Home tech cracks cases

COMMON home technology devices are fast becoming the vital silent witnesses in crime investigations.

Home audiovisual systems, calculators, dashcams, movie cameras and smart watches are just some of the ordinary household devices police seize while looking for clues.

In the past five years the AFP has seized almost 17,000 devices across the country during criminal investigations.

While most of them were the obvious mobile phones, computer hard-drives, USB sticks and dedicated encrypted devices, other items also included ipods, voice recorders, radar detectors, answering machines and cash registers.

And when devices are seized, don’t expect to get them back soon.

Documents obtained under Freedom of Information revealed the police held on to items for years.

Almost 10,000 devices were held by police for forensic examination, as evidence for court or were passed to state and territory police or “another agency”.

Less than half of those were disposed of or returned to their owners from 2017 to 2021.

Although they may not contain damning footage of the actual crime, these devices can work like an informant or even be an alibi-buster for a suspect’s cover story.

Head of forensics and data analytics at digital forensics company Law In Order, David Kerstjens, said digital forensic experts now had to be prepared to gather digital evidence from an ever growing number of sources.

He said smart watches and phones were giving up information that was once never available.

“It is the health data, the heart rate, the steps, the distances covered. If you said you were asleep at the time (of the crime) and the data show that you were walking around – then that is the ultimate alibibuster,” Mr Kerstjens said.

In May this year, a Greek pilot was jailed for murdering his wife after their combined smart devices, fitness trackers, smart watches and home monitoring system contradicted his version of events and cracked the case.

Babis Anagnostopoulos had claimed his wife was killed by burglars during a home invasion.

However, data from his phone, his wife’s smartwatch and home monitoring system all contradicted his version of events. His wife’s smartwatch showed her corpse still had a heartbeat at the time she was supposed to have been found murdered.

Anagnostopoulos’s activity tracker on his phone showed him moving around the house while he said he was tied up and data storage cards from their home monitoring system showed they were removed from the system – again contradicting his timeline.