In Bob Elder’s expert hands, a cellphone is a gold mine of crime-fighting information.

Elder recently retired from his job as a detective-constable with the Victoria Police Department. His last seven years on the force were spent with the Computer Forensic Unit, honing his ability to pull data from electronic devices.

The 51-year-old has developed such a knack for what he does that his knowledge is sought around the world — the result of a reputation gained from a regular travel schedule to teach his techniques to other professionals. As a result, he is often asked to weigh in on cases from far afield.

“I just did work on a homicide in Delaware,” Elder said, explaining that the case involved a man who killed his wife but claimed to have found her dead in the house.

“Based on using one of these advanced techniques, we were able to determine that he had actually been Googling the event from the time he killed her to the time it was reported to police. In that hour, he was Googling it to see if it had been reported, so that put him at the scene.”

Elder’s work has also meant dealing with child-pornography cases, including an investigation of a Victoria juvenile that took on international proportions. The juvenile turned out to be trading child pornography with people around the world, and Elder and others were able to delve into the operation by extracting chat logs and contact lists from a hard drive.

That led to a string of arrests in other locations over the next three or four years and the rescue of a number of children. Elder said the success and scope of the outcome makes it stand out among his cases.

Elder’s police career includes eight years as a Saanich reserve officer and 131Ú2 years with VicPD — time that also included a stint with the Strike Force, an undercover surveillance squad focused on drug cases. He said he jumped at the chance to work in computer forensics.

“I was always a geek from way back, so when the job came up to become part of the unit, I applied for it and got it.”

Elder’s role in cellphone-related investigations usually involves getting into the guts of the device, taking it apart and looking for data. He said criminals may lock their phones, but that won’t stop police.

“That’s where my expertise kind of comes in,” Elder said. “I deal mainly with the advanced mobile forensics at what we call the physical level, so I’m dealing with the actual memory chips on the [circuit] board as opposed to the device itself.”

Much of Elder’s knowledge has come from work done on his own time, and the results are considered groundbreaking, said Victoria police spokesman Bowen Osoko.

“I just had a passion for it,” Elder said.

Life beyond police work will involve transferring his skills to the private sector with Teel Technologies, an American mobile-device forensics company expanding into Canada. Elder will head up the company’s Canadian operations.

His new job will change his travel itinerary, which was previously confined to North America.

“Starting in June and July, I start teaching in the U.K., Germany, Brunei and other countries. All of these countries now are looking for that technology to be able to get into these phones.”

Following wider trends, police have been looking at fewer and fewer computers, and considerably more mobile devices, Elder said. Victoria police examine about 300 cellphones a year, he said.

“The trend is within five to seven years, they expect people won’t have computer towers in their house. It’ll all be smartphones or tablets, that kind of thing.”

Information gleaned from cellphones fits in well with the legal process, Elder said

“Things that we can find on them would include call logs, contacts, text messaging. Some of the cellphones now can hold up to 3,000 or 4,000 text messages, so that gives us pretty good evidence toward the file,” he said.

“If it’s a drug dealer and he’s got a thousand text messages, arranging buys and all of that kind of stuff, it’s really conclusive evidence when we take that to court.”

Elder’s retirement was accompanied by a Commendation for Meritorious Service from Victoria Police Chief Jamie Graham.

High-tech sleuthing a geek’s dream for recently retired Victoria detective – World – Times Colonist.

Courts have wrestled with how to apply the Fifth Amendment to encrypted hard drives for several years. According to past rulings, forcing a defendant to decrypt a hard drive isn’t necessarily self-incriminating, but forcing a defendant to decrypt a hard drive can amount to self-incrimination if the government can’t otherwise show that the defendant has the password for the drive. In that case, forced decryption amounts to a forced confession that the defendant owns the drive.

Fifth Amendment Shields Child Porn Suspect from Decrypting Hard Drives | DFI News.

After deliberating for just over two days, the jury found Nosal, 55, guilty of conspiracy, stealing trade secrets and violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act — handing the U.S. attorney’s office a complete trial victory in a high-profile and challenging white-collar prosecution.

The verdict in the case before U.S. District Judge Edward Chen comes a year after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit sided with Nosal’s defense lawyers in a pivotal en banc decision that junked six additional computer hacking charges against the former Korn/Ferry International executive.

Prosecution of White-collar Hacking Successful | DFI News.

Using metaphors to explain concepts and data enhances the scientific testimony’s impact, meaning, and memory-value.

All thinking is metaphorical.
Robert Frost, (quoted in Shibles, 1974)

Forensic scientists are increasingly required to testify about their findings and their professional conclusions.¹ To present clear and compelling testimony, forensic experts need more than their science training. They need effective and evidence-based communication skills. This article describes and illustrates why metaphors are such powerful vehicles for scientific testimony and presents a simple, but extremely effective method to offer clear and compelling forensic science testimony.

Forensic scientists are like translators. They must “translate” scientific procedure and opinion in ways that both educate and persuade jurors. Legal scholars recognize that narrative elements, such as metaphors, effectively negotiate those two world-views, language, and goals.²

Science, especially neuroscience, also tells us that metaphors function as significant cognitive tools for data interpretation and decision-making.³Lawyers, politicians, war planners, peace planners, advertising and PR professionals, and psychotherapists have long used metaphors as tools to inform and to influence how people frame issues, prioritize choices, and calculate results. Metaphors have climbed out of literature courses and into court testimony.

Neuroscience and Using Forensic Metaphors
Metaphors associate dissimilar concepts across areas of the brain associated both with affect and cognition. The images used in metaphors connect to our own images to form powerful and persuasive cognitive associations. First, they collect neurons together to form constellations of images. “Neurons that fire together, wire together” is the most famous adage in neuroscience.⁴ It means that images and metaphors that ignite memories, thoughts, and feelings bundle together to form constellations of much more powerful thoughts. Because this bundling of neurons takes place across a wide area of the brain, the impact of the metaphor increases geometrically.

The following trial excerpt⁵ depicts how one forensic scientist explained the role of DNA to the jury under direct testimony.

Prosecutor: …But what is DNA? I mean, we—we know it’s out there. What is it?
Forensic scientist: …It controls how you develop and function. You inherit half your DNA from your mother and half from your father, and the inherent DNA will stay the same throughout your lifetime.

Can you spot the metaphor? “Controls” is not a scientific analysis or description of how DNA works. “Controls” is a metaphor for how DNA works. It’s a metaphor because it connects two different images. We “control” our car. We “control” our TV remote. When the scientist used “controls,” they tapped into all jurors’ images of “control,” so that DNA doesn’t just equal “control.” The metaphor equals all the jurors’ expectations, memories, and motivations for controlling. The use of “control” now clusters with every other neuron connected to “control” in the juror’s mind. Like a word search on the internet yielding a zillion “hits,” the image expands itself ad infinitum. The well-placed metaphor goes viral in the mind of jurors in seconds.

Metaphors are powerful testimonial tools for three reasons. First, metaphors can transform how jurors “frame” or understand and consider trial issues.⁵ Metaphors provide the cognitive infrastructure into which ideas and data will be stored and understood. Jurors use metaphors as “frames” into which they “fit” evidence and testimony. Forensic scientists who use forensic metaphors marshal neuroscience to clearly and convincingly define the role and significance of their testimony.

Second, metaphors “reframe” images and incite thinking “outside the box.”⁶ Metaphors, in connecting dissimilar images, expand and “morph” the meaning of both images. Forensic scientists may urge jurors to think in new and different ways. After all, jurors consider facts from different perspectives offered from different parties in court. In the “control” metaphor above, the jurors’ minds pave new pathways for the significance of DNA as well as the significance of DNA evidence for their particular case. Metaphors are perfect vehicles by which to “try on” evidence using different images.

Third, metaphors enhance meaning and meaning enhances memory.⁷Metaphors enhance meaning and the more meaningful a concept, the more memorable it is. The more a juror understands about the importance of scientific testimony, the more they will remember it. Ideas connected to images make it easier for our brains to remember names, numbers, faces, even events. The more jurors integrate forensic testimony into their own concepts and understanding, the more they will recall that testimony in their deliberations. When Winston Churchill used the metaphor, “Iron Curtain,” to describe the Berlin Wall, it stuck in the mind of strategic planners, the voting public, and politicians for over half a century.

Applying Metaphors for Clear, Compelling Testimony
Scientific testimony can seem unfamiliar and esoteric to jurors. A scientist who tries to explain science with more science piles confusion upon confusion. After all, the scientist has invested years in education and training to learn his or her protocols, techniques, and scientific judgment. Probably every juror has heard of DNA, but it is unwise to assume that jurors know its structure and function—let alone its particular significance to a particular case.

Yet, jurors are expected to assess the credibility of forensic scientists, to assess the value of their testimony to the case, and to prioritize scientific evidence to the case at hand. Also, jurors may labor under information from forensic science-inspired TV shows and movies that may or may not be accurate or applicable for their case.

Metaphors help. They neither “dumb-down” information nor change the science. They render technical information in a concise, clear, and compelling manner—if metaphors are used properly.

Research shows that the most effective metaphors are both familiar to the jury and appropriate to the issue at hand.⁸ The next two sections explain and apply these factors.

Using Familiar Metaphors
Effective metaphors place familiar faces on unfamiliar testimony. Unfamiliar scientific testimony is a problem. A solution is to explain science with evocative, familiar metaphors, such as in the following exchange.⁹

Court: Any voir dire?
Defense Attorney: No, Your Honor.
Court: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you will receive [scientist] as an expert in forensic science.
Prosecuting Attorney: Now, could you explain what DNA is?
Scientist: DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic acid. And basically DNA can be thought of as a blueprint for your body just as you have a blueprint to build a house that tells you where the walls and windows should go.

In using the “blueprint” metaphor to answer the question, this forensic scientist explained the function and importance of DNA evidence in a single sentence. While jurors may not know either the scientific name for DNA or its specific physiological function, they know what a “blueprint” is. If the scientist makes metaphors both familiar and fit the issue, they will be meaningful and memorable to the jury.

Using Relevant Metaphors
Relevant metaphors fit the right issue in the right case at the right time. Irrelevant metaphors confuse the testimony and confuse the jury. Here, the forensic scientist explains a concept that was a significant factor, both at trial and subsequent appeal.¹⁰

Attorney: Now, you testified that you followed the protocol. What does that mean in layman’s terms? I’m not—
Scientist: Right. Just like you have a recipe for telling you how to cook a—make a cake, we have recipes which tell us how to conduct the DNA testing. It is called a protocol then. It is a recipe.
Attorney: And that’s what you followed. Is that correct?
Scientist: Yes.

All scientists know the importance of protocols, but jurors may not. Calling a protocol a “recipe” evokes the connection between a protocol and a familiar set of important steps—following a cake recipe for example. The procedures are verifiable, clear, uniform, and measureable. A recipe is neither experimental nor arbitrary. Likewise, a protocol is the product of testing to verify its reliability and validity. Moreover, a number of jurisdictions follow the same protocol. Therefore, it is easy to verify its effectiveness in large-scale studies.

Finally, the “recipe” metaphor evokes a “tasty” product, yielding a satisfying, accurate result. Instead of belaboring the minutia of protocols, the well-placed metaphor drives home the protocol’s characteristics and its significance cogently and compellingly.

Continuing Education for Forensic Scientists
We use metaphors every day. Every time we give or accept flowers, daydream about a new car or a new home, or watch commercials on TV we create and apply metaphors. We use metaphors to describe movies, vacations, and sometimes, our bosses! Forensic scientists use forensic metaphors in a specific way. Creating and applying forensic metaphors is both an analytical and imaginative process. This is a learned process.

Here are a few hints on creating effective metaphors.

1. Clearly define the point of the scientific testimony. Will it describe the reliability of the method? Will it have to define scientific concepts (such as DNA or protocols) or will it have to describe the method of data collection?
2. Now, let your mind wander a little (“free association” as Freud called it).
3. Use “like” or “as” to link one image with another. For example, “blood pattern analysis is like…”
4. Make a list of possible metaphors.
5. Finally, use analytical skills to determine which metaphor is most familiar and appropriate to use with a particular issue, a particular case, and a particular jury.

Conclusion
Neither the importance of scientific data nor its relationship to the trial issue are immediately recognized or valued by jurors. The best science in the world is lost when jurors misunderstand its content or significance. Using metaphors to explain concepts and data enhances the scientific testimony’s impact, meaning, and memory-value. Metaphors don’t change the science or dumb it down. They make science clear and compelling.

References

1. See Bullis, R. (2012). Stressing Demeanor Credibility: Continued Impacts of Melendez-Diaz for Forensic Scientists in Forensics Magazine,9(1), 15-20 and Bullis, R. (2011). Applying Melendez: Briscoe and beyond Forensics Magazine, 8(3), 15-20.
2. Caudill, C. (2002). Scientific narratives in law: an introduction. Law and Literature, 14, 253; Rideout, J.C. (2010). Penumbral thinking revisited: metaphor in legal argumentation. Journal of the Association of Legal Writing Instructors, 7, 155.
3. Boroditsky, L. (2011). How language shapes thought. Scientific American, 304(2), 62-65 and the pioneering work in Lakoff , G. & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by (University of Chicago: Chicago).
4. D.O Hebb’s 1949 famous quote in Organization of Behavior: A neuropsychological theory (John Wiley & Sons, Mahwah, NJ).
5. Virginia v. Winston, 404 S.E.2d 329, Va. App. Lexis 80 (1991) trial transcript pp. 321, lines 9-17 found in www.scientific.org/DNAproblems.
6. For a comprehensive description of how metaphors “frame” issues and persuade audiences and consumers see Geary, J. (2011). I is an Other.(HarperCollins: New York). For an empirical test on the how metaphors “frame” issues see Williams, A., Davidson, R. & Yochim, E. (2011). Who’s to blame when a business fails? How journalistic death metaphors influence responsibility attributions. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 88(3), 541-561.
7. Modell, A. (2003). Emotional memory, metaphor, and meaning.Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 555-568.
8. Thibodeau, P. and Durgin, F. (2011). Metaphor Aptness and Conventionality: A Processing Fluency Account. Metaphor and Symbol,26, 206–226.
9. Lovitt v. Virginia, 537 S.E.2d 866, Va. Lexis 149 (2000) cert. den’d, 534 U.S. 815 (2001), trial transcript p. 1157, lines 18-23 found inwww.scientific.org/DNA problems.
10. Supra, note 9, trial transcripts p. 1190, lines 9-18.

Ronald K. Bullis, Ph.D., J.D., teaches law at Averett University and is a practicing psychotherapist. He writes on law, malpractice, forensics, and the use of narratives in the courtroom. He conducts seminars on law, professional liability, and ethics and can be reached at ronlaura@clearwire.net.

Applying the New Science of Metaphors to Forensic Science Testimony | DFI News.

Last week, prior to the FBI naming Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev as the primary suspects in the bombing, members of the link-sharing site set out tocrowdsource the identities of the people behind the attack. Their vigilante efforts turned counterproductive when Tripathi’s name was picked up by those monitoring police scanners. The site helped spread the misinformation, and became “one of the more ugly and disgusting places that had a lot of traffic,” Tripathi’s sister told ABC News.

Reddit Apologizes for ‘Online Witch Hunt’ | DFI News.

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As the value of bitcoins skyrockets, security researchers have discovered yet another piece of malware that harnesses the processing power of compromised PCs to mint the digital currency.

Scammers spreading malware on Skype are taking a nefarious approach to mine Bitcoins. Malicious code hijacks a computer’s resources, according to Kaspersky Lab. While the bitcoin-miner.exe malware harnesses only the CPU resources, which are much slower than GPUs in BTC mining, the attackers have the benefit of infecting many computers and then chaining them together to mint the digital currency. Unlike legitimate miners, the criminals don’t have to pay the purchase price of the hardware or pay for the electricity to run them.

Spiking Bitcoins Minted by Skype Malware | DFI News.

An internal Drug Enforcement Administration document discusses a February 2013 criminal investigation and warns that because of the use of encryption, “it is impossible to intercept iMessages between two Apple devices” even with a court order approved by a federal judge.

The DEA’s warning, marked “law enforcement sensitive,” is the most detailed example to date of the technological obstacles — FBI director Robert Mueller has called it the “Going Dark” problem — that police face when attempting to conduct court-authorized surveillance on non-traditional forms of communication.

Apple has disclosed little about how iMessage works, but a partial analysis sheds some light on the protocol. Matthew Green, a cryptographer and research professor at Johns Hopkins Univ., has written that because iMessage has “lots of moving parts,” there are plenty of places where things could go wrong. Green said that Apple “may be able to substantially undercut the security of the protocol” — by, perhaps, taking advantage of its position during the creation of the secure channel to copy a duplicate set of messages for law enforcement.

Apple’s iMessage Encryption Trips Up Surveillance | DFI News.