Eastern Kentucky University is now home to a new Kentucky State Police satellite digital forensics laboratory. It’s expected to help process digital evidence more efficiently for law enforcement in the eastern region of Kentucky.
KSP Forensic Computer Examiner Kim Bradley says EKU student interns next semester may be called upon to help out with the latest digital technology. “We will figure out how to extract the data, but we don’t always have time to figure out the why. We’re going to leverage the knowledge and the time of the students to figure out the whys, so that later down the road we can go back and look at that again and see, maybe it will help us in another piece of evidence,” said Bradley.
Workers in the crime lab review various digital instruments from laptops to cell phones to tablets to even drones. Bradley says their investigative work does involve a great deal of child exploitation cases, but also murder, theft, white collar crime, and drug cases.
In addition to law enforcement agencies, Eastern Computer Science Professor Ka-Wing Wong says this experience could help students to someday provide corporate sector advice. “Almost anything today you can think of will require this type of skill set to make sure your organization is under appropriate protection,” noted Wong.
Carol Smith, a forensic computer examiner in the Frankfort KSP lab and graduate from EKU in May of 2017 attended the Friday ceremony. “I’m extremely envious of the students who get to go through this program and have an opportunity to be an intern and just see the lab in action. I would have loved to have that opportunity, going through the program myself,” said Smith.
Four EKU student interns are expected to participate in lab activities next semester.?
