GAMEPLANS: A template for robust digital evidence strategy development

With police officers encountering digital evidence in the vast majority of inquiries, a digital evidence strategy (DES) can ensure they are prepared to effectively deal with it; Dr Graeme Horsman, Senior Lecturer in Digital Forensics at Cranfield University, explains how the GAMEPLANS acrostic can help officers produce a robust DES to effectively identify, collect, examine, and evaluate any digital devices/data, and define the circumstances when it is appropriate to conduct such tasks.

The National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC)[1] notes that “today, virtually every crime has a digital element, often involving vast amounts of complex data, and this presents policing with a serious challenge,” a view that is widely shared[2][3][4].

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A DES should describe those actions required of any investigative team to effectively identify, collect, examine, and evaluate any digital devices/data, while also defining the circumstances when it is appropriate to conduct such tasks.

The ability to effectively examine the contents of digital devices and the data they produce and store is now a crucial part of any investigation and effective criminal justice system[5], yet undertaking this task is far from straightforward and not the only challenge facing investigators when dealing with digital devices.

While it is acknowledged that the forensic examination of devices and their data can itself be a complicated task[6], there are also difficulties involved with understanding and identifying the value that any source of digital data may have in regard to an inquiry, and establishing an appropriate and effective course of investigative conduct for dealing with it[7][8].

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