Digital Investigation Techniques

Forensic science plays a vital role in the criminal justice system by providing scientifically based information through the analysis of physical and digital evidence. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is a non-regulatory scientific research agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce with a mission to advance measurement science, standards, and technology and has been working to strengthen forensic science methods for almost a century. In recent years, several scientific advisory bodies have expressed the need for reviews of the scientific basis of forensic methods and identified NIST as an appropriate agency for conducting them. A scientific foundation review, also referred to as a technical merit evaluation, is a study that documents and assesses the foundations of a scientific discipline, that is, the trusted and established knowledge that supports and underpins the discipline's methods. Congress has appropriated funds for NIST to conduct scientific foundation reviews in forensic science. These reviews seek to answer the question: "What established scientific laws and principles as well as empirical data exist to support the methods that forensic science practitioners use to analyze evidence?