March 1, 2025 Dabblers v. Professionals " If you do the job in a principled way, with diligence, energy, and patience, if you keep yourself free of distractions, and keep the spirit inside you undamaged… then everything you do will be suffused with justice." -Marcus Aurelius I recently had a discussion with a colleague or two while attending the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS) annual meeting in Baltimore, MD.   These discussions revolved around the observation that digital forensics, unlike any other forensic discipline, attracts all kinds of “practitioners” who think they can do the job to an professional, expert-level degree (and tell their clientele they can do the job), but in reality, they are lacking many of the baser elements to practicing a true forensic science discipline.   There are several reasons for this, but first, I think it’s important to draw the corollaries between digital forensics and other “hard” forensic sciences.   For the purp...