Crime is Increasingly Borderless 

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The impact of the Internet on crime is considerable. There is a vast challenge and opportunity in digital evidence in criminal investigations, especially by the international dimension of digital evidence. There is a growing need to provide law enforcement and prosecutors with ‘tools to address the way criminals communicate today and to counter modern forms of criminality’, according to eema.org.

The EU-funded initiative LOCARD (Lawful evidence cOllecting & Continuity plAtfoRm Development) recognizes this challenge. Its aim is to provide a holistic platform for chain of custody assurance along the forensic workflow, creating a trusted distributed platform that allows the storage of digital evidence metadata in a blockchain. Potential digital evidence will therefore be suitable for presentation in a court of law. 

It will provide a platform to automate the collection and documentation of every digital evidence. LOCARD increases the trust in the handling and processing of digital evidence, the management of chain of custody by providing transparency, using immutable storage to store the chain of custody and using end-to-end security through Trusted Environment Execution, according to locard.eu.

EEMA, an independent European think tank, focused on identity, privacy and trust, will provide technical, legal, ethics and stakeholder communications expertise to the initiative.

Chair of EEMA, Jon Shamah, states: “The exponential increase in the volume of digital evidence, emerging from a diverse array of sources such as smart devices, cloud services, surveillance systems, social media etc, presents organisations, law enforcement and prosecutors with an immense challenge but also a vast opportunity.” He continues: “Being able to swiftly gather evidence from a wide range of sources and manage the data in a way that preserves the chain of custody will enable cases to be investigated thoroughly, prosecuted faster and with higher success rates.” He adds: “LOCARD acknowledges that crime is increasingly borderless and without a way to share digital evidence in a manner that maintains its integrity, perpetrators will continue to evade the justice system.”