Applying cyberpsychology to CFI investigations?

… a fellow student is looking into the field of offender psychological profiling from a suspect's forensically investigated computer for her MSc research project

I'd be interested in seeing the methodology used by your fellow student.

… I have never seen psychology have any useful benefit in any investigation I have been involved in …

Thank you for this interesting perspective. Together with Beetle's comment about mens rea, I see that the psychology of motive is mainly useful in sentencing, and not necessarily in convicting. I have a lot to learn yet about the Law and how it works.

The principle component that detects crime is evidence.

Agreed. Perhaps I have been watching television's Criminal Minds too much. 😉

I agree, it's always about money unless it's GBH or murder.

I think this is where I should have been more specific in my original post. CFI techniques can be used in a wide variety of cases these days, including everything from petty theft and fraud to GBH, rape, and murder. I'm wanting to focus more on crimes perpetrated against computers and computer networks. While money is often a motive in such crimes also, there is a broader range of possible motives, as mentioned by Dr Rogers in his hacker taxonomy, including "seeking media attention", "disgruntled employee", "motivated by a sense of power and prestige", "interested in the intellectual endeavor", and "political activist". However, as I acknowledge above, motive alone doesn't prove a case.

I am hoping that computer forensic psychology can be used to help identify a suspect. I am very interested in the concepts of identity and online identity, authentication, anonymity and privacy in cyberspace. You can alter who you say you are online, and to an extent alter how you are perceived by others online, but ultimately you are still yourself, and there will be something that gives away your identity, no matter how good you are at creating an online alter-ego. While a cyberciminal may be able to eradicate all trace of their IP address, they cannot totally obfuscate their personality.

I think that there is certainly scope for the application of forensic psychology and its various disciplines to investigations involving various types of computer crimes, especially cases involving the unlawful access to computer systems (hacking), malware, defacement, and child exploitation, amongst others.

I have had the opportunity to work with some really good profilers for example, who have certainly narrowed down the suspect pool in a case, or at the very least have pointed us in the right direction. You might want to have a look at Brent Turvey's Behavioural Evidence Analysis profiling model and how it could potentially be used in instances of cyber crime.

With regards your hypothesis that "taggers" (or grafitti artists) are the same as website defacers, see if you can find an article from a few years ago in the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, which looked at delinquency in the context of computers, and they made some similar findings which may be useful to you.

Hmmm…

Let me make sure I understand completely. You think any and all criminal psychology, in your experience is completely useless for detective work?

Let me offer an alternative view - I have been a detective for 28 out of 30 years as a police officer and I have never seen psychology have any useful benefit in any investigation I have been involved in during that period. The only more useless thing that springs to mind is parapsychology.

The principle component that detects crime is evidence.

H

Hmmm…

Let me make sure I understand completely. You think any and all criminal psychology, in your experience is completely useless for detective work?

That wasn't quite what I said. I haven't seen it have any benefit in a case I have been involved in during 30 years and I have worked on more or less every kind of case during my service. There are two particular areas where it can be used -
one in court which is unlikely in the UK
and two in guiding an investigation and it has been used like this in the UK.

However it is guesswork, educated guesswork maybe, but is it not a case of trying to apply generalisations and in doing so if the particular case doesn't fit the generalisation then it isn't going to work.

For example, I can recall one particular case of of an abduction of a new born child from a maternity ward. A profiler was brought in and gave a view of the person who would commit this act. This was used to focus the enquiry and was in actual fact completely wrong. The case was solved by fundamental detective work seeking witnessses and gathering evidence.

Not quite the same I know but the police have been known to use mediums and such like to help in cases. In the case I mention above we were contacted by over 100 well meaning and genuine people who thought they could help with some special psychic skills they had. I spoke to a number of them and they were absolutely convincing, in fact one made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck as she told me she saw the child in a bag going blue. However at the end of the case everything that these people had offered was researched as a project and only in about 5 instances did the caller get some element correct and where they got something correct the rest was completely wrong.

OK you can give me examples of where it might have been used to some effect and I accept you might take it into consideration but I would put it very low down on the scale of usefulness.

H

Not at all my field, but from a purely mathematical/statistics point, I have never seen any (most probably due to the obvious secrecy/privacy matters involoved) large scale study on the actual accuracy of criminal profiling.

If such a study exists, it would be an interest read.

From the presentation of this
http//www.springerlink.com/content/pk8037k402m54w01/

This chapter discusses the empirically derived conclusions of studies that sought to examine the accuracy and skills of various groups performing a profiling task. The conclusions provide some support for the contention that professional profilers can produce a more accurate prediction of an unknown offender in comparison with other studied groups. The results also give an indication of the type of skills required for proficient profiling.

Just like the tales (and in a few cases, probably, reality) about investigators using clairvoyants reports.

I mean, if you flip a coin you have a 50% probability of getting head.

If you devise a device that automatically flips a coin giving statistically a 51% of the flips head, you have a somehow "more accurate" result.

The point is the rate at which profiling, or however psychology applied to investigation has a much higher rate than coin flipping.

Going on a "side branch", apart "Criminal Minds", don''t forget "Lie to me"
http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie_to_Me

Inspired by the actual works of Dr. Paul Ekman
http//www.paulekman.com/
http//www.wga.org/content/default.aspx?id=3462
http//apnews.myway.com/article/20100108/D9D3HB101.html
http//discovermagazine.com/2008/aug/28-the-science-of-sniffing-out-liars/

It is said that the actual airport surveillance or LE Officers trained to detect a particular set of expressions/behaviours very often mistake "normal" irritation or nervous behaviours for a criminal attitude, harassing perfectly innocent passengers.

As an example of the difference between theory and real world, check this report
http//www.privacylives.com/eu-tests-in-flight-video-surveillance-to-automatically-id-suspects/2008/05/30/
http//www.bka.de/kriminalwissenschaften/fotofahndung/pdf/fotofahndung_final_report.pdf
on a much more "exact" science face recognition.
The accuracy is reported as being well below the "certainty level" that seem to be the "standard" on TV shows.

jaclaz

I would suggest that Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs five layer model (published in Motivation and Personality, 1954), http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs , and later expanded upon for the "modern" era http//www.businessballs.com/maslow.htm still apply to the motivational aspects of spray taggers and cyber miscreants alike.
The same needs for peer recognition and self worth can be seen as driving the competitive nature for the taggers and the web site defacers.

As for online identity "fingerprinting" it is likely that IM users develop a stylistic text habit that is similar to a tag by which they could be recognized should they use another Im handle elsewhere. For example a specific txt spk abbreviation or consistent mis-spelling of words or phrases. I have a habit of inserting brackets (for inline comments) that is easily recognised.

Even the technology can affect the content eg predictive text can change the intended meaning of a message. A taxi driver arrived at our office to "Pick up bag" as sent by sms. After some confusion it was discovered the original text was "pick up abi"

harryparsonage, thanks for the detailed response.

I do not disagree with you.

I think psychology is as much of a tool of generalization as many other tools used to discover actual evidence.

The psychologists I worked with stress the caveat of generalization. A few outlying incidents do not negate the value of generalization. Once there are sufficient amount of "outliers" are recorded, the generalization has to be adjusted.

As for "mediums and such", I would not associate with them because of my faith, nor do I consider any such para-anything as science.