FORENSIC AUTHORSHIP EXPERTISE OF INTERNET COMMUNICATION: LEGAL AND METHODICAL PROBLEMS

This paper eliminates some actual legal and methodological problems occurring in forensic expert practice of the Russian language Internet-user authorship ident-i fication. Today’s Internet is wildly involved in the commission of crimes. Many forms of criminal activity use Internet as a means of communication. Contents of Internet-sites, emails between individuals, chats, life-journals, forums, blogs, exchange of messages can contain critical evidence of various malicious verbal actions, ranging from publishing ofefnsive materials on a web-site to accounting fraud, blackmail, identity theft, child pornography, pedophilia, drug selling, etc. Insight to the person responsibility for a message or web site content can come from the language the author uses to express himself. The layout of words, sentences, abbreviations, stylistic signs, can play the same role as a fingerprint at a physical scene of crime when bad guys try to conceal in Internet their authorship identity. So the forensic analyses of writetn text provided by the individual via Internet-communication have become commonplace tools for law enforcement around the world. Methods: forensic speech analyses of writetn text provided by the individual via Internet-communication, comparative evaluation of text analysis, lingvo-criminalistic analysis of word’s layout, vocabulary and stylistics of idiolect. Methodology: forensic speech science, expertology, criminalistics. Assessing the expertise of the person’s authorship of the Russian Internet message or web-site text is extremely subjective and usually demands special criminalistics skills and expert technology necessary to reveal clues about the author’s individual speech features. So a scientific objective method of exact and robust attribution becomes desirable. Problems illustrated in this article include some actual legal aspects of gaining evidence from information spread through Internet in difefrent forensic cases (i.e., anonymous blackmail, fraud, defamation, obscene messages, plagiarism, propaganda of terrorism, extremism, fascism, etc.). Also a full account of forensic authorship expertise technique with detailed instruction on how to make the expertise, with a wealth of illustrative examples from real criminal cases is presented.

• Galyashina E.I.

• Социальные (общественные) науки