According to researchers, full-disk encryption is hampering police forensics.

The authors of the report suggest there are some things law enforcement can do, but they all must happen prior to a drive being buttoned up by encryption. Specifically, they say that law enforcement should stop turning computers off to bring them to another location for study, doing so only causes the need for a password to be entered to read the encrypted data. Also, in some cases, doing so causes the data to be automatically destroyed. Fortunately, there are some tools forensics experts can use to gather data if it sits untouched, such as copying everything in memory to a separate disk. The team also suggests that law enforcement look first to see if the drive has been encrypted before scanning it with their own software, as doing so will likely result in a lot of wasted time.