Increasingly, criminal allegations are either based entirely upon information contained within or revealed by an examination of portable digital telecommunications and internet communication devices. In the simplest terms on mobile smart phones.

That this is the case, is of course, hardly surprising when you consider how much time we all spend communicating via a portfolio of communication applications or text or emails; or visiting innumerable websites across a vast range of different topics and interests. All such communications leave a trace or a footprint that can be detected and followed via forensic examination of our laptops, tablets or smartphones. Investigative agencies have the capacity to make identical point in time forensic images of the operating system and all of its content and then examine such evidence will skill and care.

Our mobile devices also record our whereabouts routinely, creating a GPS bread crumb trial of exactly where our devices have been over the lifespan of the device in question. Few if any of us bother to activate any hide my location software or bother to turn off the GPS tracking and storing capacity of the device in our possession all day long and at night too. These devices also of course have storage capacity in which to store documents, photographs, videos. All such items have the capacity to evidence or actually be the subject of criminal offending.

Refusal to provide an access PIN codes upon request to the police who make such a request with reasonable cause during an investigation can in itself found a separate criminal offence capable of leading in itself to a term of imprisonment.

The increasing use of digital evidence at trial has led to trials becoming considerably longer than formerly. The defence routinely mount exhaustive challenges to the integrity and meaning of digital evidence and the inferences of criminal intent and behaviour that flows from it.

Once a digital item has been seized as part of an investigation it is rarely returned before the end of the criminal proceedings of which it forms a part even if it doesn’t form part of the actual case evidence. This leads to tremendous inconvenience for suspects and witnesses alike who haven’t backed up the content of the device in question into cloud-based storage.