You're listening to Tech Talks, a podcast by the Technology Education Collaborative.
Tech is an Arizona 501c3 nonprofit that empowers everyday people with useful information about
the technology they use each and every day. Today, we're sitting down with John Delmar,
a digital forensics specialist, and he's going to answer our standard five questions
about what he does every day. Thanks for being here.
You're welcome. Glad to be here.
All right. So like I said, the way this works, everyone gets the same five questions. You ready?
Shoot.
What is your title and position?
I am a digital forensics specialist with Epps Digital Forensics, and I work for Epps
Digital Forensics. However, all the statements in this interview are my personal opinions
and not the opinion or position of Epps Digital Forensics or any of the operations thereof.
We provide criminal and civil digital forensics and litigation support in Arizona and many other
states.
And so what does that mean? So what specifically do you do on a daily basis?
We examine evidence or collect evidence and exam evidence collected from all sorts of
digital devices, whether it's phone, computers, your car, wearables, the cloud, and take that
information and try and quantify what is there and speak to its truth in support of criminal
and civil litigation.
So can you give me a completely not real but generic example?
Currently, we are doing a brute force unlock on a phone that was collected postmortem from
a teenager to look through there and see if there is signs of bullying and also to help bring
closure to the family. We also have a criminal case in which we are looking at cell phone
tower data and Google location data and speaking to the truth of the police reports used to
garner the indictment and that are going to be presented in a court of law and make sure that
that information is presented in a factual and scientifically sound manner.
So you've mentioned a lot of different technologies. You've mentioned vehicles,
you've mentioned cell phones, you've mentioned computers. Is it kind of any technological
device that may have evidence or is there things you don't work on?
In broad strokes, we work with a lot of the various technologies. There are
specializations. So if, for instance, we get a sound file, we go through, we collect data,
and we get a sound file. And if the client needs somebody to speak to whether or not that is an
original sound file, or if it's been modified or any other information, we will engage a third
party specialist for that. But we serve as general technology. So we cover a lot of stuff. And in the
digital age we're in right now, everything is interconnected. You can't walk down the street
and not generate a thousand bright and shining points of data. So in that kind of environment,
there's a lot of stuff for us to look at. And that's part of the job is knowing what we
should look at and what is just going to be digital noise.
So what is your favorite thing about your job?
I enjoy the truth. That's going to sound really weird, but I derive a joy from the purity of
getting past he said, she said to just the basis of this is factual. I can speak to this. There's
no presumption. There's no assumption. This is what it is. And it can be nothing else. And,
you know, getting to that point is, you know, where I can answer a question with certainty
and with that reservation is one of the joys of the job.
And what is your least favorite thing about your
job? Because we all got something we don't like to do at work.
I dislike with a fair amount of passion, the process of paperwork. And I realized there's
a certain level of, you know, well, it's all about that because you've got to document everything you
do. But the doing is the fun part. The filling out all the paperwork is the thing I would like
to leave in the rear view mirror. So what kind of paperwork are you writing reports? Is this like
administrative paperwork? One of the challenges we have is due to the nature because, like I said,
litigation support, which means we deal with the courts and anybody who's dealt with the courts.
It is one of two things, either happens too fast or it happens too slow. And for instance,
we just recently had to unseal some evidence on a case that we've been working on since 2018,
and it's still in court. And, you know, there's not been, you know, it's not like it's up for
appeal. We haven't done the first round, and that's six years. So you have to document stuff
because rarely can you count on something having an expeditious end. I mean, you know, when
something wraps up and like, oh, it's done and we're finished and we never need to touch this
again. That's such a rarity. At a minimum, the simple stuff can hang around for seven years.
It's just a matter of course. So we have to document. You have to cross your T's, dot your I's,
and document everything. Because even though like, oh, I'll never forget this.
Five years down the road, what were we thinking about when we did this five years ago? You know,
you don't have that in your head space anymore. So if you haven't written it down someplace,
you get to redo the work. And that's never fun. So what would the one practical thing that you
would tell someone who's interested in getting into this particular facet of tech, like what is
a practical thing they could do or should do? Because of the nature of the business and because
the tools and the training can be, can be punitively expensive. I would recommend anybody
who's looking to get into this, you know, somebody who this job speaks passion to, is you are really
going to want to get in with law enforcement, whether it be at a federal level, a city level,
state level, the digital forensics, the tools, the techniques, the tools you use,
and the reasons why you have to use those have become so commonplace. They're using vehicle data
in accident investigations now. There's been a recent spat of, this was kind of one of those
interesting things, where police in California are now seizing Teslas that are parked on the street
if there's a violent crime in the area because the Teslas have cameras in them. And the police,
this hasn't been officially declared, but I'm assuming that it's much, much easier to, you know,
get somebody to give a copy of the vehicle's camera data when you're threatening to throw their
$60,000 car into impound than it is to issue a subpoena for that information from Tesla and fight
through their legal department. So there's a different level of motivation there in between
the two parties to comply. So with even a traffic accident, having a digital forensic side of it,
law enforcement is on the leading edge of the daily use of it. So if you don't have a strong
technology background and you're just looking to get started into this, the suggestion is, is get
into the law enforcement side of it. We see a lot of our compatriots, a lot of people in this
industry have got a law enforcement, either at our federal, state, city level background. And that
seems to be a very common thing. So, you know, keep your nose clean and, you know, a lot of it
isn't sworn positions anymore. For a long time, you saw a lot of people that were sworn police
officers. So they'd gone through the police academy and stuff like that. And I think that
law enforcement is waking up to the fact that there's a different set of skills that benefits
digital forensics than, you know, beat copper detective or investigative. There's some overlap
there, but, you know, they're hunting for kind of a little bit of a different breed of cat when
they're hunting for somebody who's a digital examiner, you know, so they're much more amicable.
We're starting to see more civilian people that are working in support positions with the cities.
And since I haven't heard of a bunch of programs that teach this because it's all, you know,
there's one company doing computer forensics, there's one doing Macintosh forensics, there's
another one doing cell phone forensics, there's another one that does CDRs, which is your cell
data dumps or locationality. There's a bunch of small players in the market out there. I say
small, but, you know, there's a bunch of disparate players in the market. So there's not one place
where you go to get all of it. It's fragmented. And, you know, so having a government agency foot
the bill for that fragmented training site, a wonderful, wonderful thing. And it'll give you
an Apple opportunity to actually practice your trade because there's always somebody,
there's always somebody committing a crime and everybody's got a phone in their pocket.
So we're all walking around computers, they're all connected, they're all collecting data.
And that's where that need to be able to parse that data out for law enforcement is critical
for them. All right. So our final question, kind of a personal question. Do you have any passion
projects, any organizations you support, any other interests, anything you're working on that you'd
want to share with people? It does not have to be related to your occupation. I do a lot of,
you know, the additive manufacturing. So 3d printing, laser cutting, small scale CNC,
that maker space where you sit back here and you, you try and create something that's always been,
you know, the, the, the ability to create is divine, you know, so being able to have that
creative and, you know, it, you're always having to keep up to date. So it's something that exercises
your mind. So yeah, that maker space is fun. I keep probably more reptiles than I should.
I was going to call you out on the herpetology if you didn't mention it. Cause I know you've
done some good work in that space too. I, you know, once a year I get together and I
do a presentation for a bunch of seventh and eighth graders. And then I usually get
Shanghai for a bunch of kindergarteners or first graders to do the same presentation for them
after school. But at one of the local schools, I do that. And then, you know, I have, I have
participated with nonprofit organizations for that, you know, for, to, to push the responsible
pet ownership. You see a lot of overly dramatic or sensationally idiotic things out there in
YouTube space that's, that are done for the purposes of gathering attention. Cause that's
how you get views these days. And I think that some of those choices that those people make
are self-serving and are very detrimental to both the animals and the hobby. And you know,
they're cool critters and they can be very interactive and very intelligent and, you know,
can bring people joy and peace and contentment. And as long as they're kept responsibly,
they're safer than goldfish. I have got, let's call it eight boa constrictors right now. The
biggest is about seven and a half, eight foot long. And then I have got a, let's call it
precocious Argus monitor that we're working on bringing civility to, but it's not the friendliest
little thing in the world, but an amazing animal. And if you've ever sat back and watched the
velociraptors in Jurassic park and they look into the eye and you can see the cunning going on,
you see the, you know, as blue sits back here and figures out exactly how she's going to cover
that 15 feet. I see that every time I walk past that lizard. It's, there's something going on in
there. There isn't subtitles for what it is, but there's something going on in there. And it's more
than, you know, it's doing some complex thought. That's all of them for me right now. My daughter's
got a hog nose. I don't know if, I don't know if teenagers count as pets, but you know, it depends
on who you're talking to that, you know, it depends. You catch them right before dinner
and you can see them kind of reverting back to their base forms, you know, and you kind of like
throw a Cheeto at them or something like that. And, you know, hopefully they don't take a hand
off. All right. So thank you so much for coming, John. A pleasure to be here.
This podcast was recorded at the Advanced Cyber Systems Lab at Gateway Community College at the
Washington campus. The ACSL is a tech hub for the general public, where you can use a 3D printer,
record a podcast, practice advanced tech skills on one of our servers and do a whole lot more,
all free of charge.