February 2009

The last post was by Holly, and she wrote on concerns on the distribution of knowledge and people committing crime with this knowledge. The issue is also true the other way around, since we have to exchange knowledge, and have our methods peer reviewed in journals, so use them in court. In many countries legislation exist to shield the information such that it is not used for committing crime, and still the evidence can be used in court. It is also the reason that often events are organized for law enforcement only in this field.

Within FIDIS www.fidis.net where I am involved in the package on forensic science, another issue is mainting privacy, since people seem to store lots of information on the internet without realizing that other people can also use it in the future, and one should be aware that even if information is erased, it is often available on backups, so it is also something to be aware of. As we see with the latest developments on the mobile phone (for example latitude of google), also the location of where you are, is visible on the net. With these systems you give permission, and even I tend to use these features, since it can be a nice gadget.

I am looking forward to the meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Science in Denver. I organized a workshop, and we have the first year of our new group in Digital Evidence and Multimedia, where I am currently chairperson of. I will also give a paper on camera identification and ENF.

In August we also organize a workshop the Third International Workshop on Computational Forensics at the Netherlands Forensic Institute, The Hague, The Netherlands [August 13-14, 2009]. Currently there is a call for papers, so we are looking forward to this. It is in conjuction with IAPR and there should be paper proceedings ready by Springer in August.