In the context of preventing and fighting crime, the analysis of mobile phone traffic, among actors of a criminal network, is helpful in order to reconstruct illegal activities on the basis of the relationships connecting those specific individuals. Thus, forensic analysts and investigators require new advanced tools and techniques which allow them to manage these data in a meaningful and efficient way. In this paper we present LogAnalysis, a tool we developed to provide visual data representation and filtering, statistical analysis features and the possibility of a temporal analysis of mobile phone activities. Its adoption may help in unveiling the structure of a criminal network and the roles and dynamics of communications among its components. Using LogAnalysis, forensic investigators could deeply understand hierarchies within criminal organizations, for e.g., discovering central members who provide connections among different sub-groups, etc. Moreover, by analyzing the temporal evolution of the contacts among individuals, or by focusing on specific time windows they could acquire additional insights on the data they are analyzing. Finally, we put into evidence how the adoption of LogAnalysis may be crucial to solve real cases, providing as example a number of case studies inspired by real forensic investigations led by one of the authors.
The COPLINK system @cite_4 and the related suite of tools has a twofold goal: to ease the extraction of information from police case reports and to analyze criminal networks. A conceptual space of entities and objects is built exploiting data mining techniques in order to help in finding relations between entities. It also provides a visualization support consisting of a hyperbolic tree view and a spring-embedder graph layout of relevant entities. Furthermore, COPLINK is able to optimize the management of information exploited by police forces integrating in a unique environment data regarding different cases. This is done in order to enhance the possibility of linking data from different criminal investigations to get additional insights and to compare them in an analytic fashion.
@cite_4
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In response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, major government efforts to modernize federal law enforcement authorities' intelligence collection and processing capabilities have been initiated. At the state and local levels, crime and police report data is rapidly migrating from paper records to automated records management systems in recent years, making them increasingly accessible.