With the advancement of the Internet and related technologies, many traditional crimes have made the leap to digital environments. The successes of data mining in a wide variety of disciplines have given birth to crime analysis. Traditional crime analysis is mainly focused on understanding crime patterns, however, it is unsuitable for identifying and monitoring emerging crimes. The true nature of crime remains buried in unstructured content that represents the hidden story behind the data. User feedback leaves valuable traces that can be utilised to measure the quality of various aspects of products or services and can also be used to detect, infer, or predict crimes. Like any application of data mining, the data must be of a high quality standard in order to avoid erroneous conclusions. This thesis presents a methodology and practical experiments towards discovering whether (i) user feedback can be harnessed and processed for crime intelligence, (ii) criminal associations, structures, and roles can be inferred among entities involved in a crime, and (iii) methods and standards can be developed for measuring, predicting, and comparing the quality level of social data instances and samples. It contributes to the theory, design and development of a novel framework for crime intelligence and algorithm for the estimation of social data quality by innovatively adapting the methods of monitoring water contaminants. Several experiments were conducted and the results obtained revealed the significance of this study in mining social data for crime intelligence and in developing social data quality filters and decision support systems.

This thesis aims to address several issues emerging in the new digital world. Using Trusted Computing as the paradigmatic example of regulation though code that tries to address the cyber security problem that occurs, where the freedom of the user to reconfigure her machine is restricted in exchange for greater, yet not perfect, security. Trusted Computing is a technology that while it aims to protect the user, and the integrity of her machine and her privacy against third party users, it discloses more of her information to trusted third parties, exposing her to security risks in case of compromising occurring to that third party. It also intends to create a decentralized, bottom up solution to security where security follows along the arcs of an emergent “network of trust”, and if that was viable, to achieve a form of code based regulation. Through the analysis attempted in this thesis, we laid the groundwork for a refined assessment, considering the problems that Trusted Computing Initiative (TCI) faces and that are based in the intentional, systematic but sometimes misunderstood and miscommunicated difference (which as we reveal results directly in certain design choices for TC) between the conception of trust in informatics (“techno-trust”) and the common sociological concept of it. To reap the benefits of TCI and create the dynamic “network of trust”, we need the sociological concept of trust sharing the fundamental characteristics of transitivity and holism which are absent from techno-trust. This gives rise to our next visited problems which are: if TC shifts the power from the customer to the TC provider, who takes on roles previously reserved for the nation state, then how in a democratic state can users trust those that make the rules? The answer lies partly in constitutional and human rights law and we drill into those functions of TC that makes the TCI provider comparable to state-like and ask what minimal legal guarantees need to be in place to accept, trustingly, this shift of power. Secondly, traditional liberal contract law reduces complex social relations to binary exchange relations, which are not transitive and disrupt rather than create networks. Contract law, as we argue, plays a central role for the way in which the TC provider interacts with his customers and this thesis contributes in speculating of a contract law that does not result in atomism, rather “brings in” potentially affected third parties and results in holistic networks. In the same vein, this thesis looks mainly at specific ways in which law can correct or redefine the implicit and democratically not validated shift of power from customer to TC providers while enhancing the social environment and its social trust within which TC must operate.

Computer Forensics is mainly about investigating crimes where computers has been involved. There are many tools available to aid the investigator with this task. We have created a prototype of a completely new type of tool where all evidences are indexed by its time variable and plotted on a timeline. We believed that this way would make it easier and more intuitive to find coherent evidence and would make it faster to work with for the investigator. We have performed a user test where a group of people has evaluated our prototype tool against a modern commercial computer forensic tool and the results of this test are much better than we expected. The results show that users completed the task much faster and that the results were more correct. They also experienced that the prototype were more intuitive to use and that it was easier to find evidence that was coherent in time.

With the advancement of the Internet and related technologies, many traditional crimes have made the leap to digital environments. The successes of data mining in a wide variety of disciplines have given birth to crime analysis. Traditional crime analysis is mainly focused on understanding crime patterns, however, it is unsuitable for identifying and monitoring emerging crimes. The true nature of crime remains buried in unstructured content that represents the hidden story behind the data. User feedback leaves valuable traces that can be utilised to measure the quality of various aspects of products or services and can also be used to detect, infer, or predict crimes. Like any application of data mining, the data must be of a high quality standard in order to avoid erroneous conclusions. This thesis presents a methodology and practical experiments towards discovering whether (i) user feedback can be harnessed and processed for crime intelligence, (ii) criminal associations, structures, and roles can be inferred among entities involved in a crime, and (iii) methods and standards can be developed for measuring, predicting, and comparing the quality level of social data instances and samples. It contributes to the theory, design and development of a novel framework for crime intelligence and algorithm for the estimation of social data quality by innovatively adapting the methods of monitoring water contaminants. Several experiments were conducted and the results obtained revealed the significance of this study in mining social data for crime intelligence and in developing social data quality filters and decision support systems. / Commonwealth Scholarship Commission.

The use of information technology (IT) is exploding. Today, it is in our daily routines to use some kind of information technology. The increase of users increases the number of cyber crimes, ie, crimes that in some way involve IT. As the cyber crimes grow in numbers, the workload for technical investigator increases, these are called digital crime investigators. The thesis is about how police digital crime investigators work and what problems they may encounter during an investigation. The result is based on physical interviews and surveys with a qualitative research method with semi-structured questions, ie interviews addressed to a person or a group where everyone gets the same questions. To further understand what a digital crime investigator do we recreated an authentic legal case focusing on filesharing from Nacka District Court. A scenario was created in which the suspect in the authentic case appealed the case and we were asked to verify the previous evidence. Our results showed that the working methods of the various digital crime investigators are basically the same with slight variations and that it requires a number of specific qualities to do the job. All 20 participants think that the job is exciting and fun, however it is not always pleasant and does include some negative aspects. / Användandet av informationsteknik (IT) ökar explosionsartat, idag ligger det i våra dagliga rutiner att använda någon form av IT. Ökningen av användare gör att antalet IT-relaterade brott ökar, d.v.s brott som på ett eller annat sätt involverar IT. Då de IT-relaterade brotten växer i antal blir arbetsbördan för de som säkrar den tekniska bevisningen större, dessa kallas IT-forensiker. Arbetet handlar om hur polisens IT-forensiker arbetar och vilka problem de kan stöta på under en utredning. Resultatet är baserat på fysiska intervjuer och enkäter med en kvalitativ forskningsmetod med semistrukturerade frågor, d.v.s. intervjuer riktade till en person eller en grupp där alla får samma frågor. För att ytterligare förstå vad en IT-forensiker arbetar med återskapades ett autentiskt rättsfall med inriktning på fildelning från Nacka tingsrätt. Ett scenario skapades där den misstänkte i det autentiska rättsfallet överklagar och vi fick som uppgift att verifiera den tidigare bevisningen. Våra resultat visar på att arbetssätten hos de olika polismyndigheterna i grunden är samma med små variationer och att det krävs ett antal specifika egenskaper för att klara av jobbet som IT-forensiker. Samtliga 20 IT-forensiker som deltog tycker att jobbet är spännande och roligt, det är dock inte alltid en dans på rosor då det förekommer en del negativa aspekter.