As the nation and world progressively go online to work, play, and communicate with one another, computers and cyberspace have increasingly become targets and tools of criminal activity. To be sure cybercrime has quickly grown to be one of the major challenges facing police and law enforcement officials. The television series CSI: Cyber attempts to portray how a team of special FBI anti-cybercrime agents would investigate and arrest the cybercriminals that haunt cyberspace. As in all television police dramas, the acts and actions that take place on the show are a mix of truth and fantasy. However, since the perpetration of a cybercrime is a little more complex than your typical street crime, the show’s believability is less than other shows in the CSI franchise.
In an episode called iWitness, for example, the cyber team investigates the death of a well-known hacker, who is shot and set on fire while holding her smartphone. In trying to learn the details of ow she died, the team is accesses the hackers badly burned phone, which initially does not reveal much. However, the team figures out that the victim had hid information on a separate part of the phone that was password protected. After cracking the password, the team was able to discover that the victim had been hired by someone to hack into the social media and computer of another person. Ultimately, the team was able to discover that the victim had been hired by a college official to hack into the account of a female student that had been raped by three male students from the college’s rowing team. The official wanted the hacker to find out information about the rape victim that could be used to convince her not to press charges. The hacker was killed when she decided that she was going to tell the police about the school official and the three students.
The parts of the show that were most accurate and therefore believable were the scenes that had nothing to do with cybercrime. For instance, the show realistically portrayed how an investigation of a campus rape might proceed, for the obtaining of warrants to search the students’ computers to the likely move by the university to at least initially block the investigation until it could perform its own internal investigation and consult with its legal counsel. The show also realistically portrayed the fact that special warrants would be needed to search student computers and smartphones if they were school property and therefore might have access to the student’s educational records which are protected under the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (SPLC, n.d.). On the other hand, the show was least accurate in its portrayal of computer and digital forensics. The investigation of cybercrimes, as mentioned, is a bit more complicated than a typical street crime. Some of the reasons for this is because digital evidence is both extremely fragile and extremely easy to contaminate. In the show however, the digital evidence was not only quite easy to obtain, preserve, but also authenticate.
Two examples are illustrative of the show’s inaccuracy in regards to cybercrime. First, at numerous times throughout the show, the team was confronted with a cyber obstacle that was password protected. For instance, the phone that was retrieved from the dead hacker was password protected, as well as the partition that she used to separate her hacking activities within the phone. While it is proper and necessary digital hygiene for everyone to have and use passwords to protect the computers and smartphones; on the show using a password was nothing more than a minor obstacle to their efforts to access the phone. Indeed, while the show admittedly pointed to the fact that a brute-force attempt or a trial-and-error method of find the right access code combination could take “10 billion tries”, the team succeeded in what seemed like just a few minutes (Assar, 2015). While this might be possible if the access code was simple like “1234”, the phone belonged to a skilled hacker, who most likely would use a bit stronger password. Similarly, while the password to access the phone might have only been numbers, the password that allowed the hacker into her secret partition most likely would be alpha-numeric and include symbols (Assar, 2015). A long alpha-numeric password that included random combinations of symbols, something any good hacker would incorporate, would be virtually impossible to break, or at least, require a number of years (Cross, 2008). However, the team was able to figure out that password in less time than it took find out the phone’s access code.
The second inaccurate portrayal on the show was the initial handling of digital evidence, namely the phone. The phone, as mentioned, was in the hands of the hacker when she was shot then burned. Apparently, after the body was discovered, it was brought to the hospital for an autopsy. The autopsy was performed without removing the phone from the victim’s hand. Only then was the cyber team informed about the phone. Like any crime scene investigation, to protect from evidence contamination, its integrity must be maintained at all times, including the chain of custody (Cross, 2008). In this case, the phone, which later turned out to hold so much important information was initially treated like it was a worthless. Realistically, when the body was found with a phone, the scene should have been secured and the cyber team should have been informed and sent to the crime scene. At the scene before the body was moved, the team member would have determined its status. At that point, the phone should have been separated from the hand, tagged, placed in anti-static bags, and transported to the lab (Cross, 2008). As it was portrayed on the show, a good defense attorney has a good argument to get the phone and its information excluded from trial.
Since technology and how technology works is not the most interesting subject to talk about, especially when it is the focus of a television police drama; it must be portrayed in a manner that is interesting and entertaining if the goal is to get and keep viewers. Unfortunately, such portrayals tend to persuade the public that the science underlying the technology is as easy as they see it. While that is alright for watching television shows, problems do occur when people’s perceptions of the technology actually influence them in a trial. CSI: Cyber gets many of the elements of typical crime correct but has a long way to go in its accurate portrayal of cybercrimes and their investigation.
References
Assar, V. (2015). Let’s call out CSI: Cyber’s hilariously absurd technobabble. Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/2015/05/csi-cyber-tech-talk/
Cross, M. (2008). Scene of the Cybercrime, 2nd Ed. Burlington, MA: Syngress Publishing.
