Digital forensics expert & expert witness · The Forbes digital forensics columnist
How digital evidence works and when it holds up: authentication, admissibility, expert testimony and the device-level forensics behind proof.
For one day in late July, anyone could type a sentence into Google Earth and get a fake satellite image rendered on top of Google's real imagery of a real place. Researchers made a nuclear plant in Iran and a bomb crater at a Gaza hospital within hours. Google pulled the feature the next day.
Google pulled AI image generation from Google Earth one day after launch because of fraud concerns. A digital forensics expert on what happens next.
Digital evidence authentication faces a growing crisis as metadata, once a key indicator, proves increasingly unreliable.
Text message screenshots are unreliable as legal evidence. Easily faked even before generative AI.
Metadata was never proof. It is an envelope written in pencil, and every new app and upload pipeline hands someone else an eraser.
A digital forensics expert on why screenshots of text messages prove almost nothing, what carrier records and backups miss and when only the smartphone can answer.
How did a deepfake indict an innocent person in federal court without anyone catching it? The first federal survey of judges on deepfake challenges just dropped.
A claims adjuster reviews damage photos. A detective examines cell phone video. A family law attorney presents screenshots in a custody hearing. None of them can confirm with certainty that what they're looking at is real.
Video evidence can only be enhanced so much - too much and you create artifacts that do not exist in the original footage.
Police can get permission to search your property faster than you can order coffee, study finds.
Digital evidence is volatile and fragile. Volatile, meaning easily changed. Fragile, meaning easily destroyed. Your case is only as good as your collection. Fail to respect this truth and risk losing before it begins.
Call detail records reveal your historic location, communication, and activity—here's how.
AI evidence, deepfakes and cell phone forensics from an expert witness who works these cases. No hype, no fear-mongering. Free.
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