to the assistance of counsel; the Burger Court has not extended this right to counsel to confrontations before institution of criminal proceedings nor to post- indictment photographic identification

LAPR: An experimental aircraft pushbroom scanner

A three band Linear Array Pushbroom Radiometer (LAPR) was built and flown on an experimental basis by NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Center. The functional characteristics of the instrument and the methods used to preprocess the data, including radiometric correction, are described. The radiometric sensitivity of the instrument was tested and compared to that of the Thematic Mapper and the Multispectral Scanner. The radiometric correction procedure was evaluated quantitatively, using laboratory testing, and qualitatively, via visual examination of the LAPR test flight imagery. Although effective radiometric correction could not yet be demonstrated via laboratory testing, radiometric distortion did not preclude the visual interpretation or parallel piped classification of the test imagery

Development and fabrication of heat-sterilizable inhalation therapy equipment

The development of a completely heat sterilizable intermittent positive pressure breathing (IPPB) ventilator in an effort to reduce the number of hospital acquired infections is reported. After appropriate changes in materials and design were made, six prototype units were fabricated and were successfully field tested in local hospitals. Most components of the modified ventilators are compatible with existing machines. In all but a few instances, such as installation of bacteria-retentive filters and a modified venturi, the change over from non-heat-sterilizable to sterilizable units was accomplished by replacement of heat labile materials with heat stable materials

PRECEPT-4-Justice: A bias-neutralising framework for digital forensics investigations

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Software invisibly permeates our everyday lives: operating devices in our physical world (traffic lights and cars), effecting our business transactions and powering the vast World Wide Web. We have come to rely on such software to work correctly and efficiently. The generally accepted narrative is that any software errors that do occur can be traced back to a human operator’s mistakes. Software engineers know that this is merely a comforting illusion. Software sometimes has bugs, which might lead to erratic performance: intermittently generating errors. The software, hardware and communication infrastructure can all introduce errors, which are often challenging to isolate and correct. Anomalies that manifest are certainly not always due to an operator’s actions. When the general public and the courts believe the opposite, that errors are usually attributable to some human operator’s actions, it is entirely possible for some hapless innocent individual to be blamed for anomalies and discrepancies whose actual source is a software malfunction. This is what occurred in the Post Office Horizon IT case, where unquestioning belief in the veracity of software-generated evidence led to a decade of wrongful convictions. We will use this case as a vehicle to demonstrate the way biases can influence investigations, and to inform the development of a framework to guide and inform objective digital forensics investigations. This framework, if used, could go some way towards neutralising biases and preventing similar miscarriages of justice in the future

Identifying dynamical modules from genetic regulatory systems: applications to the segment polarity network

BACKGROUND It is widely accepted that genetic regulatory systems are 'modular', in that the whole system is made up of smaller 'subsystems' corresponding to specific biological functions. Most attempts to identify modules in genetic regulatory systems have relied on the topology of the underlying network. However, it is the temporal activity (dynamics) of genes and proteins that corresponds to biological functions, and hence it is dynamics that we focus on here for identifying subsystems. RESULTS Using Boolean network models as an exemplar, we present a new technique to identify subsystems, based on their dynamical properties. The main part of the method depends only on the stable dynamics (attractors) of the system, thus requiring no prior knowledge of the underlying network. However, knowledge of the logical relationships between the network components can be used to describe how each subsystem is regulated. To demonstrate its applicability to genetic regulatory systems, we apply the method to a model of the Drosophila segment polarity network, providing a detailed breakdown of the system. CONCLUSION We have designed a technique for decomposing any set of discrete-state, discrete-time attractors into subsystems. Having a suitable mathematical model also allows us to describe how each subsystem is regulated and how robust each subsystem is against perturbations. However, since the subsystems are found directly from the attractors, a mathematical model or underlying network topology is not necessarily required to identify them, potentially allowing the method to be applied directly to experimental expression data