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СУДЕБНАЯ ЭКСПЕРТИЗА
E.I. Galyashina (E.M. ra^amuHa)*
FORENSIC AUTHORSHIP EXPERTISE OF INTERNET COMMUNICATION: LEGAL AND METHODICAL PROBLEMS
Review. This paper eliminates some actual legal and methodological problems occurring in forensic expert practice of the Russian language Internet-user authorship identification. 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 offensive 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 written text provided by the individual via Internet-communication have become commonplace tools for law enforcement around the world. Methods: forensic speech analyses of written text provided by the individual via Internet-communication, comparative evaluation of text analysis, lingvo-criminalis-tic 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 different 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. Keywords: forensic, authorship, identification, expertise, Internet discourse, speech features, computer crimes, messages, email, Russian language.
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, chats, life-journals, blogs, and various net-mediated messages can contain evidence of malicious verbal actions, ranging from publishing offensive materials on a web-site to accounting fraud, blackmail, identity theft, child pornography, pedophilia, drug selling, etc.
Personal responsibility for a message or web site content can be tested by the individual language style the author uses to express himself.
Word preferences, layout of sentences, a way of abbreviation, etc. can play the same role as a fingerprint at a physical scene of crime when criminals try to conceal their authorship identity in Internet communication. That is why the forensic analyses of Internet discourse have become a commonplace tool for law enforcement officers in Russia. Unfortunately, assessing the expertise of the person's authorship of the Internet message or text on a website is extremely subjective and usually demands special criminalistics training, skills and expert technology necessary to reveal clues about the author's
© Galyashina E.I., 2015
* Galyashina, Elena Igorevna — Doctor of Law, Professor, Department of Judicial Expertise of the Kutafin Moscow State Law University.
125993, Russia,Moskva, ul. Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya, 9.
individual speech features. Especial difficulties represent short text-messages because formal methods and statistic approach cannot be applied for the length limits (less than 1,000 words).
The exploitation of the Internet as a medium that can cause criminal activities has brought to life some actual legal and methodological problems occurring in forensic expert practice of the Russian language authorship identification via Internet-messages. These problems include some legal aspects of gaining evidence information spread through Internet (anonymous blackmail, fraud, terrorist, extremist, fascist, defamation, obscene messages, plagiarism etc.). Besides Internet-discourse which can be represented as dialog and monolog sentences, acquires stylistic characters of oral and written speech needs to be characterized in terms of formal language characteristics and demands a new approach to the forensic authorship expertise technique with detailed instruction on how to make the expertise of short texts and formulate the rule of decision (whether two or more messages were produced by one and the same other or the particular suspected one).
The scope of Internet-discourse analysis for authorship is evidently very wide, so the format of this article permits to illuminate only the most actual problems which require forensic investigation. The paper focuses on such points as: Internet as a medium of computer-mediated criminal communication, proper collecting speech evidence from computer-mediated communication, Russian language peculiarity of Internet-discourse authorship authentication, identification of suspects by features of written speech, principals of the forensic expert technique (based on Russian language short texts and messages).
Today's Internet is a medium that fosters criminal speech activity. Internet-user can easily view web-sites dealing with propaganda of extremist ideology, messages expressing radical ideas, promoting hate crimes, open advocacy of violence against specific groups of people, all sorts of drugs trading, bomb-making instructions, and obscenity. "With just a few keystrokes, an individual can access to all forms of pornography, bomb-making instructions and poison recipes, and plethora of extremist ideologies expressing everything from radical religious cults to clandestine organized crime groups... One of more interesting multimedia promotions that are found on the Internet arises from the ashes of Nazism and the far right"1.
Criminals utilize the ability of Internet to store information and make it available to everyone. Activists of radical extremist groups act anonymously publishing in Internet-medium their mission statements and credo which contain propaganda that
1 Taylor R.W. Digital crime and digital terrorism. New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2006. P. 222.
violates the basic human rights guaranteed by the Constitution of the Russian Federation. Members of organized criminal groups exchange net-messages acting on behalf different real or unreal people disguising their personality.
Using the computer to explore WWW, chat and exchange messages in virtual world gives a person a feeling of anonymity that allows doing what he or she would never do in real life. Law enforcement officers monitoring Web surfing and computermediated communication can built speech and language profiles on the communication habits of those who take part in discussions of web-forums, leave comments on the web-site, send messages, emails on behalf of another person, and specially disguise their identity in social nets. So the very first problem is to find out the identity of those who act under pseudonym or anonym in computer-mediated discourse and the second one is to tell one or more authors send messages on behalf of different nicknames. A lot of attention in authorship attribution has been traditionally focused on literary anonymous or doubtful texts. It appears that a text sample of relatively short size (i.e., less than 1000 words) is not adequate to represent statistic characters of author's style. Short computer-mediated messages are not the traditional object of Crimi-nalistics and traditional authorship attribution of Literature and Linguistics. So a new methodological approach to extract individual speech invariants and style markers sufficient for accurate author identification of computer mediated short message discourse is obviously needed.
Apparently computer data can be easily destroyed, deleted, edited or other way modified. As authorship's Internet forensics consists of a series of complex phases where the first step is to collect evidence appropriate to the court. Speech evidence needs to be carefully gathered and securely stored for further expert investigation. During this process, integrity of information obtained from different computer sources should not be compromise or altered at any way.
The technology of collection and preservation of electronic samples of Internet discourse in not widely known to the law enforcement community. So the next problem that occurs is the point of evidentiary collection of doubted or anonym (pseudonym) speech samples with traces of crime located in WWW for future forensic analysis. Technical specialists should conduct the special procedure of gathering evidence so that it would not be doubted in the court by the defense.
First of all, messages, web-site content, emails and other speech products must be contained in a physical medium. Anything (hard disk, flesh memory, optical compact disk, microchips, etc.) capable to store digital information may be used to preserve verbal evidence of committing crime actions with
E.I. GALYASHINA (E.H. faAMWUHa)
LEX RUSSICA
the help of Internet communication. But inadvertent mishandling of physical medium of digital evidence may destroy its evidentiary value. So the chain of custody2 must be maintained. The foundation testimony should permit to check how the evidence was collected, where it came from, who had the access to the evidence with notation of time and place, any changes, such as copying, removing or replacing any piece of information for analysis. That is why electronic speech evidence before placing it on the physical medium should be properly documented, and only then the physical container must be labeled and inventoried. For example, the specific procedure, recommended in the USA "by the National Institute of Justice3 to preserve the digital evidence for later analysis while maintaining its probable value"4.
Internet-mediated discourse associated with the criminal act must be collected in a manner that allows it to be presented in court. The person collecting the Internet-mediated evidence must take all possible measures to ensure that the chain of custody is documented, file with information validated by a hash, it container labeled so that the origin of that evidence can be determined at a later stage by reviewing that documentation. For the purpose of authorship attribution the questioned text samples might be additionally preserved being print from the screen of computer with documenting this procedure by a notaries or other officially authorized person.
Proper handling and documentation of incriminating in itself Internet speech production (e.g. fraud, blackmail, terrorist or extremist propaganda, etc.) with potential evidence value will provide the effectiveness of its final investigation in trial.
A computer-mediated Internet communication provoked a new form of discourse which integrates traditional features of oral and written speech. Language is no longer seen as merely carrier of information from one mind to another, but also as 'an essential dimension of the culture to which are ascribed most of the social values and representations on which collective exchanges and practices are based'5. Specificity of Internet communication genres causes new methodology problems of authorship attribution technology as Russian language rules are not fully applicable.
2 Black's Law Dictionary defines chain of custody: In evidence, the one who offers real [physical ] evidence... must account for the custody of the evidence from the moment in which it reaches his custody until the moment I which it is offed in evidence. [The] chain of custody is proven if an officer is able to testify that he or she took control of an item of physical evidence, identified it, placed it in locked or protected area, and retrieved the item being offed [in evidence] on the day of the trial. (Black's Law Dictionary. 6th ed. St. Paul, MN: West Publishing, 1990).
3 See:Technical Working Group for Electronic Crime Scene Investigation. Electronic crime scene investigation: A guide for first responders. Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice, 2001.
4 Taylor R.W. Op. cit. P. 291.
5 See: Marc E., Picard D. Social Interaction. Paris: PUF, 1989. P. 35.
In physical form, Internet speech is simultaneously ephemeral (temporal) and durable, occurs mostly in real time (in space), mostly visual (requires seeing) but may be oral (i.e., Skype-technol-ogy), quick, dynamic, social, and fragmentary. The properties that constitute Internet conversational written speech include its ability to carry on multiple interactions simultaneously with immediate feedback (in chartrooms), rich emotion expression (through emoticons and graphics), dynamic dimensions (through animation, hypertextuality), ability to frame and mountain messages, highly colloquial constructions and non-standard usage of words, introduction of novel features of grammar, vocabulary, spelling and punctuation6.
In the standard identification routine the examiner is given one or more written texts of the doubtful authorship and the text samples of one or more suspects. The task is to identify authors by comparing a disputed written text with a set of non-disputed written texts. The procedure of author recognition consists of the process of linguistic feature extraction and feature comparison of the language units that are separated from the sentences and abstracts. The dimension of linguistic profiling is added to text analyses.
Linguistics profiling has two parts: language indicators: regional and social dialect, age, gender, education, occupation and stylistic analysis: comparing the document's style with those of other documents written by possible suspects.
Stylistic analysis focuses on a writer's habitual speech features over which the author has little or no conscious awareness: patterns of clause embedding, use of parallel structures, mechanical errors, punctuation, discourse features and organization, print features (underlining, bolding, italicizing, etc.).
The compared texts become characterised by a set of lexical and syntactical language parameters adequate to characterise individual written speech style and habits of writing. The usage of a combination of linguistic features and hierarchically structured analysis in qualitative and quantitative manner is preferable.
To make the robust determination about the identity of the author of the doubted written text comparative statistic linguistic methods are used. Decision of examined author's sameness is based on the standard procedure of calculation and matching of the parametric description of the compared texts. The parameters are as follows: the index number of nouns, verbs and other parts of speech in the Russian language normalized to the whole number of words in text. Then the index of punctuation, orthographic, stylistic, and lexical and grammar mistakes is counted. Next the peculiarity of usage of Russian social and territorial dialect words and expressions is examined. Finally the id-
6 See: Galyashina E.I. Preliminaries in Forensic Speech Science. Moscow: STENCY, 2003. P. 77-94.
iolect units are analyzed. However speech habits like catch-phrases are unlikely to be of any value in statistical text examination.
But as it was mentioned Internet mediated messages are usually limited by their length. The average length of the sentence in a short message are about 8-9 words. The text sample itself does not increase 3-5 sentences. So forensic authorship research becomes focused on individual language competence, skill, and habits exhibited in the written speech communication. Statistical features become not valid. A sophisticated forensic authorship analysis must be based on regular and current usage of features being mostly unconscious to the user.
The expert's practice reveals that indications of the individual author style may be subdivided on general (common) lexicological, phraseological, syntactical, spelling, and individual stable speech habits, individual usage of definite languages means etc.
Clues of language individual skills are divided on spelling (stable incorrect writing of a word stable violation of a definite rule of a spelling), indications of punctuation skills (stable violation of a definite rule of the punctuation), peculiar, primary usage of definite signs of punctuation, partitioning of the text sample on paragraphs, sentences, and synthases.
Characters of lexicological and phraseological skills reveal themselves in usage of words in unusual senses and connections with in other words, in usage of social and territorial dialects, new created words, archaisms, etc.
Features of syntactical skills represent definite violations of peculiar usage of syntactical constructions. Features of stylistic skills represent a combination of e stylistic markers in lexicon and syntax.
In a course of authorship research the indications of formal — logical skills of written speech are also studied, including intellectual skills of perception of a reality, accentuations, arguments, rating, attitude to a subject of speech, etc.
Consequently, the main concern of forensic author identification methodology is to define an appropriate characterization of a text sample that represents clue marks of author's individual writing style.
The researches of texts with doubtful authorship as it is accepted in Russian forensic linguist science are conducted according to the historically grounded Russian criminalistics methodology by stages.
The first stage is the analytical stage of separate research of each introduced written text. It includes: study of the factors of a speech situation in which each of the investigated texts was created (subject, particular mission, stylistic membership, style and representing form of written speech, character of speech dialogue, addressee of the message, social relations connecting the writer and the addressee); study of general and individual features and indications describing skills of written speech of the author of each document.
The next one is the research of communicative and language construction of each of the introduced texts, during which the level of possession of language, on which one is, executed the text (degree of correspondence of the text to the rules of grammar and usage of words); level of stylistic culture (degree of correspondence of the used language means to norms, purposes, and characteristics of speech dialogue); personal speech abilities and skills of usage in the written speech form the language means, language competence and etc. are determined.
Finally the comparative or the synthesizing stage of research is conducted, in which one a rating and evaluations of the combination of the revealed features, its specificity and peculiarity is assessed. Matching of individual indications of written speech in researched texts, and also rating of conterminous and distinguishing (differentiating) indications of written speech in the compared written texts is conducted. Finally the conclusions are stated.
It is known that speech of the individual is developing together with the personality; it becomes different with development of its natural and spiritual forces. The speech features of the person depend largely on a social microenvironment, on a circle of speech communication in different spheres of public life, on variety of personal concerns, on one's educational level and background.
So what the linguistic features are to be analyzed in order to determine the author's identity in short text messages?
At the present moment in Russia forensic linguists usually use the following set of speech parameters on the lexical and grammatical levels of speech. Lexical analysis includes the evaluation of richness of active and passive vocabularies, correctness and accuracy of word usage of different functional styles, including words of limited or marked usage (official and colloquial, slang and jargon, dialectal or bookish, borrowed, obsolete, non-seman-tically used words and so on), frequency of individual preferences in usage of synonyms, repeated words and expressions, individual connotations and weakened meaning of words and idioms.
Grammatical analysis includes variability of models for sentence constructions, frequencies of usage of syntactic models, index of complexity of syntactic constructions, index of embedded and subordinated clauses, index of model words and expressions, quantity of verbs, adverbs, conjunctions and ratio to the quantity of nouns, adjectives, pronouns, specificity of communicative type of sentence (negation, preposition, exclamation or question), frequency of infinitive subject and object, participles and adverbial particles, individual verb compositions, specificity of word formation, peculiar usage of prefixes, affixes, suffixes, peculiarity
E.I. GALYASHINA (EM faAMWUHa)
LEX RUSSICA
of text composition, word order, sentence formation and so on. Besides the mentioned linguistic features are to be qualitatively and quantitatively estimated and evaluated to get their identification value. So the degree of features' variety and range of their usage must be born in mind.
Completing the analysis, the forensic expert generates a report describing what individual features were established, what author was or not identified. This report as any other evidence in Russian law does not have the predetermined force in courts and should be evaluated in the judicial process alongside with other evidences, being available in criminal case. However, very frequently other evidences do not happen. Therefore it increases a significance of the examination and responsibility of the expert for reliability and validity of the conclusions he makes.
The forensic examination of written texts including author's identification is very complex. It requires application of a universal complex of special knowledge from various sciences studying different forms of Russian written speech representation. The expert scheduling forensic authorship investigation usually specializes in the field of forensic applied linguistics, including the lexical and grammatical analysis, forensic stylistics, and Russian regional, social dialects, criminal and professional slang and so on.
In forensic expert's report on authorship examination a significant number of special scientific linguistic, mathematical, psychological etc. terms is usually used, the detailed description of complicated sophisticated methods of text analysis is stated; the listings from computer programs are resulted. The text of such expert's report is difficult for perception and evaluation by the participants of court examination. The crucial problem is the independent testing of the reliability and objectiveness of the employed forensic expert. Therefore the independent forensic linguists are often attracted by the lawyers for assistance in evaluations of a police expert's report; check of reliability and validity of the conclusions. Specialists help to determine, whether methods of the authorship analysis and the used algorithms have been correctly selected and conducted, speech phenomena correctly assessed as idiolect features and individual markers.
A number of questions are formulated. What is the identification significance of revealed linguistic features? Are they sufficient for identity or distinction of the authors? Could they be prompted, copied or imitated? What is the reliability of the decision-making procedure? What should be thoroughly assessed? Is the competence of the expert and the quality of a research sufficient?
The authorship analysis is robust only if it carried out by the sophisticated forensic linguist, who supplies the qualitative description of text with objective quantitative information.
It is also completeness and comprehensiveness, accuracy of methods and means, adequacy of completed techniques. Also it is observance of a sequence and specifications of the applied methods, skill of the expert to select, describe and evaluate correctly author identification features, correspondence of conclusions to delivered problems, validity of conclusions and so on. The major condition of correct author examination is the precise following certain rules accepted in forensic written speech examination. It is impossible to omit or to ignore one or several phases of the research routine.
The scientific validity and comprehensiveness of expert's report assumes validation of methods of the linguistics analysis of written speech. It is the check of selected linguistic characteristics, completeness of their description, and validity of distinguishing and conterminous features, sufficiency to make a decision about an identity or distinction (difference) of the authors.
The experts' report must be methodically and logically competent. Authentic scientific facts and objective arguments should confirm the conclusion about the author's identity or distinction (difference). Only in this case the conclusion of the expert can become the relevant evidence in Russian court examination of texts with doubtful authorship.
For robust and reliable forensic investigation it is essential to choose proper linguistic text parameters. It is known that identifiable individual parameters of written speech need to answer some demands. First of all the individual linguistic feature must have a high degree of variation from one text to another, and a combination of the used features should uniquely define the author habits and manner of word usage, grammatical models etc. Another demand is that the linguistic parameter should consistently occur throughout the texts of one functional style and should not be influenced by extra linguistics context. In general the most valid parameters must be resistant to disguise or mimicry, be available in most realisations of the written speech.
The investigations in spontaneously written Russian texts showed that mostly to the demands of forensic application correlate features, describing the realisation of word usage and syntactic structure the so-called individually preferable words and syntax within sentences. Figures of speech (the so called stylistic devices or rhetorical devices) are analysed to set the variety of author's techniques to give an auxiliary meaning, idea, or feeling. Thus words that diverge from their normal meaning, or phrases that have specialized meaning not based on the literal meaning of the words in it become informative. Individual stylistic devices can provide specific emphasis; bring freshness of expression, or clarity. Attention is given to fixed expressions — idioms, proverbs, catchphrases, anomalous or ill-formed collocations that represent meaningful choices of the authors. In Russian lan-
guage Internet-mediated discourse fixed expressions are comparatively frequent, although there are few extensive studies of their actual idiolect distribution. It should be pointed that in conversational Russian Internet discourse the fixed expressions may occur in individually exploited or truncated forms. "The text function of fixed expressions may be classified according to the way in which they contribute to the content and structure of a text. In the text under consideration, four functions are seen, according to whether the expression primary informs (conveys new information), evaluates (conveys speaker/writer opinion or attitude), modalizes (conveys speaker/writer's attitude towards the truth value of his/her utterance) or organizes and functions as a discourse signal. To these four functions may be added a fifth, situation-ally bound, typically found in spoken interaction, and typically lexicalized as a convention or closed-set turn: this covers fixed expressions that show a speaker's reaction to something in the extralinguistic situation, for example a greeting, valediction, apology, request or warning such as So long! Excuse me, A penny for them and Talk of the devil..."7.
Thus to make the reliable consideration about the identity of the unknown or doubtful author experts conduct both quantitative and qualitative methods and undertakes a comparative research of the unknown and suspected text samples. The decision of examined authors' sameness is based on the standard procedure of calculation and matching the linguistic descriptions of the compared written texts.
Author's literal capacities are the exact usage of the terms, skill of correct sentence constructions, expressing the conclusion, applying of methods of rational reasoning and argumentation, skill of series thinking, logic nature, and sequences of presentation of thoughts, grammar stereotypes, contents and depth of thought transmitted by verbal means.
It is known, that written speech (written text as product of speech) has system nature, different language levels, which patterns and units are
Bibliography:
1.
interdependent8. The system of errors in Russian texts derives some kind of a negative projection of a system of Russian language with hierarchy, intrinsic to structural levels. For examples, In Russian, capitalization is used very sparingly; names of week days, months, nationalities, languages, etc. are not capitalized. Therefore the author capitalizes only when he has to. Frequently occurring errors in capitalization in Russian may be assed as the individual speech habit of the author.
Some authors make their speech incorrect deliberately. Thus to imitate foreign accent incorrectly used noun cases and verb forms, incorrect declension (or a total lack of declension), incorrect gender agreement may be used. In Internet discourse deliberately made errors might be made to achieve a comical or funny effect. Thus grammar errors are mostly used to obtain a comic effect or to make a sentence sound unusual or unexpected. Word structure errors and spelling errors are used to achieve some special effect (i.e., expressing "affectionate feelings").
A forensic expert faces the methodological problems of choosing appropriate reliable method for a certain case, founding analyses on valid and reliable methods and techniques, using qualitative analysis and statistical methods to establish the significance of results, exploiting databases and linguistics corpuses9.
The democratization and reforming of criminal and civil legal proceedings in Russia has increased a significance of objective evidentiary base in crime investigation. Therefore it is so relevant the role of all court experts, including forensic linguistics in installation of an objective truth. The large liability requires further development of scientific and substantiated methods of the forensic authorship analysis of written speech.
It is hoped that the problems discussed here will contribute to the principle of scientific rigor underlying the credibility and acceptance of evidence submitted by authorship forensic experts in court.
Материал поступил в редакцию 15 января 2015 г
Advances in written text analysis / ed. Malcolm Coulthard.Routledge. — London; N-Y., 2005. P. 126. Bondarev, V.G., Sapharov R.A. The Matter of Legislative Definition of Political Activities in the Russian Federation // Sententia. European Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences. — 2013. — № 2. — P. 53-64. DOI: 10.7256/13393057.2013.2.10261.
Connecting Observation and Understanding. — Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1988. — P. 159-182.
Galyashina, E.I. Preliminaries in Forensic Speech Science. — Moscow: STENCY, 2003. — P. 77-94.
Levi, J. Language as evidence: the linguist as expert witness in North American courts // Forensic Linguistics. —
1994. — № 1. — P. 1-26.
Marc, E., Picard, D. Social Interaction. — Paris: PUF, 1989.
Taylor, R.W. Digital crime and digital terrorism. New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2006.
Technical Working Group for Electronic Crime Scene Investigation. Electronic crime scene investigation: A guide for first responders. — Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice, 2001.
7 Advances in written text analysis / ed. Malcolm Coulthard. Routledge. London; N.-Y., 2005. P. 126.
8 See: Labov W. The judicial testing of linguistic theory // Linguistics in Context: Connecting Observation and Understanding, Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1988. P. 159-182.
9 See: Levi J. Language as evidence: the linguist as expert witness in North American courts // Forensic Linguistics. 1994. № 1. P. 1-26.
E.I. GALYASHINA (Е.И. Галяшина) LEX RUSS^CA
СУДЕБНАЯ АВТОРОВЕДЧЕСКАЯ ЭКСПЕРТИЗА ТЕКСТОВ ИНТЕРНЕТ-КОММУНИКАЦИИ: ПРАВОВЫЕ И МЕТОДОЛОГИЧЕСКИЕ ПРОБЛЕМЫ
Галяшина Елена Игоревна — доктор юридических наук, профессор кафедры судебных экспертиз Московского государственного юридического университета имени О.Е. Кутафина (МГЮА). 125993, Россия, г. Москва, ул. Садовая-Кудринская, д. 9.
Аннотация. В статье рассматриваются некоторые актуальные правовые и методологические проблемы, возникающие в судебно-экспертной практике проведения судебной автороведческой экспертизы текстов Интернет-коммуникации. Контент Интернет-сайтов, сообщения по электронной почте, комментарии в блогах, переписка в чатах может содержать доказательственную информацию о многообразных правонарушениях, начиная от распространения оскорбительных, клеветнических материалов до вымогательства, угроз, распространения экстремистских материалов, пропаганды и незаконного оборота наркотиков и т.п. Установить личность автора криминогенных материалов и сообщений в Интернет-коммуникации возможно по особенностям его индивидуального стиля. Комбинаторика используемых слов и выражений, устойчивых словосочетаний, стилистических привычек могут, как отпечатки пальцев, оставленные на месте преступления, позволить идентифицировать анонима или преступника, скрывающего свою личность под псевдонимом. Судебная экспертиза письменных сообщений в Интернет-коммуникациях является сегодня одним из эффективных средств установления личности автора по письменной речи. Методы: судебно-лингвистический анализ письменной речи, судеб-но-стилистический анализ речевых особенностей Интернет-дискурса. Методология: криминалистика, судебная экспертология, судебное речеведение, судебная лингвистика. Проведение судебной автороведческой экспертизы по текстам Интернет-коммуникации на русском языке требует применения разнообразных специальных знаний, специальной подготовки эксперта и разработки новых методик, ориентированных на специфику речи в Интернет-коммуникации. Применяемые в настоящее время методы часто носят субъективный характер, поскольку тексты Интернет-сообщений малой длительности не пригодны для применения объективных, автоматизированных, статистических методов, требующих значительного объема исследуемого массива текстов. В этой связи актуальным является разработка методических подходов для установления автора по текстам малой длительности, со специфическими стилистическими чертами общения, опосредованного компьютерными технологиями в Интернете. В статье рассматриваются проблемы обеспечения собирания криминогенных сообщений в Интернете и их документирования в целях последующего экспертного исследования на предмет установления принадлежности одному или нескольким авторам по делам, связанным с плагиатом, оскорблениями, клеветой, распространением экстремистских материалов в Интернете и т.д. Акцентируется внимание на выборе методов анализа, этапах экспертного исследования и системы признаков, характеризующих навыки письменной речи автора текста на русском языке. Ключевые слова: судебно-экспертная практика, авторство, идентификация, экспертиза, Интернет-коммуникация, особенности речи, компьютерные преступления, сообщения, электронная почта, русский язык.
