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AI is becoming more common in digital forensics, but the biggest danger is people trusting it too much. Heather Barnhart discusses a framework that helps examiners assess when AI is appropriate, where it can assist with tasks like triage, and where it should not be used, while keeping trained human experts responsible for decisions.

Notes:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/heather-barnhart-cellebrite_ai-dfir-digitalforensics-ugcPost-7463670252950847488-b7s-/

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“The tool said” might be the fastest way to lose a jury. Recorded live at IACIS, we sit down with Stacy Eldridge and Becky Passmore of Parsing The Truth One Bite At A Time, two former FBI senior forensic examiners who build a true crime-ish podcast around one thing most shows ignore: the digital artifacts and the courtroom testimony that prove what happened.

https://parsingthetruth.com/

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Tool output can look authoritative while still being dangerously easy to misread, and we’ve both seen how fast that goes sideways when a case hits court. Live from the MSAB Digital Summit 2026, we walk through a simple principle that saves careers: an artifact is a clue, not a conclusion. We talk about how “artifact worship” happens, how to build real corroboration, and why multiple records on the same phone are not automatically multiple lines of evidence.

We also get honest about forensic reporting and peer review. Assuming “legal will catch it” is a trap, because attorneys and supervisors may not be able to validate the technical meaning of a timestamp, a parser decision, or an attribution statement. We share practical ways to write clearer digital forensics reports, verify tool parsing, and test your assumptions so you’re not learning hard lessons under oath. If you work mobile device forensics, this section is for you.

From there we shift into training and deep technical skills that are quickly becoming baseline: Android RAM acquisition and analysis, what kinds of artifacts can show up in memory, and why RAM can hold evidence you may never find in a file system extraction. We also unpack protocol buffers (protobuf) and the uncertainty that comes with app data when the .proto schema is missing, plus why that matters when AI and automation start “helping” with interpretation. We wrap with an ALEAPP update, a reminder that a portable tool report isn’t analysis, and a quick look at how standards like Daubert and Frye raise the bar for methodology.

Notes:

Brett Shavers Blogs:

It’s Not Artifact Worship When One Artifact Actually Changes the Case https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/its-artifact-worship-when-one-actually-changes-case-brett-shavers-nwi6c/

I Thought Legal Would Catch It. They didn’t. https://www.brettshavers.com/brett-s-blog/entry/i-thought-legal-would-catch-it-they-didnt

IACIS https://www.iacis.com/events/in-person/2026-orlando-training-conference/