Criminal network investigation is all about hypertext

Criminal network investigations in policing, intelligence, and journalism face a number of challenges that can impact their success or failure. Some challenges, like political decisions to increase or reduce investigation resources, or amendments to criminal law that provide investigators with more wide reaching options for survaillence and interrogation are primarily in uenced by jurisprudence researchers and social scientists. Other challenges, such as those related to information about a criminal network, network investigation processes, and human factors during investigations can be supported by software tools to assist criminal network investigators. Based on the information, process, and human factors challenges, we formulated a hypothesis for useful tool support, and analyzed problems related to each challenge. Our response to these problems was a list of requirements that guided the development of new processes, tools, and techniques with the aim of reducing the impact of the challenges and support the hypothesis. We propose hypertext as the key technology to bridge investigators and tools, to provide integrated support of information synhesis and sense-making, and to increase the capabilities of investigators by leveraging man-machine synergies.