From: Center for Strategic and International Studies
William A. Carter, Jennifer Daskal, William Crumpler
Whether you believe law enforcement is “going dark” or we are in a “golden age of surveillance,” law enforcement faces substantial challenges in identifying and accessing digital evidence that is available and important to their criminal investigations. Some of these problems are no doubt related to encryption and ephemerality of data—the two issues that have absorbed most of the national attention to date. But the problems with digital evidence and digital technologies go far beyond those issues and affect over one-third of law enforcement cases.
Over the past year, we conducted a series of interviews with federal, state, and local law enforcement officials, attorneys, service providers, and civil society groups. We also commissioned a survey of law enforcement officers from across the country to better understand the full range of difficulties they are facing in accessing and using digital evidence in their cases. Survey results indicate that accessing data from service providers—much of which is not encrypted—is the biggest problem that law enforcement currently faces in leveraging digital evidence.
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