Exclusive: The importance of communication in investigations
James Thorpe
Share this content
Throughout history, the communication of information has been vitally important for triumph on the battlefield, either in a military or economic sense. The purpose of any finding is to ensure an advantage to anyone dealing with it in an accurate and timely manner. The modern world is crossed with the networks of intelligence and counter-intelligence services trying to provide benefits to their governments. It appears it’s important now more than ever to ensure a good international security collaboration against global challenges such as transnational crime and terrorism. From such a perspective, it’s crucial to consider how to mitigate the arising risk and offer a much safer environment to all community members. In other words, it’s all about how the security landscape can protect their people as well as infrastructure. Apparently, the role of the case management team is more obvious today as proactive law enforcement can provide a lower crime rate as well as improve the living and business conditions of their population.
Since the beginning of civilisation, one of the most significant things invented is language. Any language connects the groups of people that use it. The interaction between those group’s members is recognised as communication. Through their communications, the people can express their needs, intents, beliefs and emotions, civilians can use communication in order to uncover some of their weaknesses, bad actors can do the same thing to make a plan or commit a crime. These unusual times have brought us emerging technology that can offer us the chance to communicate even if we are separated from each other. As many experts have said, the world became a global village a long time ago.
Using communication as an advantage
The sophisticated devices are traceable in both navigational and information exchange senses, so that this sort of advantage can be used by the investigative forces in order to effectively resolve the case. Crimes can happen anywhere and at the beginning of any investigation it’s important to deal with the information about such an occurrence. The case management professionals can use the footage in the communications network in order to find out something critical or even ensure the evidence. Cyberspace has become the location of the majority of today’s criminal activities and even if we get an indication something is happening, we still need to search for the critical findings we need at that moment. If the crime has occurred for real, any investigation will lead to arrest. The epilogue of any case is in a court that should make its judgement about some happenings or the series of events. Tracking the communications or collecting the clues is not the same thing, but those two actions could be deeply correlated with each other. For instance, if the crime is committed, the information about it will come to the Police Departments and they will visit the crime scene to make an inspection. At the very beginning of the search, it’s possible to deal with the timeframe about when the crime was committed. Such a finding is sufficient to develop the case and confirm using electronic signals who was present on the crime scene at the time of the incident.
Furthermore, if anything was detected the next step could be putting the device under increased examination and searching for more contacts that should also be confirmed. The modern criminal syndicates and terrorist organisations have largely used support from the hacker’s community as those sorts of actors are well informed and ready to offer their service for adequate payment. They are well-paid professional criminals that work for profit. So, the well-organised investigation needs the workforce, equipment and skill on one side and a lot of patience on the other. Correctly dealing with the intelligence of someone’s communication can bring victory to the good guys.
By Milica D. Djekic
You can follow Milica on Twitter here
About the Author
Milica D. Djekic is an Independent Researcher from Subotica, the Republic of Serbia. She received her engineering background from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, University of Belgrade. She writes for some domestic and overseas publications and she is also the Author of the book “The Internet of Things: Concept, Applications and Security”, published in 2017 by Lambert Academic Publishing. Milica is also a speaker with the BrightTALK expert’s channel and Cyber Security Summit Europe being held in 2016 as well as CyberCentral Summit 2019, one of the most exclusive cyber defence events in Europe. She is a member of ASIS International since 2017 and contributor to the Cyber Defense Magazine since 2014 and the Australian Cyber Security Magazine since 2018. Milica’s research efforts are recognised by Computer Emergency Response Team for the European Union (CERT-EU), Censys Press, BU-CERT UK and EASA European Centre for Cybersecurity in Aviation (ECCSA). Her fields of interests are cyber defence, technology and business. Milica is a person with disability.