Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced every day in complete legality by millions of users, in every country, by children learning mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data extracted from the memories of all the computers in humanity. Luminous lines ordered in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, in the distance…
William Gibson, Neuromancer - 1984
Summary :
A century ago, scientific police were born, which immediately implemented all the techniques to investigate criminal cases and catch the guilty. We will see that the founding principles of forensic sciences are still relevant today, naturally transposing themselves into our digital world.
Introduction: Paris, 2021
During a series of projects for the Ministry of the Interior, about ten years ago, I discovered the basics of forensics and its founding fathers: Bertillon, Galton, Gross and Locard. Working today with a cybersecurity team, I find these century-old principles in their work. With the eye of a connoisseur, who is not that of an expert, I propose to weave some links between the practices of the physical world and those of the virtual world.
Buenos Aires, Argentina 1892
The night is beautiful, it is wild. Alerted by the screams, the police who enter the usa telegram data house discover two children. Dead, stabbed. Next to them lies their mother, wounded. Immediately, she accuses her neighbor, a cowherd. How could Francisca Rojas know that her fingers would betray her?
The cowherd was arrested and tortured. No confession came out of his bruised mouth. As for the children's mother, the blows she received had left no trace. Strange!
This strange imbroglio was unravelled by a commissioner trained in a very young technique, dactyloscopy . The bloody fingerprints were taken, the crime revealed, the cowherd exonerated, the mother condemned.
Francisca Rojas, through her heinous crime, became famous and the police became scientific, more than a century before "CSI" popularized the practice.
At that time, only a few experts knew that fingerprints could uniquely identify individuals. Nearly a century later, genetic fingerprinting once again revolutionized police techniques.