Digital Communications, Evidence and "The Locardian Threshold”
The Locardian Threshold
Essay in Digital Warfare: Media and Technologies in the Russo-Ukrainian War. Zasanska and Ivanenko (Eds). Transcript Verlag 2025). pp. 351-354.
CKS Managing Director Mike Innes comments on his latest publication, digital technologies, historians, lawyers, competing standards of evidence, and the rule of law.
Citation: Innes, Michael A. "The Locardian Threshold." Chapter in Digital Warfare: Media and Technologies in the Russo-Ukrainian War. Zasanska and Ivanenko (Eds). Transcript Verlag 2025. pp. 351-354. URL: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783839475218-019/html.
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I enjoyed writing this piece, for two reasons. The first is that it reviews Matthew Ford’s new book, War in the Smartphone Age (Hurst, 2025). Ford teaches at the Swedish Defence University, writes compellingly about digital technologies, and for at least a decade now, we’ve been actively calling on each other to sanity check our respective research ideas and agendas. The second is that the book, Ford’s latest, takes a close look at smartphones, being a pervasive and ubiquitous communications technology, and how they’ve either thrown a wrench or breathed new life - you decide - into old debates about social distance and perpetrator-victim-bystander dynamics.
That’s the dovetail. My own preoccupations tend to fixate more pedantically on the historical record, and its infinite arrangement of prosaic little bits and pieces of past minutiae. Who did or said what? Did they have the resources to effect the communication they’re alleged to have broadcast? What were the specific resources and technologies at their disposal? When (when precisely!) did they have access to or control of those resources? What language, labels and ideas did they use in their communications? Why did these use those particular devices? What were their intended audiences, and what, most importantly, were the macro and micro effects of all that effort?
Historians tend to obsess about source provenance, quality and type. Like any good (or even mediocre) historian, I’m no exception. My work is deeply engaged with this dual track, the origins of a document and the information in it, and what each of those things mean. When I put it that way, it comes across as obscure. It probably won’t win over a mass audience, and my publisher will probably be tut-tutting as he reads this. Still, books like Kathy Peiss’ Information Hunters (OUP, 2019) and Joshua Hammer’s The Bad Ass Librarians of Timbuktu (Simon & Schuster, 2017) bring to life important, real-life tales of documents, books, and other historical evidence as loci of agency and control in trying times.
The Harvard historian and writer Jill Lepore is well known for the way she deals with the nature of “truth” and “evidence” as it was lived and as it was recorded. Doing those two things well and in parallel is something akin to a Michelin-star chef peeling an onion and making it look like high art. Truth and evidence: it’s almost impossible to invoke these two things and not bring to mind the point that Clio and the courts have a long and complicated relationship. History and law intersect in many ways. Today, their respective standards of evidence are at stake, and forensic science has become the arbiter of quality between the two - an assumed hierarchy of values that can’t survive without the rule of law.
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