Peter Sommer

Peter Sommer combines academic and public policy work with commercial cyber security consultancy, with a strong bias towards legal issues.

His first degree is in law, from Oxford University. He has recently retired as a Professor of Digital Evidence at Birmingham City University and is now a Visiting Professor there and a Visiting Professor at de Montfort University. Until 2011 he was a Visiting Professor in the Department of Management at the London School of Economics and before that a Senior Research Fellow. He has consulted for OECD, UN, European Commission, UK Cabinet Office Scientific Advisory Panel on Emergency Response, UK National Audit Office, Audit Commission, and the Home Office. He was a Specialist Advisor to the old Trade and Industry Select Committee covering e-commerce and crypto and to the Joint Committee on the Draft Investigatory Powers Bill (now an Act). During its existence he was the joint lead assessor for the digital speciality at the Home Office-sponsored Council for the Registration of Forensic Practitioners and has advised the UK Forensic Science Regulator and the Home Office on communications data.

For over 30 years he has acted as an expert in many important criminal and civil court proceedings in the UK and international courts usually where digital evidence has been an issue including Official Secrets, terrorism, state corruption, assassination, global hacking, DDoS attacks, murder, corporate fraud, privacy, immigration issues, allegations against the UK military in Iraq, the International Tribunal on the Lebanon, “revenge porn” on social media, serious organised crime, IPT issues and child sexual abuse.

He is the author, pseudonymously, of The Hacker’s Handbook, DataTheft and The Industrial Espionage Handbook, and under his own name, Digital Evidence, Digital Investigations and E-Disclosure (IAAC) now in its 4th edition

He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.