Kansas City Detective Describes How Regional Computer Forensics Labs Extract Data from Devices

Josh Clevenger, a Kansas City, Missouri Police Department detective, describes the process of extracting forensic data from devices at the Heart of America Regional Computer Forensics Lab (RCFL) in Kansas City.


Video Transcript

Think of it as is somebody trying to pick a lock, right.

You have to know how to do that. There's certain things you have to do. And so by picking that lock or getting around that lock or figuring out ways to get around that, it's very difficult. And it takes a lot of time and effort to get past those. But once we get into that data, that's where, you know, we can start making it human readable.

Because if I showed you just a whole set of data, you wouldn't know what to do with it. So there's also that second part that's really important because it's not just extracting the data, it's actually making human readable, because at the end I have to make that my report. I have to then place it into something that, a jury—a prospective jury—has to ingest that in a trial. Or a case detective has to ingest that and read that data and understand it and what it means.

So that … it's really kind of a three-part process when you go through that. It's the one part is just picking that lock. That is difficult. But it's the magic that happens after it that's really the fun part really.

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