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In the topical BBC series The Capture, the technicalities of CCTV surveillance and hazards of forensic interpretation are deftly woven in the storyline of an investigation where video camera recordings provide the key evidence for the case. What appears as an innocuous kiss, noticed by a CCTV operator in a routine observation of street activity, leads to assault, GBH and the unveiling of high-level machinations, where digital evidence is deployed by morally ambivalent judicial actors to exonerate and indict in spectacular ways. Familiar tropes accompany the twists and turns of the plot: working her way through the ranks, there is the young and ambitious female investigator, whose chemistry with the wholesome yet troubled suspect, a returning soldier from Helmand province, sustains the dramatic tension. Viewers are kept on the edge of their seats as the bumbling forensic expert is fatally silenced, not before revealing how footage can be synchronously changed. We are left to establish this has been the case, and indeed through repeated replays we learn to question what we see. Forensics is portrayed as relatable through the dogged dedication of the CCTV specialists, who are overwhelmed by the amount of evidence but knowledgeable at their métier, and their penchant for breakfast brioche, which helps the investigator to prioritise her case and skip the long processing queue. The evidence itself is ‘moody’, as the suspect describes it in an exculpatory scene that attempts to reconcile the obviousness of the footage with his own trauma-ridden recollection. The Capture’s message is that as far as digital evidence is concerned its uncharted complexity leads to hocus-pocus and nefarious manipulation. The ubiquity of digital trace adds to the messiness of possible interpretations and uncertainty. Its rendering unfolds outside the more familiar repertoires of traditional crime scene investigations where the evidence is found in the material fixity of bodies, and where the laboratory stands as proxy for rigorousness and incorruptibility.
It is hard to ignore the ways in which digital trace has crept into both our fictional worlds and routine undertakings. In forensics, it has been increasingly called upon to confirm ‘proof of life’ and the whereabouts of victims and suspects, to order chronologies and ascertain sequences of events. Nevertheless, how are we to understand its place in relation to more established forensic subdisciplines? Early criminalistics was riddled with imprecision. Building gradually on techniques of identification and indexing of criminal records (consider, for instance, Bertillon’s portrait parlé), crime scene photography and the application of Locard’s Exchange Principle and baseline tenet ‘every contact leaves a trace’, investigation practices have come a long way. Forensic science, however, remains shadowed by controversies about the accuracy of its methods and the strength of its correlations. Its domain has been strengthened by the acceptance of forensic DNA as its gold standard in the last quarter of a century, heralded to single-handedly professionalise both investigative practices and the status of its practitioners. Its probabilistic clarity increasingly opened to question (and eventually replaced) widespread beliefs in the infallibility of fingerprinting. Science and technology studies scholarship shows how contemporary forensic science discourse is replete with claims that various types of evidence speak for themselves. However, as Mike Lynch, Simon Cole, Ruth McNally and Katherine Jordan remind us, legally, evidence never speaks for itself, it must be spoken for by an expert. In unpacking the relationship between forensic trace and systems of knowledge and accountability, these scholars, among many others, have systematically revealed the scaffolding on which the credibility of the field has been built.
Today, the rising use of digital information across the spectrum of criminal offences signals key changes to the ways in which forensic evidence is obtained and analysed. Digital forensics itself has moved from an ad-hoc hobbyist pursuit that before the 1990s offered solutions to tackle financial crime, to a multi-faceted mainstream endeavour aligned to the broader forensic science field. Parallel to this development has been the shift among its practitioners from regarding digital trace as objective and ‘speaking for itself’ to acknowledging the need the harmonise practices, implement standards and establish replicability protocols, to bolster the veracity of this latest addition to the gamut of forensic sub-disciplines. Making sense of it is hampered by the challenges to adapt to the amount, speed of change and diversity of sources of potential evidence. It is also contingent on organisational arrangements, the capacity of digital forensic specialists to provide timely analyses, the ability of officers to incorporate the results in investigations and the knowledge of prosecutors, jurors, defence and judges to weight the outcomes. What can be gathered by applying a science and technology studies perspective to explore digital forensic communities is plentiful in terms of adjusting the observational lens to scrutinise new socio-technical imaginaries and fine-tune its conceptual toolkit to instantiate how digital trace is assembled and processed and traceability achieved in the alignment of investigative practices, informal exchanges, standards and protocols.
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