Agents, Trojans and Tags: The Next Generation of Investigators

In a statement the Council of the European Union has recommended that member states should introduce clandestine remote searches of computers as a standard investigation method to combat cybercrime. At present, there is little analysis of the consequences such a development will have in the UK. The use of remote forensic software tools by law enforcement agencies has been, however, controversially discussed elsewhere and most notably in Germany where the Federal Constitutional Court had the opportunity to analyse the issue. This paper describes the use of this investigation method in Germany and analyses the reaction of the German and some other legal systems to give a first indication of the likely issues that its use in the UK will raise.