“Imagine a tractor-trailer filled with paper documents – that is roughly equivalent to one terabyte of data. As Stephen Niemczak, special agent in charge with the Office of Investigations at the Department of Health and Human Services, said it could take digital investigators a while to sift through.”
“The Digital Investigations Branch in HHS’ Office of Inspector General has a team of highly skilled digital investigators and forensic computer examiners responsible for identifying, preserving, collecting and analyzing electronically stored information, and supporting criminal investigations. After conducting any additional digital investigations, the team shares that information with special agents and prosecutors for use in judicial proceedings, Niemczak said.”
“Massive amounts of data require sufficient storage while it is investigated, and a chain of custody to ensure integrity of the data by the time it reaches the courtroom.”
“’It’s extremely important for our people to be trained in handling evidence properly. And one of the reasons that we provide so much training to our individuals and have that subject matter expertise is to make sure that we can maintain the integrity and authenticity of that information for use in judicial proceedings,’ Neimczak said on Federal Monthly Insights – Special Bulletin: Digital Investigations.”
“The branch relies on cloud solutions that interconnect all of their offices nationwide, and allow team members to remotely access or distribute workloads. If one office sees a surge in investigations activity, the cloud makes it easier to leverage national resources, he said. That’s also important considering some investigation are inherently national rather than regional, and because keeping up with the pace of technological advances is challenging enough…” Read the full article here.
Source: HHS digital investigators connect with cloud to manage ever-growing data for legal cases – By Amelia Brust, May 12, 2021. Federal News Network.
