I was flicking through some of his cards the other night, and thought that you could apply the principle to pretty much anything – get a character, assign it some characteristics, slap some abstract mathematics onto the gameplay and there you have it – a new card game, ready to play or trade.  I started thinking of some of the different character types we encounter in our daily work at Monkeytown HTCU, and thought it might be fun to have a little dabble with making them into cards. So here they are – a few samples that you can extend and build on. The HP ratings aren’t very consistent and there isn’t much of a gameplay element, but I am after all just doing it for a few cheap lolz.

Click to embiggen.

LE Forensic AnalystAll-round freak

Asshat Journalist

Blasé Barrister

Counter-Terrorism Forensic Analyst

Evil Anti-Paedophile Establishment Conspiracy

First-time Paedo

Paedophile-advocate

Phone-dumper

Teenage OCG Member

Unicorn Hunter

I’m sure that y’all will have ideas of your own, so let’s have em in the comments below. Here’s the PSD file, based on one by ~Air-wave on DeviantArt in this thread. Any mangling of his template is my fault, because my Photoshop skillz are teh suck.

And what woof-beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Monkeytown to be born?
(with apologies to W.B. Yeats)

The Monkey family acquired a dog this week. He’s a lovely little fella, black-and-white and with a colourful ethnic mix of basset, border collie, staffie and a few others. He came with a name, and at 2 years old it seems a bit late in the day to change it – my vote would have been for ‘Chomsky’ though.

While he’s been gazing soulfully into my big brown eyes today, I got to thinking that it’d be a good thing to have more pets in the workplace. Naturally, me being me, I took this idea and ran with it, turning it into a ridiculously far-fetched basis for a rambling blog post. Laydeezangennelmen, I would like to present to you my ideas for bringing more beasties into the HTCU.

One natural application for dogs at work is their calming effect on people. It’s a scientifically documented fact – or as good as – that having a dog to snuggle and talk to is very therapeutically valuable, and can help relieve stress <waves a hand vaguely at Google Scholar for references>.

I don’t know what happens in other parts of the world, but in the UK most HTCUs have a counsellor visit them a few times a year because of all the nasty crap that we have to look at. With the current financial implosion that we’re seeing in Monkeytown this appears to be a bit too pricey now, so we’ve had to release the counsellor that we’ve all got to know and trust over the last decade, and from now on we’ll be baring our souls to some random from Occupational Health, who we’re assured will not be posting ‘HTCU nutter quotes of the month’ on the canteen noticeboard. None of us are very happy about this, but it could be worse – I’ve started heard a rumour that one plan is for us to have mandatory treatment based on a 1960s study into treating psychopaths where they strip us naked, dose us with LSD and throw us all in a portakabin for a few days. Or something similar, I’m hazy on the details.

Personally, I’m going for the dog route rather than the naked-LSD therapy. We could do a bring-a-dog-to-work day for those who have woofers, and those who haven’t could borrow one from the force doggy section. The dogs could be encouraged to lollop around the offices all day, getting tummy tickles and therapeutic licks from staff who need to de-stress.

In fact while they’re in there, they could be taught to do basic triaging as well – the average police dog has had a hell of a lot more relevant training than anyone who’s joined our unit in the last couple of years. I’m going to contact the mighty Harry Parsonage right now to ask if ADF Triage can be produced in a dog-friendly package that throws out tasty treats when a positive is found.

You dirty old man!

Why stop at dogs? I hear that some of the forces with mounted sections are having to close them down or redeploy the horses as Level  1 UCs, which seems a bit of a waste. I suggest that the HTCU could take them over, and get a few carts from somewhere. There’s no chance of us getting a vehicle of our own anytime soon, so this would do nicely – we could turn up for search warrants on our horse and cart, and have plenty of room for exhibits. It would also do wonders for maintaining the grooming standard in the unit, as the horses could nibble on our hair while we worked. Do horses eat hair? It’s the sort of thing they would do.

Oh, and we could all wear jodhpurs and big boots.

Continuing the theme, we could invest in monkeys to do a lot of the tedious work for us – image categorisation for example (come to think of it actually, it might be a bit cruel to expect an intelligent animal to do this all day. Maybe we could rig up some species of bivalve to hit the C4P buttons). Naturally we’d have to install a load of ropes and hanging tyres into the office but we’d be able to play on them too, so we’d also be helping our general fitness. The larger primates – I’m thinking orang utans – could be dressed in suits to attend court on our behalf. Seeing as only 0.02% of court warnings end up in us actually being needed, it’d be a good way of avoiding wasted time and they’d be good listeners for the barristers to show off their sparkling wit to.

Fishtanks! Hell yeah! Great big ones with beautiful tropical fish in, and maybe a marine tank for some cephalopods (what is it with geeks and cephalopods, by the way? I don’t know why, but I feel myself strangely drawn to them too). As well as the calming effect they’d have on the office – imagine the office lit by blue lights on equipment and the lovely glow from the fishtanks – they’d also be handy for waterboarding anyone suspected of bringing digestives into the office.

OK, I’ve wibbled on enough and I’m sure my loyal readers have got plenty of suggestions to put mine to shame. Comment me up, daddyos!

When the GPGFCBEE (pronounced ‘Gup-guff-sea-bee’) was updated a couple of years ago it drew a lot of ‘WTF’s in the LE world because of its heavy branding (heavy on a ‘black hole, sucking in gravity itself’ scale) by a well known forensics company. There was no problem with the content, it was just that ACPO seemed to have ignored the 43-odd HTCUs in England and Wales and all of the highly experienced LE practitioners in them who are the end-users of the Guide, and gone off to consult a commercial entity. To the best of my knowledge no explanation was ever given for this, and indeed ACPO seem to have handed the Guide over in its entirety to their partner – or at least that’s the impression one would get from the apparent lack of any mention of it on ACPO’s website. Maybe they were scared that we’d moan about backlogs and funding, maybe they didn’t like our dress sense or maybe they’d just forgotten about us. Who knows? Who cares? Caring about a perceived snub by a faceless body of chauffeured chiefs would be an egotistical act and, as we all know, destruction of the ego is the biggie on the path to enlightenment. Ho hum. <Monkey sits in the Lotus position for a while>

Aaaaaaaaaaanyhoo. I was reading the Guide the other day, and noticed that it’s been a while since it was updated. It’s also quite limited in its scope – it sticks to the straight route of HTCU work and never really leaves that path for a wander among the bluebells. I convened a meeting of the MCCF (Monkeytown Cabal of Chief Forensicators i.e. me sitting naked and bloodied in front of pieces of a broken mirror) and over a bottle of brandy and a bowl of peaches, we cobbled together the following:

MCCF Computer Forensicy and Related Stuff Least-Bad Practice Guide

Supported by Golden Apple Ltd, Manufacturers of Exquisite Pies, Pasties and Industrial Vodka

Least-Bad Practice Principles

1. Don’t mess up the evidence.
2. Never play cards for money with a guy named after a city.
3. If you’ve got to mess up the evidence, make sure you can explain why and how.
4. Never get locked up in a country that uses a different alphabet to yours.
5. Write shit down.
6. You provide all the evidence but the OiC owns the case: he gets the commendation for your work, but if it all goes wrong it’s his fault. On paper.
7. Friday is hot dogs day!

Dealing with Volatile Data

Don’t bother. We didn’t bother with it in 2001, so there’s no reason we should start now. Trying to execute a warrant at a time when the suspect’s at the keyboard would only mess up breakfast arrangements, too. Mmmmm….breakfast.

Crime Scenes

Don’t wear your best trousers, wash your hands before eating.

Electronic evidence is everywhere. All over the bloody place. Could be in anything, really. In a computer? Yup. In a thumbdrive shaped like a duck? Sho nuff. In a 32GB microSD card that the suspect is busy necking while you’re waiting for him to answer the door? No diggity, no doubt. But don’t forget to look in the places that you might not immediately think of, too.

For example, there are devices on the market that use the mains power in a house as a data network – which is just plain weird to start with – but if you follow the implications of this to their logical conclusion, it means that if there is an empty light socket above your head in a house, it could be dripping contraband data all over you and your colleagues. To combat this, remember to pack a bucket in your search kit to put under any light sockets, to capture errant data.

Wear gloves if you’re going through someone’s dressing gown pockets. Srsly.

If you’re at a business premises, find a comfy chair at a desk with a good view of proceedings and make it your ‘Base of Operations’. Open a laptop and run a few sciencey-looking things, and wait for the admin chicks to come flocking. It’s not as if they’ll be doing any work, with you stealing all their computers.

Workplace Welfare

Staff in an HTCU are exposed to mountains of truly horrible shit, on a daily basis – only this week, I watched a man masturbate an alligator. To help them cope with this, they need to be allowed to behave exactly how they want. They should also be offered counselling, massages, aromatherapy, paid sabbaticals to go treasure hunting in ancient ruined cities, free bikes and pick of foxy ladies in the canteen queue. Venting spleen in a blog can work wonders, too.

Poor diet can also be a stressor, so why not relax with one of Golden Apple’s marvellous pies or pasties, washed down with some ice-cold vodka? A vodka a day keeps Occupational Health away!

Defence Access

Everyone’s got a right to a decent defence, and part of this involves allowing a defence forensicator access to the exhibit. This should be done under controlled circumstances, and the process should be monitored to ensure the safety of the original evidence. If the defence monkey is about to turn the machine on, the correct way to respond is to scream ‘For the love of God man, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!’, before expelling him from the building and telling the solicitor to stop sending his feeble-minded relatives round under false pretences.

On the other hand, many defence monkeys are lovely and know their stuff – the best are even ex-Police – and these can be welcomed with open arms, as long as they bring biscuits or Golden Apple pies, pasties and vodka.

So that’s my tuppence worth. Maybe a guide like this is better crowdsourced so if you’ve got any suggestions, stick em in the comments.

this is the preliminary report on the bin Laden job we picked up – quite a coup getting that, wasn’t it? I’m sending this email by the new super-mega-secure system that the CIA connected us to, but I’m not sure if I’m doing it right. I hope this doesn’t go out on some random blog or something when I press ‘send’ LOL !

I’ve attached an Encase screenshot of the ‘Osama’ user profile. It’s pretty self-explanatory. The CIA will probably want to keep the Haliburton thing quiet, so let me know if you want it deleted using that handy Encase LE-only ‘delete inconvenient evidence but still make the hashes match’ button that we used on all those Op Ore jobs.

 The computer was on when it was recovered, and the user seems to have been ~4 hours into a session on ‘hotornot.com’ – he favours needy-looking emo chicks, if you’re interested.

There was a lot of email on there, mostly on AOL (if ever there was a good excuse to execute a suspect…). Most of it’s spam, sent rather than received. He was big into the herbal viagra business, and seemed to be working as a Pakistan stringer for a few of the UK car insurance companies but indications are that he found the whole thing morally repugnant.

In terms of plans, he had a few MS Paint drawings of a proposed secret volcano base somewhere in the Indian ocean, and was working on a deal with the Somali pirates so that they’d protect him from sharks and deliver Angel Delight every week.

Financial – a few bank accounts mentioned, but I’ll need a couple more days OT to get the pages back (what was the CIA’s cost code again?). He had a Paypal account and was a big eBayer. Collecting those Franklin Mint figurine things, if you can believe it! He’d just ordered their Kate Middleton portrait doll. His online shopping was pretty much restricted to that, bulk quantities of Angel Delight and pallet-loads of digestive biscuits.

Plenty of music – lots of that martial jihadi crap, but he was also a big Butthole Surfers and Cramps fan. Who knew?!? Oh, and on the subject of music – the writing about ‘bury me at sea where no murdered ghosts can haunt me’ wasn’t a last will ‘n’ testament, he was writing out the lyrics of a Pogues song for the monthly Afghan Mujahid Alumni karaoke night.

Regarding the other exhibits, I’d recommend that unless the Americans can pay for the OT, they’re just going to have to sit in the queue. There’s no risk to life (what with him being dead), so it scores pretty low on the prioritisation matrix. Do you want to tell Obama that or should I?

Hope this is useful, give me a ring if you need anything else.

Laterz,

Monkey

The report doesn’t go into any detail about what the OT was actually used for, but there are plenty of assumptions bandied about that it was all simply to provide more pies for the po-po. Oh, and here’s the link to the research itself – Sky News must have forgotten that quoting research in a news article without linking to the original source screams out “we’re talking bollocks”, as well as being in contravention of the mighty Ben Goldacre’s fantastic idea for making news more difficult to make up.

This sort of rabble-rousing is obviously far easier than doing proper journalism, and it’s a wonderfully handy weapon for the government to hand out to their tame news-whores when they’re flamethrowering a new chunk of the public sector.  Need to get public sympathy away from the police in the run-up to the Winsor Report? Call them a bunch of scrounging money-grabbers – simples!

As regular readers will know, I’m a helpful sort of monkey. With this in mind, I’d like to create a repository of handy headlines for whipping up the masses against various public sector jobs:

NHS spends £40 million per year on saucy uniforms for nurses! (This can have ‘to titillate asylum seekers’ added to it for the Daily Mail and Daily Star)

Teachers fleece Britain for thirty million paid days off per year! (thanks to N for this one)

Taxpayer stumps up for firefighters’ comfy duvets!

Women civil servants demand separate toilets in PC-WC shocker! (News of the World can include a staged photo of a woman on the toilet for this one)

Government pisses away billions to bail out banks! (nah, that’d never happen)

Have our boys gone soft? Fury as troops get free foreign travel to sunny shores! (Daily Star can add ‘to help beardie mullahs’)

Millions wasted as NHS refuses to use amputated body parts in canteen meals! (Daily Star version adds ‘to appease mad mullahs’, Daily Mail can make the body parts ‘cancer-curing’)

Pampered GPs fritter millions per year on lightbulbs and electricity for swish offices!

Millions wasted on NHS mops and buckets as administrators refuse to allow stray dogs to lick blood from floors!

You get the idea. I think this is going to be one of the those posts where your comments are going to be better than my suggestions, so post ‘em if you got ‘em!

I’ve dabbled in the sim world in my time, although the sheer strangeness of Ship Simulator freaked me out a little – I love ships, but taking a virtual container ship across a featureless, flat Atlantic is not my idea of fun. Sim City was more my cup of tea, with the water pipes, electricity and god-like power over your fellow man. I seem to have little patience for games these days though, and the only one I can play for any length of time is Sid Meier’s Pirates! I bought it for Son of Monkey, obviously, but I can often be found terrorising the Spanish Main long after he’s scooted off to bed.

Simulators can serve a purpose other than fun though – they’re so realistic now that they can be valuable training tools, at least in the theory behind flying a helicopter or navigating a busy shipping lane. The US Army has been using America’s Army as a recruiting tool for some time now, focusing on the team-building and planning stuff rather than the ‘Leroy Jenkins‘ technique of FPS-playing. Thinking about this led me to the idea that maybe the computer forensics community could develop an HTCU Simulator game, partly as a training tool for prospective recruits and partly just as a bitter sneer at the world. Here goes:

Player Classes

When you start a game, you choose whether you want to play as a police officer or a strawb. Both classes have their good and bad points – playing as a police officer you start a bit older (having had to keep the mean streets clean for a few years first), but you retire young and with a huge payout, at the expense of a bigger monthly pension deduction. In addition to this you get the pluses of free local travel (got to perfect that ‘pretend to be asleep’ skill to at least +5 if trouble breaks out though!), sock allowance, rent allowance, moustache allowance, boot allowance, tie-pin allowance*, and a much higher rung on the tottie-grabbing ladder at Christmas dos. You also get to point out that ‘the job’s fucked’ with a bit more authority. Disadvantages of playing this character are that you can get moved to any random post at a moment’s notice, are tied to the pension and are sworn to defend the honour and person of any gimp who needs it, although not if you buy the ‘back injury’ upgrade.

Playing as the strawb, you get to work until you drop dead of old age or lose your job in a wave of budget cuts, with no hope of upward movement for the next 40 years. Advantages are that you can mutter about leaving for the private sector a bit more convincingly and you’ve got a certain coolness among your geek friends.

Eras of Play

Once you’ve chosen who you want to play as, you choose which era you want to play in -

• ‘Prehistory’ – you’re a DC in a fraud squad and know how to use a computer. The avatar for this era is a caveman with a 5 1/4″ floppy and a porn star moustache.
• ‘Early Years’ – you use Encase 3 and Norton Diskedit, and feel as if you have a relationship with the authors of DDOs through their pithy comments in the code. The avatar is a happy, youthful geek like the ‘pipboy’ from Fallout 3.
• ‘Golden Age’ – the mid- to late-oughties. You have a training budget, a couple of conferences and workshops per year, and most of the equipment you need. You know almost everyone else in the LE CF circle at least by name. You have a backlog, but it’s manageable. The avatar is a strong-chinned, noble worker looking towards the horizon in the Soviet-heroic style
• ‘Fin de Siècle’ – you cower under a barbarian government and have little training, equipment or hope of advancement. The backlog is insane because of disk size, broadband use and a raised level of perversion in society. You feel like the last man on the roof in Saigon. Your avatar is a drowning sailor being machine-gunned by leering Nazis.

Once you’re started, you get some training. The nature of this will depend on what era you’ve chosen to play in. If it’s prehistory, you write your own course. If it’s current day, you get mentored by a cyncial old-arse who’s under pressure to complete his own caseload from a sergeant who’s on the verge of going Colonel Kurtz under the weight of the backlog.

During gameplay, cases come into your virtual in-tray and leave as you complete them. Now and then you’ll get one with lots of tricky problems, and successfully unlocking them all will move you up a level. Most of the jobs however – particularly in the later years of the game – become like the old ‘Daley Thompson’s Decathlon’ game on the ZX Spectrum – you hammer a couple of keys as fast as you can, only instead of making Daley do a good long jump, you’re categorising images in a race against the clock. Lose the race and the case gets thrown out on abuse of process. Win and you get an identical job with an exponentially higher number of images. You can choose to mitigate the number of images you have to categorise by absorbing the hash databases of other forces but the trade-off with this is that you then have to spend just as much time re-categorising all the wrong ones.

During the day-to-day business of the game, you also have to contend with an expanding waistline and a diminishing toolkit – points are gained from other players by appropriating their handy white Phillips/flathead double-headed screwdrivers and putting your initials somewhere on them.

After a certain amount of time in the game, you may get a lucky break and go on a ‘Unicorn-Hunting Course‘. This will be a bit of light at the end of the tunnel of doing the same case over and over again for 90% of your time, and you’ll return full of enthusiasm and desire to use your new skills. Other departments will eagerly request your unicorn-hunting skills, and you’ll unlock a mini-game where you try to get out from under the daily grind to do some unicorn-hunting. You are unsuccessful.

You can complete the game by retiring, applying out of the HTCU or becoming so consumed by the oily, black kernel of disgust that builds up within you from wallowing in other people’s brain-filth that you’re disciplined after making a defendant eat his own rectum on the landing at crown court.

Other features could include ‘Boss Roulette’, where you get a new chief/inspector every day, each with varying degrees of enthusiasm for their new role; ‘Recover the RAID’, where you have to forensik your own workstation after a PoS Lacie dies again, and  ’Elastic Band Wars’, where you put each others’ eyes out with office supplies. Happy gaming, kids!

* please don’t complain about the inaccuracy of this in the comments, as ever I’m only saying it to raise a cheap laugh.

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 44,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 5 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, there were 44 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 59 posts. There were 57 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 4mb. That’s about 1 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was March 12th with 909 views. The most popular post that day was 10 signs that you work in computer forensics.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were twitter.com, facebook.com, praetorianprefect.com, blogs.sans.org, and forensicsfromthesausagefactory.blogspot.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for leda and the swan, rumpelstiltskin, phil spector, cartman, and south park.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

10 signs that you work in computer forensics March 2010
8 comments

Report in the Style of…The Daily Mail December 2009
5 comments

If Apple did computer forensics… April 2010
29 comments

Making Court a Bit More Fun November 2009
14 comments

Forensic Olympics November 2009
12 comments

So seeing as I seem to have dried up, I decided to put the Monkey onto someone else’s back, in the form of an interview. I was looking for someone erudite, witty and well-known in the forensics bizz. No one came to mind (bmm-tish, athankyoulaydeezandgentsI’mhereallweek), so I gave Geoff Fellows a shout.

Geoff, as many of you in the UK will know, is one of the teaching luminaries at Cranfield University/The Defence Academy, as well as forming one of the vertebrae of the F3 and running his own consultancy. Students of his, often wearing their special adult nappies on the first day of the infamous Forensic Foundations course, are struck by his sandpaper-dry wit, humourous barrister impressions and unorthodox method of teaching the MFT. He definitely leaves an impression.

So without further ado, allow me to present an interview with Geoff Fellows:

Tell us a bit about yourself. Your potted history on F3 would indicate the life of an itinerant seafarer with a cheese fetish. Is this accurate?

Well, I only started to enjoy cheese at age 44, but the itinerant seafaring has featured a bit more strongly.

Very briefly, I was born in Bearsden in Scotland. My father was a very angry dispensing chemist from Anniesland Cross and my mother had been a nun until she met my father during the war and decided to shed the habit and not to be a nun any more.

We moved to Oxford, then to Maidstone in Kent. I went to Sutton Valence School (which is still there, but now they take girls too! Ewwwww yuk. We got by with the occasional bout of homosexuality.) then I joined the Royal Navy for a brief period (it didn’t suit me- nuff sed), then Post Office Overseas Telegraphs in London, then the International Telex exchange, also in London, then I was a bus conductor on Maidstone and District Buses for a bit and then I joined a stock exchange telegraph company called PQ Cables.

When I left there I went to a Commune in Wales which was an alternative technology centre. There was supposed to be a lot of grass and free love, but I seem to remember spending most of my time trying to keep dry.

Then I moved to the Isle of Skye and bought my own inshore fishing boat called the “Frøya”. We fished lobsters in pots (creels in Scotland), set long-lines to catch whitefish and we also took out sea anglers. Then I got an HGV licence and drove lorries all over Scotland for a few years, mostly carrying 3,500 gallons of Talisker single malt scotch per trip to bonds on the mainland. I cannot abide whisky. It is one of my many failings.

Then I ran a hotel near Dunvegan on Skye for Clan Macleod for 3 years with my then-wife. We ran out of money in 1979 and so we left Skye for Northamptonshire and I joined the Police. I loved Northamptonshire Police (and the Police service) with a passion, and I still do. Amongst the best times of my life, and I stayed until 2004 when I hit 55 years of age.

Since then I have been fooling around with forensic computing on my own.

If you were offered enough money, would you record a full TomTom session in your ‘barrister’ voice?

Yes, I would love to. It could be a lot of fun. “Please resile from your current direction” instead of “Make a u-turn if possible”, and “Your speed quantum is in danger of becoming an issue of rubric” instead of “You are exceeding the speed limit”. How about, “By some extraordinary stroke of luck you have arrived at your destination”.

Which would you rather face – pirates from the ‘golden age’ on the Spanish Main, or contemporary Somali pirates?

Yes, I knew that someone, some day, would notice my barely concealed fascination with Johnny Depp. Bugger. Do Somali pirates say, “Yo-ho-ho”? I think not. To hell with them, then.

How did you get into CF?

By accident. In 1983 I investigated a big cheque fraud with just one (very lovely) WDC to assist me. (Jo P, where are you now? Sigh.) Anyway, it took over a year, and we went to court and got a great result and then I went sick with stress and unrequited lust. When I came back in April 1984 I was put on light duties and given an Apricot computer with some crime stats on it and asked to type in the crimes. That was the first time I ever touched a computer. Then I took over the HOLMES computers for Northants, then I got a bit of a degree in computing, then I was asked to do some data examination for the Fraud Squad, then we started to do all of West Midlands Police forensic computing work for money (they had no forensic computing department in those days and we did!!!) and that was it really.

Almost everything in my life has happened by accident. I never had a plan, and if I ever got an inkling that some day there might be a plan it immediately went to ratshit anyway.

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve seen on a job?

A guy from a place in Northamptonshire who loved anything in white socks. He had inflatable schoolgirls in his loft with white socks on, he bought a house by a school where the children wore white socks, he started an Irish dance troupe because the children all wore white socks and he had a Jack Russell terrier which he also dressed in white socks for walks. The socks were held on by with white elastic bands. Of course, he wore white socks himself. He even took photos of racks of white socks in Marks and Spencer and British Home Stores and kept them on his computer. His computer mouse was in a white sock. He had no loo paper, just a hook in the bathroom with white socks on it.

What’s the most satisfying piece of evidence that you’ve ever recovered?

A whole folder full of pictures of Tess Daly. In fact I date my loss of innocence to that one moment.

What’s your favourite forensic tool?

EnCase. Yes, alright, alright, I know. Don’t go on. There it is. I remember when it came out first. I thought, “This is what we should have had from the start and we didn’t.” I still think so.

Winhex is wonderful stuff too, and very nice and hexy.

If you could bestride anything in the manner of a colossus, what would it be?

Tess Daly. She is actually Helen Elizabeth Daly, and she lives in Fulmer, Bucks. Did you know that? I’ve been to Fulmer many times.

Years ago it used to be Susan George. Before that it was a girl called Celia from the Maidstone Convent (which had a very fetching blue and yellow uniform). Before that it was a metal tractor with pedals on the front wheel.

Do you think that the glut of CF courses at universities at the moment is a good thing? If you were taking on a youthful apprentice, what qualities/experience would you be looking for?

If a Forensic Computing course is offered by a University and it actually teaches relevant current forensic computing, by which I mean at a technical level, in detail, and on a basis of practicality and real-life forensic computing work now, in 2010 then, Yes, of course that would be a good thing.

If a Forensic Computing course is offered by a University in order to cash in on the word ‘Forensic’ and CSI and that sort of stuff, and it is taught by a motley collection of retired system administrators who used to be really good at Cobol programming or who once understood Slotted Aloha or who used to run the Cambridge Ring and who really have no understanding at all of investigative work of any kind then No, they are an excrescence on the face of the planet – they are “a horror, a proverb and a byword amongst all the peoples” (Deuteronomy 28:37).

You coined the term ‘Noncenet’ to describe a doomsday scenario of paedos who actually put thought into covering their tracks – do you think that our bread-and-butter customers are getting cleverer?

Absolutely not. I often wonder why, but I now think that it’s a question of exhaustion. They are so worn out by constant self-abuse and fanatical tidiness that they really cannot find the energy to install TrueCrypt.

Who are you most like: Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now, Roy Batty from Blade Runner or Woody from Toy Story?

No question. I mean look! Obvious. And I hope that I will go with a smile and the words “Time…..to die”.

Dessert Island Disks: You’re shipwrecked and can take: an endless supply of one dessert; two paper books and a 250GB disk containing the data of your choice (and the equipment to utilise the data, natch). What’s it to be?

Yes, all those things, please. The dessert would be my wife’s Mango Cheesecake, the Books would be any two books by the amazing Professor Richard Dawkins (Dawkins is my GOD!) and the 250 gig disk would be filled with series like ‘The Wire’, ‘Sopranos’, ‘Deadwood’, ‘Band of Brothers’ and most particularly and especially ‘Mad Men’. And oh yes, Monkey. You are right about Omar Little – Amazing; what a man. A rôle model to which children everywhere might aspire. He leaves Brother Mouzone morally and spiritually nowhere.

What’s the most outrageous thing you’ve heard or seen on a Shrivenham course dinner?

An enormous phallic white candle which was produced for dramatic purposes. There was a thong produced during the course of the same evening which I tucked into my pocket, but that is another story…

What does the computer forensics trade need more of, and less of?

More huge great belly laughs, unconfined by the ghastly business of political correctness. Who can possibly do this job and take it all seriously? We must ROFL all day, every day, singly and in groups, in the office, in the street, in cars, in nonce’s houses, in the dens of extremism, and also as we lie between our own sheets contemplating the complete idiocy we have witnessed during the course of yet another day.

Less of? Fewer FC jobs run as incident rooms with viewing teams and Holmes ‘actions’ and all that silly nonsense. There are some very fine forensic examiners out there. Please, for Dawkins sake, let them do their jobs? Please? They really want to……….

Point us at two non-forensic websites that you enjoy

www.flakebook.com and www.bbr.com. The latter is a palace of delights. Go down to St James’ Street some time. Wander in. You don’t need to buy anything – just marvel at the beauty and sophistication of an ancient business beautifully conducted. Reminds me of the Met.

Have you got any favourite music for different stages of the forensic process?

Amy MacDonald – “This Pretty Face” when I am really cooking on gas and the bookmarks are going in and the keyword searches are coming up trumps and the hashes are starting to match. Turn it up and up and UP and watch the windows rattle.

Cool video too. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ph7-BeEQW4Y

Also Alesha Dixon – “The Boy Does Nothing” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn9lLnVurYI) when I have just printed an invoice for thousands which I am about to post to someone whom I know will pay it.

If you were sergeant of an HTCU now, what would you do that you don’t think is being done enough of?

Nah. Can’t think. What I would (and did) absolutely refuse to do was to be be a ‘budget-holder’. Crap!! The answer to that silly nonsense is - ”Sunshine, I am a forensic analyst, or trying to be. I am absolutely not interested in your accounts and budgets. Not my problem, Sonny Jim. You want me to look after your budget then you get yourself down here, Mushtie, and do what I am paid to do whilst I do what you are paid to do.” Bah.

Who will play you in the film of your life?

Well, Anthony Hopkins has the right accent and the craggy good looks, and also the leather and wire mask, and he is polymathic, but I feel I must stay with Johnny Depp. So versatile, so elegant, slightly louche (what IS the matter with this spellchecker?), so damn capable. And also, as Simon Key would say, “A little bit Wheeeee, a little bit Whoooo”.

Do you have a favourite forensic process at the moment? The one that you always look forward to running out on a new job?

Looking at the dirty pictures.

Grading: A/1/1

Intelligence indicates that members of OCG ‘The Gang of F**kers’ are conspiring to cause harm to the person and reputation of Happy MONKEY (25/10/??).

Sources indicate that this is to be done by convincing ‘The SHOPKEEPER’ (NFD) that MONKEY is, and has been, stealing from ‘The Tuck Shop’ and is generally taking the piss.

Methods are likely to include planting empty chocolate wrappers/Coke cans in MONKEY’s workspace,  making false claims to have seen him stealing from the ‘The Tuck Shop’ and laughing to the OCG about it, and claiming that MONKEY has been making abusive remarks about The SHOPKEEPER..

The OCG includes known nominals ‘Phil Collins’, ‘The Prankster’, ‘The Fluffer’ and ‘The Strawbinator’.

Sources connected to the OCG say their motives are lol-based, in particular with reference to ‘pushing The SHOPKEEPER over the edge and making him actually flip out and give MONKEY a few digs‘.

This conspiracy would appear to have been in place for at least a week, and indications are that The SHOPKEEPER is already close to tipping point.

DISSEMINATE TO: Public Protection Unit, Witness Protection.

So much so, in fact, that I think we should exploit it much more to cross-fertilise ideas between the online and LE worlds. Doing this, I argue, will lead to better communication between police and their communities, create better internal systems for LE and maybe make a few quid as well.

Take prisoners, for example. The UK’s prison population currently stands at around 85,000. This is a government figure so by the time you’ve factored in things like what defines a ‘prisoner’, what defines a ‘prison’, seasonal adjustments against a basket of currencies et cetera, the number is probably quite different. Whatever the precise number, it shows that the incarcerated element of society is a sizable demographic and one that’s been pretty much ignored by social networking sites so far. I’d like to look at this and see how we can address the problem, with a view to becoming fabulously wealthy and selling out any ideals I may have once had, leading to a movie being made about my success starring Johnny Depp as me with Rachel Weisz as the love interest.

One of Facebook’s most popular features has been the installable ‘applications’ that add extra functionality and features to the site. Games like Farmville have become massively popular, with players opening up their personal profiles to hundreds of strangers just to get a chance at building a bigger hen house or upgrading to a big red barn. I propose:

Prisonville

I think Prisonville could tap into this market. Players would start off with a basic cell containing nothing but a wooden bunk, a bucket to defecate in and an amorous cellmate. Over time they could build up stocks of currency (cigarettes, razors, toothpaste, mobile phone credit etc) to make their cell more homely.

Currency could be earned by slopping out neighbours’ cells as well as hiding contraband for them when a cell-search is imminent, and players could send their friends Visiting Orders to get hold of drugs, phone batteries and other items to help build up wealth. Over time a player’s back passage would get upgraded so that he could store more goods up there and build up a stock of commodities to sell. Purchasable items could include things like a waterbed, games console, curtains (and pelmets), Ikea chairs etc, all of which could be kept either in the cell or warehoused in the colon.

Prisoner-networking could be integrated into Facebook’s new location-aware features, to provide functionality like Foursquare – once an inmate has occupied a cell or wing for a certain amount of time, they are made the ‘Daddy’ of that location. Challengers can seek to remove him from power by hitting him over the head with a few snooker balls in a sock or throwing him off the landing.

OK, maybe these ideas could do with a bit of work, but at least I’m thinking about it. It’s a shame to have all these high-end smartphones floating around prisons without making full use of them, after all.

Bringing the Social Inside

At the same time, police forces can learn a lot from the social internet. Look at the internal crime management systems we use, for example – in terms of UI, they’re generally a sprawling mess that makes even Encase’s layout look logical (usually a clear case of salespeople selling features that don’t exist and have to be gaffer-taped on to the existing software), and there’s often a distinct lack of fun to them – almost as if lolz weren’t part of the requirements anaysis, if you can believe that.

I’d like to be able to look at the custody record of a prisoner and click ‘Like’ on his ‘reply to caution’. A threaded ‘occurrence’ log would encourage people to keep it updated as well, and provide a good right-to-reply for the often-maligned forensic folk: “You had the report weeks ago, dickhead – stop blaming us” “whoops sorry, it was under my desk lol”. Custody photos could be livened up with an icanhascheezburger style ‘lolprisoner’ generator, and a B3ta-like (link can be NSFW) Photoshop Challenge based on scene photos would makes Fridays fun again.

Individual users could have their own profile page, status updates (‘Bob is working on job 540/10 booo, I hate the scat jobs lol’) and amusing photos from work nights out. Maybe we could incorporate a ‘friends’ system too, so that you could follow the activities of people that you work or hang out with. Why not take it the whole hog and integrate the crime management systems with Facebook Connect? I’m sure that those whores at Facebook would welcome the chance to sell advertising based on the data, and the Police is such a sociable and friendly place to work (think of it as being like an episode of The Inbetweeners – warning: foul language and very rude jokes), that this is sure to be a hit…especially if we add an internal dating element to it. This could tie in with duty calendars, so that officers could add ‘Cover if wife phones’ flags to certain times or days. There seem to be big retirement parties every week now, so I think an internal social network would be well-used – and if it was integrated into the crime-management and intelligence systems, all the better. Particularly as we’re all going to be out of a job soon, as we’re going to need some way to keep in touch with each other.

OK, so they’re my ideas. The way things have going recently y’all seem to be writing better Monkey posts in the comments than I do in the blog, so let’s ‘ave em.