One of the justifications for an increase in the number of days a terrorist suspect can be held in the UK without charge, from 14 to 90, is the time it takes to decipher what is on a suspect’s computer hard drive.
\nAssistant commissioner at the Met Police, Andy Hayman, has claimed the extra time is needed in order to make sure that all the evidence from a seized PC is located before someone is released. The question is: why does it take so long?<\/p>\n
The Met Police has a high-tech crime unit and also has access to the Forensic Science Service. Both units employ Forensic Computer Analysts who crack hard drive contents.<\/p>\n
We asked Dr Fauzan Mirza of ProSoft Research, an expert in hard drive encryption, how the Met would set about cracking a hard drive and looking for evidence of terrorist activities. “There are two stages,” he told us, “acquisition and analysis. Acquisition is automated and takes a copy of the hard drive itself. It runs at the speed of the fastest backups, around 500MB per minute. Analysis looks at the contents. It’s usually obvious within a matter of hours whether there is evidence on it.”<\/p>\n
“If there is evidence it can take more than a week to analyse it. It could be two to three weeks depending upon the sophistication of the means used to hide it, steganography for example.”<\/p>\n
A Met spokesperson confirmed to us that in some terrorism cases, they were facing this exact issue. “We are dealing with encrypted messages,” he said.<\/p>\n
more from [url=http:\/\/www.techworld.com\/security\/news\/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=4727]TechWorld[\/url]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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