Building a Digital Forensic Laboratory

Chapter 22. The Future of Digital Forensics and Its Role in Criminal Investigations

Introduction

In the 1980s, when computer forensics was a new discipline, mainframe computers were the tools of the trade. With time, mainframes were replaced with PCs. Although by today's standards the processing power, data storage capabilities, and communication paths of those early PCs were extremely limited, moving from mainframes to PCs was a major breakthrough, not only for most forms of business, but also for digital forensics.

Since that time, we have seen explosive growth in the area of digital processing and data storage technologies. The devices most people carry around with them everyday (laptops, cell phones, PDAs, GPS devices, etc.) boast processing ...