Le persone scrivono più che mai con le loro tastiere e telefoni, ma le note scritte a mano sono diventate rare. Anche le firme stanno passando di moda. La maggior parte degli acquisti con carta di credito non li richiede più, e se lo fanno, di solito puoi semplicemente grattarne uno con l'unghia. L'antica arte della scrittura è in declino.

Questo segna un profondo cambiamento nel modo in cui comunichiamo, ma per un gruppo di esperti solleva anche una questione esistenziale. Gli esaminatori forensi della scrittura a mano autenticano le note e le firme scritte a mano, o le rivelano come false, analizzando le caratteristiche distintive della nostra scrittura. Poiché le persone scrivono meno a mano, l'esame della scrittura diventerà irrilevante?

Un recente rapporto del National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) suggerisce che la risposta è no, se il campo cambia per stare al passo con i tempi. Ma i tempi stanno cambiando in più di un modo, e il declino della grafia è solo una delle sfide con cui il settore dovrà fare i conti.

Come lo fanno gli esperti

Emily Will è un'esaminatrice di scrittura a mano certificata dal consiglio di amministrazione in uno studio privato in North Carolina. Ha esaminato le firme su innumerevoli assegni, volontà, atti e affidamenti. Ha ispezionato le cartelle cliniche per valutare se la firma di un medico possa essere stata aggiunta in una data successiva a quella indicata, forse dopo che è stata intentata una causa. Ha anche esaminato forme di scrittura più lunghe, come lettere minacciose o moleste e biglietti d'addio. Se l'apparente vittima di suicidio non ha scritto la nota, la polizia potrebbe avere un omicidio tra le mani.

Per valutare se un pezzo di scrittura è stato scritto da una persona in particolare, gli esaminatori hanno bisogno di qualcosa con cui confrontarlo, quindi raccolgono campioni di scrittura che sono noti per essere da quella persona. Il tipo di scrittura deve essere lo stesso, se una firma, scrittura corsiva, o stampa a mano. I campioni noti dovrebbero essere all'incirca dello stesso periodo della grafia in questione, perché la nostra calligrafia si evolve nel tempo. E avere più campioni noti da confrontare è la chiave, in quanto ciò consentirà all'esaminatore di considerare la variabilità nello stile di scrittura di una persona.

"Non sei un robot, quindi ogni volta che firmi il tuo nome, sembrerà diverso, " disse Will. "Questo è ciò che rende l'esame della scrittura così interessante."

I non professionisti potrebbero pensare che, poiché la maggior parte delle persone sa come scrivere a mano, praticamente chiunque può esaminarlo. Potrebbero presumere che l'esperto confronti cose come la dimensione, inclinazione e spaziatura delle lettere e le connessioni tra di esse. Infatti, gli esaminatori lo fanno. Ma guardano anche oltre quelle caratteristiche della scrittura per segni più sottili di come è stata fatta la scrittura.

"Dì che vuoi falsificare una firma, " disse Will. "Potresti essere in grado di eseguire un buon facsimile. Ma la "O" è in senso orario quando dovrebbe essere in senso antiorario? Ci sono ascensori di penna dove non dovrebbero esserci? Quando firmi il tuo nome è tutta memoria muscolare. Ma falsificare una firma richiede deliberazione. La penna rallenta. Si ferma e si avvia ." Quelle esitazioni si presentano al microscopio come minuscole pozzanghere d'inchiostro.

"Non è tanto come appare la firma, ma come è stato eseguito è importante, " disse Will.

Ecco cosa porta Will nella sua borsa da viaggio:una lente da gioielliere, un piccolo microscopio ottico e un microscopio digitale portatile. Una torcia elettrica. Un micrometro di carta, per misurare lo spessore della carta. Un laptop e uno scanner portatile. Una fotocamera che si aggancia ai suoi microscopi. "E francamente, " lei dice, "Uso molto il mio iPhone in questi giorni."

La pratica di Will si estende al campo più ampio dell'"esame di documenti in discussione, " che comporta l'esame di un intero documento alla ricerca di segni di frode. Nel suo laboratorio, dispone di apparecchiature per analizzare carte e inchiostri e visualizzarli sotto diversi tipi di luce. Alcuni inchiostri che sembrano identici alla luce del giorno appaiono nettamente diversi sotto gli infrarossi. Identifica le cancellature, alterazioni e cancellazioni e rivela la scrittura rientrata, le impronte lasciate sui fogli di carta sotto la nota scritta.

Ma la maggior parte del lavoro di Will riguarda la scrittura a mano e le firme, e ce ne sono molti meno in questi giorni. Le frodi sull'incasso degli assegni sono diminuite ora che gli stipendi e gli assegni della previdenza sociale sono depositati direttamente. Le cause per negligenza medica comportano un minor numero di firme poiché le cartelle cliniche elettroniche sono diventate la norma. Anche le celebrità hanno notato il cambiamento. In un articolo di opinione del 2014 sul Wall Street Journal, Taylor Swift ha scritto, "I haven't been asked for an autograph since the invention of the iPhone with a front-facing camera."

Enough handwriting still passes under Will's microscope to keep her in business. Ma, lei dice, "If I were a young person starting out today, I might consider cybersecurity."

A Roadmap for Staying Relevant

The field of forensic handwriting examination may have trouble attracting new blood. A report from NIST earlier this year found that the median age for handwriting examiners is 60, compared with 42 to 44 for people in similar scientific and technical occupations. Quel rapporto, Forensic Handwriting Examination and Human Factors:Improving the Practice Through a Systems Approach, was published by NIST, but was written by 23 outside experts, including Will.

To increase recruitment, the report recommends replacing the unpaid apprenticeships that have been the traditional route of entry into the field with grants and fellowships. The report also recommends cross-training with other forensic disciplines that involve pattern matching, such as fingerprint examination.

The "human factors" in the report's title refers to a field of study that seeks to understand the factors that affect human capability and job performance. In forensic science, these include training, comunicazione, technology and management policies, to name just a few.

Melissa Taylor, the NIST human factors expert who led the group of authors, said that the report provides the forensic handwriting community with a road map for staying relevant. But the threat of irrelevance doesn't come only from the decline in handwriting. Part of the challenge, lei dice, arises from the field of forensic science itself.

"There is a big push toward greater reliability and more rigorous research in forensic science, " ha detto Taylor, whose research is aimed at reducing errors and improving job performance in handwriting examination and other forensic disciplines, including fingerprints and DNA. "To stay relevant, the field of handwriting examination will have to change with the times."

Among other changes, the report recommends more research to estimate error rates for the field. This will allow juries and others to consider the potential for error when weighing an examiner's testimony. The report also recommends that experts avoid testifying in absolute terms or saying that an individual has written something to the exclusion of all other writers. Anziché, experts should report their findings in terms of relative probabilities and degrees of certainty.

These recommendations are consistent with findings in a landmark 2009 report from the National Academy of Sciences. Called Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States:A Path Forward, that report said that "there may be a scientific basis for handwriting comparison, " but that there has been only limited research on its reliability.

Knowing When to Not Make a Call

Children used to learn handwriting in school by copying letters and phrases from books that contained models of ideal penmanship. Different copybooks had different styles, and an expert could often tell from a person's handwriting whether they were trained in the Palmer style, the Spencer style, or something else. By identifying a specific copybook style, an examiner could quickly narrow the range of potential writers.

Many children no longer learn cursive writing in school, and whether this helps or hinders handwriting examination is unknown. "It might actually make handwriting more identifiable because it allows people to develop their own individual styles of writing, " said Linton Mohammed, author of the widely used textbook Forensic Examination of Signatures, and a co-author of the NIST-led study.

D'altra parte, it might make the task harder by depriving experts of a system for classifying writing styles. This is one reason why research on error rates is needed. The way people learn to write has changed, and error-rate studies can show whether handwriting examiners are successfully adapting to those changes. "We claim to be good at this, " Mohammed said. "But how good are we really?"

Several studies have attempted to answer this question by testing whether experts are more competent at handwriting examination than people with no training. The results reveal a great deal about both handwriting examination and human psychology.

In many of these studies, participants are shown pairs of signatures and asked to determine whether they are both by the same person or if one is a fake. Calculating overall error rates from multiple studies is difficult due to differences in study design. But consistently, across studies, both experts and novices made roughly the same proportion of correct decisions, according to a 2018 metastudy led by Alice Towler at the University of New South Wales, Australia. The novices, però, made a much higher proportion of errors, while the experts more frequently declined to make a call. If a signature lacked complexity or was otherwise difficult to compare, the experts would more readily find the evidence inconclusive. This ability to defer judgment is critical to reducing errors in forensic science.

The tendency of novices to rush to judgment in cases where experts defer reflects a quirk of human psychology. People with limited knowledge or expertise in a subject often overestimate their own competence. This is called the Dunning-Kruger effect, for the psychologists who first described it. In the case of handwriting, people might be particularly susceptible. Dopotutto, pretty much anyone can produce handwriting. How hard can it be to examine?

But error rate studies show that at least some experts recognize their limitations when faced with a difficult task. "I've been doing this for 30-plus years, and I realized early on that there's a lot that we don't know, " Mohammed said. "So we have to be very careful in reaching our conclusions."

The End of Handwriting Examination, or a New Beginning?

Like Emily Will, Mohammed has examined many wills, deeds and trusts. He has also analyzed ransom notes, threatening letters, and one hit list. Being based in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the tech boom has minted many fortunes, he has also examined many stock-option grants and prenuptial agreements.

Although Mohammed started his career with the San Diego County Sheriff's Department, today he is in private practice. In his current home base of northern California, lui dice, there are no government laboratories that still examine questioned documents. This reflects a nationwide trend—a report from the Department of Justice found that only 14% of publicly funded crime labs did their own questioned document examinations in 2014, down from 24% in 2002.

Those numbers may mean that the field is consolidating rather than disappearing. If smaller labs can no longer support in-house experts due to a diminishing caseload, they can farm out work to private sector experts like Will and Mohammed. Allo stesso tempo, larger federal labs, including the FBI Laboratory and the U.S. Army's Defense Forensic Science Center, continue to maintain questioned document units. This is in part because their focus includes international terrorism, where handwritten documents are still a source of valuable intelligence, and in part because the United States is a big place. a livello nazionale, crimes involving handwriting still occur frequently enough that federal labs need to keep experts on staff.

When asked if handwriting examiners will soon become irrelevant, one federal expert said that as long as greed and fraud exist, there will be a need for handwriting examiners.

When asked the same question, Mohammed noted that changing technology did not doom the field in the past. "When the ballpoint pen came out, people said, "That's the end of handwriting examination, '" he said. People mostly stopped using fountain pens, but handwriting examination survived the transition.

Melissa Taylor, the NIST expert, agrees that handwriting examination is still a needed skill and will remain relevant—if the field successfully adapts to changing expectations around research and reliability. And if the new report, which counts many leading handwriting experts among its authors, è qualche indicazione, the needed changes may already be underway.

"There will still be documents. There will still be signatures, " Taylor said. "And most people don't print stickup notes on their laser printer. They scribble them on the dashboard before running into the bank."

Some things will never change.