Who ya gonna call when photos are legal evidence?

BY RITA GODLEVSKIS

MEET MICHAEL PLAXTON, A CERTIFIED FORENSIC MULTIMEDIA ANALYST

Who ya gonna call when photographs and video are pieces of legal evidence?

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 this 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 no one path that brings you into this work. His own 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.

An insurance fraud attempt. This doctored image was submitted in an insurance claim.

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?”

An image from a crime scene video. Lines help law enforcement indicate a suspect’s height.

It was interesting to learn from Michael that a lot of digital video/image content is challenged by technical issues such as video compression. With video in particular, in CCTV footage for example, software looks to minimize file sizes and sometimes data is lost or doesn’t look quite right. Michael also informed me that it IS possible to create and manipulate RAW/NEF files – if you know how- and, yes, modifications are detectable.

Every new product that comes out with the ability to record images or sound is a research project for Michael. Proprietary systems (for example, Apple or Samsung) are often very different, so it’s a good thing Michael has tapped into an international network of professional experts that help one another to keep up with the latest technology through online forums and special conferences.

With such an intense job, and in consideration of his background in photography, I imagined that Michael’s days off might be spent looking for beauty in the world through a camera lens. But it turns out — even though he loves darkroom work, in particular hand-colouring and landscape photography — he finds analog solace in his woodshop listening to classic rock really loud.

I always knew that digital images held a lot of data and that they could be manipulated, but after talking to Michael about how deeply one can dive into digital image information, it’s now even clearer to me that although an image is worth a thousand words, the invisible data within it, is worth a thousand pages.

For further investigations:

LEVA .org

dmeresources.com

spreadys.wordpress.com

Ontario’s Forensic Video Analyst Association: www.ofvaa.com