M EET M ICHAEL PLAXTO N CERTIFIED FORENSIC MULTIMEDIA ANALYST Who ya gonna call when photographs and video are pieces of legal evidence? BY RITA GODLEVSKIS
IT WAS THE World Press Photo international competition and exhibition, based in the Netherlands, that got me thinking about technical image manipulation. Their strict rules and guidelines around what they will accept in the competition go so far as to employ digital analysts who ensure that submitted images are not digitally altered.
This got me wondering about these behind-the-scenes experts. Who does this stuff in Canada? What do they actually do, and how? As it turns out, Canada has the highest number of certified digital forensic analysts in the world, and Ontario’s Michael Plaxton is one of them. Michael is the owner of New Media Forensics and works as a forensic video analyst for the Hamilton Police Service in Ontario. He’s got a long list of professional accreditations and an extensive resumé of projects that dive deep under the hood of images and video for purposes ranging from legal investigations and insurance fraud cases to homicides. Only 56 people in the world have his certified level of expertise. Following a degree, accreditation requires an additional 160 hours of training and a thesis project that is scrutinized by established legal experts. Michael says it takes about three years for someone to get started in his business. Michael describes his career path as a bit of an accident. And it seems in describing some of the backgrounds of his colleagues, there’s not one path that brings you into this work. His own 16 photo ED
training began in the Canadian military as a photographic imaging technician. From darkroom printing to combat documentation to publicity pics, he says that military grade photo training is the most thorough you’ll get. Part of this training led to Adobe certification and as photography and video moved into digital realms, so did Michael. I had a secret hope that Michael’s workplace would resemble something I’d seen in a television show like CSI; but, sadly, Michael instantly debunked this. He explained that an average homicide review of video materials takes more than 100 hours, and his work is a frame-by-frame review of images and sound, combined with hacking the background digital code of a file. This type of video/image analysis involves hours in front of a screen, a long list of special skills, and some advanced software (such as Axon 5, forensic software for video analysis and authentication; https://ca.axon.com/info/forensic-suite) to dive deep into the material he is provided. Michael advises to do his job, one requires a solid understanding of colour, light, metadata, hardware, and software, as well as patience, curiosity, integrity, and out-of-the-box creative problem-sleuthing skills. Oh, and you’d better be good at trigonometry. Perhaps close to like what I’ve seen on television, Michael is driven to do his job by a desire to help people find answers and seek justice. He says the most stressful part of his job takes place in the courtroom, as facing lawyers looking to disprove his results requires a thick skin. People’s lives can change dramatically in a courtroom, so there is intense pressure from all sides. As an expert witness, Michael is called on to provide unbiased, fact-based evidence. Sometimes he has no details about the case; he gets presented only with a photo or a video and is asked to determine a simple but crucial question, such as “Is the man in video 1 the same man as in video 2?”
