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Ride the Lightning: Electronic Evidence 
An electronic evidence and computer forensics blog by noted author, lecturer and consultant Sharon Nelson.
Post Frequency: 1/day Last Entry: November 19, 2009 at 11:00:00 Recent Entries: 363
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Keep Track of Ever-Changing State E-Discovery Laws and Rules
Posted on November 19, 2009Keeping up with changes in state e-discovery laws and rules is a royal pain. One of the best resources available is provided for free by Applied Discovery. A brief description of each state?s status is included along with direct links...
Computer forensics and virtualization
Posted on November 17, 2009In response to a query I posted last week about computer forensics and virtualization, Clay Calvert of Metrostar Systems was kind enough to write. The procedure he outlines below is essentially what we do at Sensei: ?I?ve had to test...
Cloud Computing Security
Posted on November 16, 2009In response to last week's post about cloud computing, I received the following guest post from Heather Axworthy, who is a self-described "Network Security Diva" (alas, I fear my diva days are over) and who has an aptly-titled blog called...
The Future of Search in EDD Rocked the House
Posted on November 11, 2009When I first saw that Jason Baron, a man of boundless energy and rapid-fire humor, was putting together a full day on the future of search in e-discovery, I wondered if he could pull it off. A whole day? I...
Cloud Computing, Virtualization and Computer Forensics
Posted on November 10, 2009The world of computer forensics has never been a stable one. Few worlds morph as fast as ours. There has been much discussion recently about the impact of cloud computing and virtualization on computer forensics. I have, dare I say...
Seventh Circuit's Electronic Discovery Pilot Program
Posted on November 04, 2009While watching the Sedona Conference webinar on the Cooperation Proclamation today, it struck me that I had never talked in Ride the Lightning about the Seventh Circuit's Electronic Discovery Pilot Program. This program, whose first phase is October 1, 2009-May...
Sedona Conference Webinar on the First Year of the Cooperation Proclamation
Posted on November 03, 2009Anyone interested in e-discovery may want to attend the next Sedona Conference ?Voices From the Desert? webinar focusing on the first year of the existence of the Cooperation Proclamation. The seminar will be held on Wednesday, November 4th at 1...
Pizza party supporting the eDiscovery Institute on November 12
Posted on November 02, 2009A guest post submitted by Joe Howie on behalf of the eDiscovery Institute: "I?ve enjoyed reading your blog and thought you might want to blog about the upcoming 5th Annual Pizza After Party in support of the eDiscovery Institute to...
Arizona: Public Records Law Requires Disclosure of Metadata
Posted on October 30, 2009To my knowledge, this is the first time that a state Supreme Court has ruled that its public records law requires the disclosure of metadata. The Supreme Court of Arizona issued this opinion on October 29, 2009 in the Lake...
The Future of Search: Free CLE in McLean, Virginia
Posted on October 28, 2009Our friend and colleague Jason Baron, the Director of LItigation for the National Archives and Records Administration, wrote me recently to let me know about a free CLE that sounds terrific. It is called "E-disovery: The Future of Search" and...
HAPPY DAYS ARE (ALMOST) HERE: DOCUMENTATION RE: CONTENTS OF A PST FILE
Posted on October 27, 2009My team of computer forensics technologists was indeed happy today when they spotted a blog posting by Paul Larimer, Group Manager, Microsoft Office Interoperability. Paul says that Microsoft will be releasing documentation for the PST file format. While his blog...
ONE TERRABYTE OF DATA ON A FINGERNAIL-SIZED CHIP
Posted on October 23, 2009Those of us involved in electronic evidence certainly took note of a story earlier this week. Computerworld reported that engineers from North Carolina State University have created a material that could hold a terrabytes of data on a fingernail-sized chip...
UVA LAW SCHOOL OFFERS PRACTICAL E-DISCOVERY COURSE - WAHOO!
Posted on October 20, 2009Last week, we had the pleasure of lecturing at the University of Virginia's School of Law during a special two-week program. The course was the brainchild of our friend and colleague John Tredennick, who led the course, which included a...
MORE ON THE BLUE CROSS/BLUE SHIELD DATA BREACH
Posted on October 15, 2009In a recent post, I discussed the massive Blue Cross/Blue Shield data breach, which elicited a thoughtful e-mail from Rob Rost. I was apparently less than clear in my post, because I agree with Rob that policies and technology must...
EDRM DEVELOPMENTS ANNOUNCED AT THE MASTERS CONFERENCE
Posted on October 13, 2009The Posse List reported today on EDRM developments announced at The Masters Conference. EDRM now has a new website - and has announced progress in each of its eight projects. There has been a certain amount of chatter on the...
BLUE CROSS BLUE SHIELD DATA BREACH: MORE THAN 800,000 DOCTOR RECORDS
Posted on October 12, 2009Blue Cross Blue Shield is now reviewing its polices after confirming that a stolen employee laptop contained unencrypted personal information (including name, address, tax ID, and physician identifier number) on almost every doctor that accepts Blue Cross Blue Shield...
TAKE YOUR DEMONSTRATIVE EVIDENCE TO COURT ON YOUR KINDLE DX
Posted on October 09, 2009I love my Kindle DX. But, silly me, I was thinking about all the books, newspapers and magazines I could now carry around on my Kindle, especially on planes, trains and cruise ships. This morning, I met with one of...
THE PACIFIC LEGAL TECHNOLOGY CONFERENCE: ELECTRONIC DISCLOSURE IN CANADA
Posted on October 07, 2009Vancouver is such a beautiful city. Getting to watch the fog lift over the mountains as the sun came out each morning over the harbor was a glorious sight. Watching seaplane after seaplane land and take off was fun too...
FTC SAYS BLOGGERS MUST DISCLOSE PAID REVIEWS
Posted on October 06, 2009We've all heard reports about bloggers shilling for companies for money, products or services. After a while, one learns to separate the wheat from the chaff, but the Federal Trade Commission has decreed that enough is enough. The FTC hadn't...
UK PERMITS SERVICE VIA TWITTER FOR ANONYMOUS POSTER
Posted on October 05, 2009BBC News reported on October 1, 2009, that the British High Court ruled that an injunction might be served on an individual who made anonymous posts on Twitter. The user was posing as Donal Blaney, a right wing blogger. U.K....
IPHONE APPS TRACK SEX OFFENDERS: THE RISE OF SMARTPHONE APPS
Posted on October 01, 2009Courtesy of a CNN report: The Offender Locater application for the iPhone, which tracks the residences of sex offenders, has made the top 10 most widely downloaded iPhone apps (more than a million downloads) since its debut in June. Photos...
PORN SURFING RAMPANT AT NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Posted on September 29, 2009According to a report in The Washington Times, employee misconduct investigations, often involving porn surfing, have overwhelmed the National Science Foundation (NSF). The problems are reportedly so extensive that they have caused the agency's inspector general to cut back on...
WHAT MAKES A DRUG RAID A BLAST? WII BOWLING! STRIKE!
Posted on September 25, 2009I talked earlier this week about how video evidence was becoming more and more prominent as a form of electronic evidence. Just to prove my point, we now have video evidence that police officers from three jurisdictions in Polk County,...
WHO'S BEEN VIEWING YOUR GMAIL?
Posted on September 23, 2009Thanks to my colleague and friend Laura Calloway for this guest post: There's been a lot of buzz lately about G-mail flaws and hacks. If you're curious about whether someone has been able to gain access to your account without...
COMPUTERIZED SWIPE CARDS LEAD TO ACCUSED YALE MURDERER
Posted on September 21, 2009The tragic death of Yale graduate student Annie Le, just before her wedding day, caught the attention of the nation. Now it appears that investigators had a bead on her possible murderer from the very beginning. Bloomberg reported that the...
FACEBOOK-ADDICTED THIEF LEAVES HIS IDENTITY BEHIND
Posted on September 18, 2009As I say constantly, you can't make this stuff up. The world of electronic evidence can be wickedly funny. Case in point: Pennsylvania resident Jonathan Parker (19) burglarized a home in Martinsburg, W.V. nabbing a couple of diamond rings in...
NEW YORK TIMES DUPED BY HACKERS
Posted on September 16, 2009The New York Times is wiping egg off its venerable face after being duped by hackers over the weekend. Readers of the online newspaper were assaulted by the classic pop-up ad advising them that their computers were infected and offering...
GUEST POST FROM THE MAC LAWYER ON IPHONE INSECURITY
Posted on September 14, 2009Thanks to our friend and colleague Ben Stevens for putting up a post today on The Mac Lawyer blog in response to John's previous post on Ride the Lightning about the insecurity of the iPhone. I've reprinted Ben's post below...
CELL PHONE SPYWARE: A READER ASKS "CAN THEY REALLY DO THAT?"
Posted on September 10, 2009Unfortunately, yes. Cell phone spyware can use satellites to constantly transmit your physical location to the person who is spying on you. It can transmit every e-mail and text message you type. It will allow the person who is spying...
REFLECTIONS ON THE 2009 SOCHA-GELBMANN E-DISCOVERY SURVEY
Posted on September 08, 2009The Labor Day weeked provided some reading time and I finally caught up with the summary of the 2009 Socha-Gelbmann e-discovery survey in Law Technology News (the full survey costs $5000, which is half the cost of one of our...
THE EDD GOLD RUSH IS OVER
Posted on September 03, 2009?Greed is good.? No one could intone those words with the sincerity of Michael Douglas playing ?Gordon Gekko? in the movie Wall Street. Indeed, Wall Street continues to operate on that premise with distressing results for all of us. But...
NEW JERSEY MUDDIES THE WATERS: CAN EMPLOYERS READ EMPLOYEE'S E-MAIL?
Posted on September 02, 2009Just when you think you know the law, the landscape changes again. On July 10th, a New Jersey appellate court issued what many commentators regard as a rogue decision in Stengart v. Loving Care Agency, Inc., which may be downloaded...
A PODCAST TO CALENDAR: GRIMM AND ALLMAN ON RULE 502
Posted on August 31, 2009On Friday, September 4th, my friends at ESIBytes will be recording a special podcast on Rule 502 with Federal Magistrate Judge Paul Grimm of Maryland and Tom Allman, a well known national e-discovery expert who is very active in The...
9TH CIRCUIT TAKES A HATCHET TO "PLAIN VIEW" IN GOVERNMENT ESI SEIZURES
Posted on August 28, 2009Some decisions just make you want to waive pom-poms and cheer. This is one of them. In the August 26th decision in U.S. v. Comprehensive Drug Testing, Inc.,a search warrant had been granted in a federal investigation into steroid use...
AIR FORCE ONE PHOTO ALTERATION: RACISM ON DISPLAY
Posted on August 25, 2009We lecture frequently on the alteration and fabrication of electronic evidence. Alteration of photos is quite common, and often done for humorous or satiric effect. But a recent case of photo alteration put racism on display. Someone had altered a...
CLOUD COMPUTING FOR LAW FIRMS? THINK IT THROUGH
Posted on August 24, 2009Sam Glover recently published on Lawyerist a post answering the question, "Can you trust Google Apps (and other SaaS)? If you read the post, in which Sam says that he uses Google Apps and isn't worried about security, privacy or...
NUIX: THE NEW COOL KID ON THE BLOCK IN OUR E-DISCOVERY TOOLKIT
Posted on August 21, 2009John found a new EDD product that he really likes, so here's his guest post: "I just love running across something that it spot on. Yesterday, we met with Morgan Sheehy of Nuix. They have a product that appears to...
HOW TO SCREW UP YOUR OWN CASE: TEXT A TESTIFYING WITNESS
Posted on August 17, 2009On August 11th, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Scott Silverman, after earlier declaring a mistrial, dismissed with prejudice a civil fraud lawsuit involving the sale of a condo tower. What made this decision interesting is his reason: a boss sent text messages...
DO YOU NEED TO CAT-PROOF YOUR COMPUTER?
Posted on August 13, 2009Obviously, my recent post about the cat who allegedly downloaded child porn caught fire out there. Because this thread has made me laugh too, let's take one more comment, from friend and litigator Dave Ries from Pittsburgh. Dave managed to...
COMMENT RE: THE CAT DOWNLOADED THE CHILD PORN POST
Posted on August 12, 2009Re: Monday's post about the porn-downloading cat . . . . thanks Steve! And best to Adrian, who John and I interviewed last year for an ABA article about e-discovery in the U.K. Dear Mrs. Nelson, One of your blog...
NORTH CAROLINA EXEMPTS COMPUTER FORENSICS EXPERTS FROM PI LICENSING
Posted on August 11, 2009I'm going to salute North Carolina tonight by eating some Carolina-style barbecue. On July 24th, the Governor signed into law a bill which will, effective October 1, 2009, exempt anyone engaged in computer forensics or computer/network security from the private...
MAN BLAMES CAT FOR DOWNLOADING CHILD PORN: WHO COULD MAKE THIS STUFF UP?
Posted on August 10, 2009Ok, the Defendant lives in Florida, so maybe he just had too much sun . . . The Sun Sentinal reported that Keith Griffin explained to detectives that the 1000 or so child porn images found on his computer were...
CATCHING BAD GUYS WITH THEIR OWN CHILD PORN
Posted on August 07, 2009Law enforcement in Germany hit upon a very effective way of catching child predators. Having in their possession videos of a man molesting young children, sometimes violently, they decided to release photos from the videos, clearly showing the man and...
EMPLOYERS MAY VIDEO EMPLOYEES UNDER NARROW CIRCUMSTANCES
Posted on August 05, 2009The Califonia Supreme Court issued an interesting opinion on August 3rd in Hernandez v. Hillsides, Inc. The ruling takes a sensible, practical approach, finding that employees have a reasonable expectation of privacy at work, but that hidden video surveillance may...
COPS ALTER DASH-COM VIDEO TO FRAME DRIVER IN FLORIDA
Posted on August 03, 2009The Blue Wall seems to be holding fast. If a cop does something wrong, the brotherhood protects him. There are exceptions of course, but Hollywood, Florida is not exactly leading the way in police integrity with a story I heard...
COPS ALTER DASH-CAM VIDEO TO FRAME DRIVER IN FLORIDA
Posted on August 03, 2009The Blue Wall seems to be holding fast. If a cop does something wrong, the brotherhood protects him. There are exceptions of course, but Hollywood, Florida is not exactly leading the way in police integrity with a story I heard...
REPLY TO: GOOGLE TO THE (E-DISCOVERY) RESCUE?
Posted on July 31, 2009I am including below a reponse I received to the original post referenced above: ********** Google has solved search in the public Internet however applying the same technology to the enterprise is a different story. In order to index the...
U.K. HIGH COURTS RULES GOOGLE NOT LIABLE FOR DEFAMATORY SEARCH RESULTS
Posted on July 30, 2009In a case that has attracted a lot of global attention, a British High Court ruled that Google is not the publisher of defamatory words that appear in its search results. Google's U.S. and U.K. operations were sued in England...
IPHONE SECURITY? A COMPLETE MISNOMER
Posted on July 27, 2009My Vice President, John Simek, has been foaming at the mouth about the iPhone's lack of real security. He finally got agitated enough to write a post for me. So if you've implemented the iPhone in a business environment ....
SCRUBBING A MAC'S METADATA: A BIT OF A PUZZLER
Posted on July 23, 2009It's always good to be humbled by conference attendees and have to admit, "I don't know." That happened last week as we were lecturing for the Virginia State Bar and someone asked, "How do you scrub metadata on a Mac?"...
HOW GOOD LAWYERS SURVIVE BAD TIMES
Posted on July 20, 2009Today I exert a blogger's privilege of departing from the primary subject in order to let readers know that my new book, How Good Lawyers Survive Bad Times, is now available for pre-order from the American Bar Association. Written with...
HOW E-DISCOVERY IGNORANCE CAN AFFECT YOUR BOTTOM LINE
Posted on July 16, 2009You can always trust Craig Ball to be on point and pithy. His latest post, about a hapless EDD rookie lawyer who had her $300/hour requested fee reduced to $200/hour by the court because of her EDD inexperience. Read the...
GOOGLE TO THE (E-DISCOVERY) RESCUE?
Posted on July 15, 2009My thanks to Alan Goldberg for suggesting that I note a recent blog post from E-Discovery Bytes dealing with the Google Search Appliance 6.0 (GSA). The post discusses the potential value of the GSA in reducing electronic discovery costs by...
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING? COMPUTER FORENSICS AND THE MELENDEZ-DIAZ CASE
Posted on July 13, 2009There has been a lot of chatter on the airwaves about the June 25th decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts (the case can be found here). Is it worth all the hullaballoo? Not in my judgment,...
AUTHENTICATING ELECTRONIC EVIDENCE: TEXT MESSAGES AND E-MAILS
Posted on July 09, 2009I read with interest Josh Gilliland's recent post on the admissibilty of text messages in State v. Loye, 2009 Minn. App. Unpub. LEXIS 660, 1 (Minn.Ct.App. 2009), in which the court ruled there was no error when the lower court...
DIVORCE ATTORNEYS SUED OVER E-MAILS GLEANED FROM SPYWARE
Posted on July 01, 2009I've been waiting for this case. It was just inevitable that attorneys (as opposed to spouses) would one day be sued for using evidence obtained from spyware. A two million dollar lawsuit has been filed in Tennessee against the law...
THE RIAA VERDICT: DID THE JURY SMELL A WEASEL?
Posted on June 30, 2009By now, everyone has heard about the Jamie Thomas-Rasset case, in which the jury awarded the RIAA nearly $2 million for the illegal download of 24 songs. I was quick to say that the decision was outrageous - and in...
GOVERNOR SANFORD'S E-MAIL: WHY DO FOLKS DO THIS TO THEMSELVES?
Posted on June 25, 2009You would think people would get it by now. Don't e-mail anything you don't want to see in the New York Times, on a billboard on I-95, or in St. Peter's hands. The minute I heard that S.C. Governor Sanford...
ELECTRONIC EVIDENCE IN EVERYDAY CASES: ESI BYTES PODCAST
Posted on June 24, 2009Yesterday, John and I had the pleasure of doing a podcast with Karl Schieneman of JurInnov, Ltd. Karl has been very successful at rounding up EDD lumanaries forJurInnov's ESI Bytes podcasts. Readers should check out his impressive roster of guests...
WEST VIRGINIA ISSUES METADATA OPINION
Posted on June 23, 2009On June 10th, the West Virginia Lawyer Disciplinary Board issued an opinion on metadata entitled, What is Metadata and Why Should Lawyers Be Cautious? A bit of an odd title, I thought, but it basically plows the usual ground. It...
EXCELLENT E-BOOK ON MEET AND CONFER AVAILABLE
Posted on June 22, 2009I am always (and usually with good cause) skeptical of vendor publications. But the recent "Considering Meet and Confer" issued by Orange Legal Technologies is a gem. I loved the "Meet and Confer Checklist" - and there are other useful...
LAWYER E-FILING GOOFS HAVE CATASTROPHIC RESULTS
Posted on June 19, 2009A recent Law.com article warned lawyers to be wary of the appellate pitfalls of e-filing. In one case, the law firm meant to file a notice of appeal, but mistakenly filed the wrong document. Oops. The court had no mercy...
SECURELY LOCKING DOWN PDFS REDUX
Posted on June 17, 2009Last week, I posted advice from John about how to securely lock down a PDF document. It was good advice. Except that a vendor, who wants you to PAY for a secure lock-down wrote me in part: "I would like...
ELECTRONIC EVIDENCE AND DISCOVERY: WHAT EVERY LAWYER SHOULD KNOW NOW
Posted on June 15, 2009It's always a pleasure to salute fellow authors who undertake the daunting subject of e-discovery and do it credibly. Those interested in EDD should take a look at the new book Electronic Evidence and Discovery: What Every Lawyers Should Know...
COMPUTER TECH FINDS CHILD PORN ON YOUR COMPUTER - NOW WHAT?
Posted on June 12, 2009You're probably going to jail. It was a long recess in the proceedings for Kenneth Sodomsky, a Pennsylvania man who had been charged with possession of child pornography after a computer repair technician found the contraband on his computer back...
ATTENTION LAWYERS: HOW TO PROPERLY SECURE A PDF DOCUMENT
Posted on June 10, 2009The following guest post was authored by colleage and friend Dave Bilinsky and first published by the Law Society of British Columbia. Since we see this issue a lot in cases where electronic evidence is altered, it seemed worthy of...
VIOLATION OF BAIL TERMS BY DRINKING: POSTED ON FACEBOOK
Posted on June 08, 2009Once again, electronic evidence on social networking sites makes the headlines. Erika Scoliere, 20, had been charged with reckless homicide and aggravated DUI after a July 2007 accident in South Elgin, Illinois that killed a motorcyclist. As a condition of...
CASTLEQUEST RELEASES "DISCOVERING THE DIGITAL RECORD"
Posted on June 03, 2009In my mailbox: An announcement that on June 1st, the CastleQuest Discovery Library published Discovering the Digital Record - The Questions for Examination by Jeffrey Ritter and David Gaston. The price of the book is $129.95. Furhter information is available...
ONLAW TRIAL TECHNOLOGIES FOUNDED BY BRUCE OLSON
Posted on June 02, 2009Readers of this blog may know Bruce Olson as our co-author of The Electronic Evidence and E-Discovery Handbook (ABA, 2006). He is also a long-time friend and colleage within the Law Practice Management Section of the ABA. I was delighted...
COURTROOM TECHNOLOGY TIPS FROM THE BENCH
Posted on May 29, 2009After identifying some court technology "potholes" yesterday, I had the opportunity to meet with one of the judges from the Fairfax General District Court. He saw courtroom technology through the prism of his court - and honestly, it was a...
COURTROOM TECHNOLOGY: POTHOLES TO AVOID
Posted on May 28, 2009Took a little personal time off from blogging . . . saw "Star Trek" which I happily rate a six on a five star scale. Wore my Enterprise earrings, of course. Back to Earth and the subject at hand. We...
NEW YORK SAYS WIFE MAY USE HUSBAND'S E-MAILS AT TRIAL
Posted on May 20, 2009A New York judge recently ruled that an estranged wife could introduce copies of her husband's e-mail as evidence of her allegations that he was lying about his income. The husband was not overly smart, to be sure. Apparently, he...
U.K. COURTS RAP POLICE OVER CHILD PORN SEARCH WARRANTS
Posted on May 16, 2009Another one of those "you can't make it up" stories from the sometimes bizarre world of computer forensics. It is not exactly a secret that many in law enforcement are not thrilled with criminal defense attorneys or their experts. In...
FUTURE OF FLIGHT: DREAMING OF THE DREAMLINER
Posted on May 12, 2009One of the nice things about a blog is that you can take a break from your subject once in a while. So the subject today is aviation. At least it is technology-related. Last week, we spent a couple of...
MOROCCAN WHISKEY AND COMPUTER FORENSICS
Posted on May 11, 2009Well, of COURSE there's a connection. It was the night before John and I were to speak for the Oregon State Bar near Portland and we were going out to dinner with our friend (author/lawyer/lecturer) Bill Gibson. On the recommedation...
WEB 2.0 JURY INSTRUCTIONS IN ARKANSAS
Posted on May 08, 2009On April 21st, an Arkansas judge issued an unusually high tech jury instruction: "... during your deliberations, please remember you must not provide any information to anyone by any means about this case. Thus, for example, do not use any...
HACKER LIFTS 8 MILLION VIRGINIA PATIENT RECORDS, DEMANDS RANSOM
Posted on May 06, 2009If only it were a movie. Then again, it probably will be a movie, a cable movie at least. On May 5th, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported that a hacker had broken into the computer network of the Virginia Department of...
STARVATON DEATH REVEALS FORGED ELECTRONIC EVIDENCE
Posted on May 04, 2009There are so many among us who depend on social services to monitor their well-being. But when one of those services routinely forges evidence of having made home visits before regular audits, it may be time to scrutunize an entire...
COMPUTER FORENSICS IN THE HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY - HELP?
Posted on May 01, 2009Computer forensics is computer forensics. That I can write about. However, I've been asked to write a chapter for a nurse's association about computer forensics in the healthcare industry. I'm not entirely stumpted - there have been some intrusions, some...
A CALL FOR VOLUNTEERS FOR TREC 2009
Posted on April 29, 2009Recently, I had the pleasure of being on an EDD conference faculty with Jason Baron, the Director of Litigation for the Office of the General Counsel at the National Archives and Records Administration. Apart from his depth of knowledge, rapid-fire...
BLUE GRASS AND HOT BROWN: EDD IN KENTUCKY
Posted on April 27, 2009Last Friday, we presented one of our most popular seminars, "Electronic Evidence in Family Law," for the Louisville Bar Association and the Kentucky chapter of the American Association of Matrimonial Lawyers. It was a sophisticated audience, almost all of whom...
GPS EVIDENCE LEADS TO MURDER CONVICTION
Posted on April 24, 2009Shyanne Somers was just 12 years old. She was supposed to babysit for the children of George Ford, Jr., but his wife Cindy returned home early and she wasn't needed. So George drove her home. He told police that he...
MORE ON EDD ANALYTICS FROM EQUIVIO
Posted on April 21, 2009Thanks to Amir Milo, the CEO of equivio, who wrote with respect to my recent posts on the use of analytics in EDD. Amir said: "As a player in this domain (and with no wish to promote any specific product),...
EDD: STARS OVER TEXAS AND LAWYERS AS PARTICLES...
Posted on April 20, 2009Last week?s EDD conference in Houston was a great success, thanks to the hard work of the Texas State Bar staff, our speaker/host Craig Ball, and a star-studded lineup that included Browning Marean, Ralph Losey, Jason Baron, Brandon Leatha, Judge...
HOW TO GET BLOG TRAFFIC: THREE WAY SEX AND SEX WITH ALIENS
Posted on April 14, 2009Recently, we began to get weekly blog stats from Ligit. Among other things, it shows the terms that bring folks to Ride the Lightning. As you might imagine, most of the searches are predictable: Computer forensics, EDD, TECHSHOW, EDD vendors,...
HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM
Posted on April 13, 2009I am very happy to be lecturing at a Texas CLE in Houston on Wednesday. The problem, Houston, is a sinus infection compounded by an ear infection - and the voice of The Frog Princess. Just got started on antibiotics...
EDD ANALYTICS IN PLAIN ENGLISH
Posted on April 09, 2009As we saw yesterday, Jeffrey the lawyer was having a tough time with the technical description of EDD analytics. So Rob Robinson of Orange Legal Technologies graciously went back and tried out a new non-technical version of his earlier note,...
ONCE MORE, IN ENGLISH: ANALYTICS IN ELECTRONIC DISCOVERY
Posted on April 08, 2009In reply to yesterday's guest post by Rob Robinson, I received a comment from Jeffrey Reed, a lawyer in the Philadelphis area: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreyreedesq What particularly struck me about his comment is that we in EDD often don't do a great...
CONSIDERING ANALYTICS?
Posted on April 07, 2009Just returned from ABA TECHSHOW, and now surrounded by piles and piles of documents glaring at me accusingly. So it is with great pleasure that I welcome this guest post from Rob Robinson of Orange Legal Technologies. Analytics in EDD...
TECHSHOW IN THE HOME STRETCH
Posted on April 03, 2009Thank heavens, just one more session to present at - and it's always low key on Saturday morning with so many folks sleeping in (not an option for speakers, lamentably). There was a full house at this morning's "Electronic Discovery...
TECHSHOW REPORT: MONETASUITE TO CAPTURE E-MAIL AND MS OFFICE TIME
Posted on April 02, 2009Courtesy of the nice folks at MonetaSuite, a number of bloggers (including John and I) had a very nice dinner at Gioco, where we were treated to a demonstration of this new product. Moneta captures e-mail and Microsoft Office time...
RAMPING UP FOR ABA TECHSHOW
Posted on April 01, 2009Through the power of Web 2.0, I suspect John and I will meet more folks than ever before at ABA TECHSHOW - a very pleasant thought. Though John is a certified forensic technologist, he is often pulled over to the...
BOOKS TO SHOP FOR AT ABA TECHSHOW
Posted on March 30, 2009As I prepare to head for ABA TECHSHOW this Wednesday, I thought it might be helpful to list some of our newest titles, so you have a chance to use the $10 book coupon that all attendees will receive when...
DEJA VU: VENDOR CODE OF COMPETITION
Posted on March 27, 2009I guess I'm exercising the eternal right of women to change their minds. Having declared this thread closed, I received a thoughtful response to my March 11th post that deserved the light of day. So, herewith: Sharon, This is a...
HAMMURABI'S CODE OF E-DISCOVERY
Posted on March 25, 2009Once again, it helps to have a sense of humor in this business. Thanks to CaseCentral for passing this along. I always liked the "river dunking test" of determining guilt. Anyone for reinstituting the test for Wall Street execs? E-mail:...
THE ULTIMATE COMPUTER FORENSICS TOOL
Posted on March 23, 2009From the folks at DISKLABS. We always say when we lecture that folks want a simple "Find All Evidence" button. This comes close. :-) E-mail: snelson@senseient.com Phone: 703-359-0700 http://twitter.com/sharonnelsonesq
COMPARATIVE MARKETING IN EDD
Posted on March 18, 2009In reply to yesterday's post, I received the following comment from Rob Robinson, the Vice President of Marketing for Orange Legal Technologies: "Concerning the comment on ?any marketer worth his/her salt? ? I would suggest that when ?Firm C? uses...
HOW DO SMALL EDD FIRMS GET THE WORD OUT?
Posted on March 17, 2009In yesterday's post, there was a comment from Mr. John Smith. A reader who wishes to remain anonymous wrote to rebut something that John said: Mr. John Smith wote: ?Any marketing professional worth their salt should be capable of defining...
WHAT READERS SAID ABOUT AN EDD VENDOR CODE OF COMPETITION
Posted on March 16, 2009As promised, here are some of the replies to my last posting: Sharon, Thank you for yesterday?s post (Vendor Code of Competition) ? and the team at Orange Legal Technologies fully agrees with the synopsis thoughts in the post. We...
VENDOR CODE OF COMPETITION: WHAT DO YOU THINK?
Posted on March 11, 2009A reader asked me to post the following for comment. Please reply privately to my e-mail address and I will post your reply if desired. And because I know I will be asked, I do not permit comments because I...
SOCIAL NETWORKS: AN AVALANCHE OF EVIDENCE
Posted on March 10, 2009This just makes my day. Theglobeandmail.com has just reported that (according to Nielsen) one in every eleven minutes spent online is spent on a social networking or blogging site. Consider the veritable avalanche of electronic evidence that will result, much...
HOW CAN YOU BEAT FREE? E-DISCOVERY SUMMIT
Posted on February 25, 2009It is Christmas in February. I just received a very nice invitation from the folks at BrightTALK for all Ride The Lightning readers. Yes, ok, I know other bloggers probably got the same offer. Still very nice. BrightTALK is hosting...
LOVING LOSEY: RALPH'S NEW EDD BOOK
Posted on February 23, 2009No, I haven't read the book yet, but I love it in advance because everything Ralph writes is colorful, engaging, thought-provoking and backed by expertise. The name of Ralph's new book is Introduction to E-Discovery: New Cases, Idea and Techniques...
WANT TO BE AN AUTHOR FOR THE ABA? FIND OUT AT TECHSHOW
Posted on February 20, 2009A bit off-topic today, but the American Bar Association's Law Practice Management Section publishes a lot of books and (coming soon) digital monographs. If you are an aspiring author, or an established one looking for a new outlet, this may...
AN INVITATION TO EDD AT TECHSHOW
Posted on February 18, 2009Come one, come all. And save some money by signing up by February 28th at www.techshow.com. John and I traditionally lead an attendee dinner at TECHSHOW, so please sign up to come with us - or at least come up...
EDD IN ABA LPM: CAN YOU TRANSLATE THAT?
Posted on February 16, 2009Well, a few of you can. But for those who cannot, the subject is Electronic Data Discovery in the American Bar Association's Law Practice Management Section. I am composing this in Boston at the ABA's Midyear meeting. By the time...
CUTTING EDD COSTS IN THE U.K.
Posted on February 12, 2009I am always happy to hear from Ian Henderson, a noted computer forensics technologist in the U.K. We had the pleasure of interviewing Ian for an ABA article last year and emerged as ???friends across the pond.??? Ian wrote me...
LEGALTECH 2009: LESS BOOZE, MORE BUSINESS
Posted on February 11, 2009I didn't make it to LegalTech this year, but I've been in touch with a number of friends who attended and their impressions have been pretty much the same. I also received an insightful Technolawyer post written by Warwick Sharp,...
DOOM AND GLOOM IN EDD
Posted on February 10, 2009Everyone in computer forensics and EDD shook their heads ruefully last week when it become public that Onsite3 had filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy and was to be acquiried by Integreon. There was a lot of buzz at LegalTech about...
INACCESSIBLE ESI: WHAT ARE THE COURTS SAYING?
Posted on February 05, 2009My friend and colleague David Isom writes terrific poetry. So I have to say that reading his recent article in the Federal Courts Law Review was not nearly as much fun as reading his poetry! That aside, it was very...
MICHIGAN SAYS YOU NEED A SECURITY CERTIFICATION TO BE A PI
Posted on February 04, 2009This recent computer forensics listserve posting says it all. Has Michigan lost its collective mind? This sort of protectionism is just plain nuts. If you are in Michigan, write to Adam. Take the recent ABA resolution (reprinted below) that says...
NEW MURDER TRIAL ORDERED WHEN JURY SEES "REDACTED" VIDEOTAPE
Posted on February 03, 2009Virginia has had its share of problems with courtroom videotapes. First, as I reported a few days ago, we had a videotaped reenactment that was, to put it mildly, somewhat less than accurate. And now we have a case where...
FORMER FANNIE IT CONTRACTOR INDICTED FOR PLANTING MALWARE
Posted on January 30, 2009John and I do a lot of lecturing on IT security. Like harpies, we repeat over and over "as soon as someone is terminated, cut their access." Seems as though someone at Fannie Mae forgot to do just that. Rajendrasinh...
INACCURATE VIDEO REENACTMENT SHOWN IN MURDER CASE
Posted on January 29, 2009Ryan Frederick may well be guilty of the murder of a police officer during a marijuana raid on his home. But I was appalled to read that a video reenactment of the night of the murder, shown in court, was...
CAROLINA IN THE MORNING: BUBBA AND BIG WALLY
Posted on January 27, 2009Regretfully, we are no longer in South Carolina. Our travels took us to Myrtle Beach and our beloved Charleston, where we heartily recommend Planters Inn as a charming, affordable, centrally-located hotel and its Peninsula Restaurant for a wonderful meal...
ELECTRONIC DISCOVERY, GRC AND RIM: HUGE KNOWLEDGE GAPS
Posted on January 22, 2009Kahn Consulting, in collaboration with ARMA and other organizations, has released a survey entitled GRC, E-discovery and RIM. One of the findings from the survey: "Less than one quarter of organizations surveyed believe that their employees understand their [governance, risk...
MICHIGAN ADOPTS E-DISCOVERY RULES
Posted on January 19, 2009Back to the salt mines after a 10 day Panama Canal cruise. There was a norovirus outbreak aboard- happily, we stayed healthy. Though perhaps we wouldn't have left so much money in the ship's casino if we'd been quarantined in...
GOOGLE STREET VIEW SOLVES KIDNAPPING
Posted on January 14, 2009Law enforcement in Massachusetts did some nifty work recently finding a girl who had allegedly been kidnapped by her grandmother. Electronic evidence can be found anywhere and these two colleagues put Google Street View to a new use. They obtained...
DEFENDING ELECTRONIC MAIL AS EVIDENCE: NEW BOOK
Posted on January 12, 2009A new book will be released by CastleQuest on January 15th, entitled Defending Electronic Mail As Evidence: The Critical E-Discovery Questions. John and I had the opportunity to have lunch with author Jeffrey Ritter, who was kind enough to share...
MD5 COLLISIONS: REAL PROBLEM OR RED HERRING?
Posted on January 09, 2009Among the computer forensics crowd, or those who follow the field, the subject of MD5 collisions always brings folks to a fever pitch, with some insisting that these collisions are a real problem and others saying, basically, "pish posh." John...
FOLLOWING ELECTRONIC EVIDENCE ISSUES ON TWITTER
Posted on January 07, 2009I promise to leave this subject soon, but there was so much response to my last blog posting, it seems as though many people would like to get to know Twitter. It is an excellent way to get EDD and...
SHARON CATCHES THE TWITTER BUG
Posted on January 05, 2009And yes, it burned half a day. Poof. Hours had vanished. I feel as though I am standing on a magic carpet, willing it to fly. I am following good pal Rob Robinson to this uncharted land. Watching Rob use...
A TRIANGULATED VIEW OF EDD
Posted on January 02, 2009Always a pleasure to highlight the work of a friend. Rob Robinson has come up with a listing of the EDD top 20, using the results of three key electronic discovery landscape documents, the Sixth Annual Socha-Gelbmann Electronic Discovery Survey...
MARYLAND SPIES ON "FRINGE PEOPLE"
Posted on December 31, 2008What, you might reasonably ask, are "fringe people?" A wooly-headed Thomas Hutchins, a former Maryland State Police Superintendant, somehow defined this as people who wish to disrupt the government, a chilling distinction not to be found in the United State...
THE "WHATEVER" CASE: GUTMAN V. KLEIN
Posted on December 29, 2008"Whatever. I told him whatever. I did whatever I felt right to do, whatever.? These were the evasive and unintentionally comic words of a witness in Gutman v. Klein (Oct. 15, 2008), surely one of the most egregious spoliation cases...
BRIGHT YELLOW SUITCASE SCREAMS "SEARCH ME!"
Posted on December 24, 2008As the holidays approach, I had a number of very serious electronic evidence postings that were possibilities. Much too serious for the season, I finally decided. My friend Ross Kodner was kind enough to send me some light-hearted moments in...
MORE STATE RULES ADDRESSING ELECTRONIC EVIDENCE
Posted on December 22, 2008Hard to keep up these days. Just when we have some sense of what all the new federal rules mean in practice, we are all scrambling to make sure we know what is going on in the states. Arkansas, Iowa,...
LOSEY LETS LOOSE ON KROLL
Posted on December 19, 2008You have to love a guy who self-effacingly acknowledges that he is a smart-aleck. Ralph Losey's e-Discovery Team blog is always a good read, but I especially enjoyed his December 15th post reviewing a recent listing by Kroll OnTrack of...
AUSSIE MEMO: PUT SHRIMP ON BARBIE, SERVE LEGAL NOTICE ON FACEBOOK
Posted on December 17, 2008G?day mates. Ah, those Aussies ? always up to mischief, these descendants of convicts. At first I thought it was someone having a bit of fun, having had perhaps a bit too much grog at the local billabong and concocting...
DATA RECOVERY HELPS CONVICT RAPIST
Posted on December 15, 2008At the worst moments, technology sometimes chooses to fail us. On December 11th, it was reported that the recovery of data from a damaged DVD helped to convict a California man of multiple rapes. Michael Barnes was never a poster...
BLACK EYES FOR LAW ENFORCEMENT: MISHANDLING OF ELECTRONIC EVIDENCE
Posted on December 12, 2008The need for more law enforcement training in the handling of electronic evidence is acute. This week has brought us more than our usual share of bumbling and fumbling from our friends in blue. This week?s harvest included: A police...
REMOTE SPY SOFTWARE GIVEN REPRIEVE BY COURT
Posted on December 10, 2008On November 21st, I reported on the temporary restraining order that the Federal Trade Commission had secured against the sale of Remote Spy software. Things have changed since then, and the CEO of CyberSpy software, Tracer Spence, wrote to ask...
YOU'LL SHOOT YOUR EYE OUT! AND OTHER RUMINATIONS FROM JAMAICA
Posted on December 08, 2008Only a complete fool would be in Jamaica composing a blog post. Enter the fool. I tried to be helpful and open our champagne on our final night in Jamaica, but John immediately forbid that, intoning one of his favorite...
GETTING OFF THE ?START? LINE: EDD FIRST STEPS
Posted on December 03, 2008For some reason, many small to mid-size businesses are struck with instant paralysis when confronted with a litigatin hold. There is much to be done - and quickly - but inertia seems to set in with the apprehenion. It seems...
DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT: AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION . . .
Posted on December 01, 2008As anyone connected with litigation readiness knows, many of the horrors of electronic discovery would vanish if only clients would manage their documents and e-mail, thereby reducing the volume of data and making the remainder easier to search. John Heckman,...
WILL SOMEONE PLEASE SAVE THESE PEOPLE FROM THEMSELVES? THE ABYSMAL STATE OF REDACTION IN THE U.S. MILITARY
Posted on November 26, 2008I didn?t know whether to laugh or cry when I saw a recent Army draft intelligence (definitely a misnomer) paper on potential terrorist uses of technology. Mind you, some of the subject matter absolutely bears study. It is certainly plausible...
UNFILTERED ORANGE: TAKE A BITE
Posted on November 24, 2008Readers are always asking me about my favorite electronic discovery resources. Some time back, I announced the debut of "Unfiltered Orange," a weekly compilation of news posts related to EDD published by Orange Legal Technologies. Now that I have enjoyed...
THE DEVIL DEFROCKED: TRO GRANTED AGAINST CYBERSPY SOFTWARE
Posted on November 21, 2008On November 17th, the Federal Trade Commission announced that it had secured a temporary restraining order against a Florida company accused of peddling spyware. At the request of the FTC, a U.S. district court in Florida issued a TRO against...
SURPRISE WITNESS: A METROCARD
Posted on November 19, 2008In today?s New York Times, an unexpected witness (a MetroCard) made an appearance. Every time we think we?ve seen every possible form of electronic evidence, something else comes along. In May, Jason Jones was arrested in connection with a fatal...
WHAT WE?VE GOT HERE IS A FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE: THE DIGICEL CASE
Posted on November 17, 2008From across the pond, courtesy of friend and colleague Ian Henderson, comes a landmark British decision in Digicel et al v. Cable & Wireless, et al. The parties got themselves in Dutch with the judge in traditional fashion. In the...
FROM THE IVY COVERED WALLS: IS THE DISCOVERY PROCESS BROKEN?
Posted on November 14, 2008This week, we had the opportunity to speak at the George Mason School of Law and George Washington University. Casting aside my abject horror at the fact that these students seem to get younger each year, they are a sharp...
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: GUIDANCE SOFTWARE AND ACCESS DATA
Posted on November 12, 2008Like so many others, I?ve been watching the tango between Guidance Software and Access Data with interest. Access Data, which is privately held, had offered to buy all of Guidance?s outstanding stock for $4.50 a share in early October. On...
STALKING PORNOGRAPHY IN THE WORKPLACE
Posted on November 10, 2008When you do computer forensics, you see the computers of folks who spend more than half of every workday viewing pornography. Having pornography on computers at work is every employer?s nightmare. Hostile environment actions are only the tip of the...
SHERIFFS WHO SEND US CHILD PORNOGRAPHY
Posted on November 07, 2008Not for the first time, yesterday we received child pornography via FedEx from our attorney client, who had been given it by a sheriff?s office in Virginia. It was on a CD marked ?Sterile.? In our world, that means no...
PAPER BALLOTS VS VOTING MACHINES: NO CONTEST
Posted on November 05, 2008Yesterday, John and I were amazed to find paper ballots available at our polling place - we've been using voting machines with touch screens for years. We were given the choice: "paper ballot or voting machine?" We looked at each...
FRAT BOYS IN W.V. ? SPOOFING E-MAIL GOES MAINSTREAM
Posted on November 03, 2008Still in W.V., but now watching black bears on a mountain top instead of lecturing. Much more serene. And no, this post really isn?t about ?frat boys? ? in fact, they are law school associates who simply, by their own...
EDD?S GRIM REAPER: THE FLOUNDERING ECONOMY
Posted on October 31, 2008Once again, we are on the road lecturing. We took a break from a warm and enthused West Virginia audience and had lunch with some of our faculty colleagues who follow the electronic evidence arena, including good friends Ross Kodner,...
NO ?MAGIC LAMP? - RUNNING HASH VALUES CONSTITUTES A SEARCH
Posted on October 30, 2008Amazing how many times child pornography cases end up making law. It has happened again, this time in Pennsylvania in U.S. v. Crist (M.D. Pa. October 22, 2008). Bottom line, law enforcement ran child porn hash values against a forensic...
HOW DO I AUTHENTICATE A GOOGLE EARTH PHOTO?
Posted on October 29, 2008After the electronic evidence has been gathered, getting it admitted in court can be a fearsome headache. You would THINK that there would be some fairly standard rules that a reasonable lawyer could follow. You?d be way off the mark....
VOTING MACHINES: IT?S NOT A BUG ? IT?S A FEATURE
Posted on October 27, 2008With the election so close, it was timely to read recently about the faux pas committed by voting machines. For years, I?ve been preaching that these machines are NOT reliable ? and Lord knows, the students at Princeton have busy...
ONLINE DIVORCEE JAILED AFTER KILLING VIRTUAL HUBBY!
Posted on October 24, 2008Well, that?s a stopper of a headline, isn?t it? In Japan, they take their virtual worlds seriously. Of course, they can?t quite charge you with murder for anything that happens in the virtual world, but the electronic evidence in this...
FROM THE MAILBAG: A LARGE GRAIN OF SALT
Posted on October 22, 2008In a recent post, I reported on the release of a new litigation hold and e-discovery study from CGOC and Huron Consulting Group. In response, I received an interesting e-mail from a reader who preferred not to be named. A...
WHAT LAWYERS NEED: BRAIN DEAD SIMPLE EDD REVIEW
Posted on October 21, 2008I have commiserated with many of my colleagues over the absence of a user-friendly EDD review tool for small to mid sizes cases. I never knew exactly how to describe it ? until I had pleasure of having breakfast at...
LITIGATION HOLDS: WHAT ARE THE BIG GUYS DOING?
Posted on October 16, 2008When I lecture, I always point out the obvious: when your spinach is sending people to hospital and your cattle, who can?t stand up but you kill them anyway and send hamburgers to market that kill people, you are probably...
FULBRIGHT & JAWORSKI 2008 LITIGATION TRENDS SURVEY
Posted on October 14, 2008This is always one of my favorite surveys. Lots of wheat, little chaff. And this year, it gave me good news. Since I make my living from the litigation business (and new case filings were down this year) and since...
MD5 COLLISIONS . . . THE ODDS ARE AN "UNDECILLION"? WHO KNEW?
Posted on October 13, 2008Guess I struck a nerve with the recent MD5 collision posts. Lots of mail - here?s one more, reprinted by the kind permission of my close friend Craig Ball, who is always a generous colleague. My husband/partner John can keep...
OF MD5 COLLISIONS AND TRAIN WHISTLES
Posted on October 10, 2008Why train whistles? Today we had two ?firsts? on the lecture circuit. We were in Winchester, Virginia ? a charming place, home to the annual Apple Blossom Festival, and a warm, wonderful audience. This was the first time we have...
COMPARING APPLES AND ORANGES: THE COST OF E-DISCOVERY
Posted on October 08, 2008The price of e-discovery is making law firms and their clients crazy. Everyone bemoans not only the high costs, but the unpredictability of the costs. Orange Legal Technologies is not the first EDD company to try to come up with...
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT: PALIN'S HACKER CHARGED
Posted on October 08, 2008It has just been reported that David Kernell (20), of Knoxville, TN has been charged with accessing Governor?s Palin?s Yahoo! e-mail account without authority. See my previous blog post for details of the hack. Kernell is an economics student at...
MD5 COLLISIONS ? ARE THEY REAL? A PRACTICAL THREAT?
Posted on October 06, 2008There seems to be a lot of confusion over the validity and use of MD5 hashes, especially as it relates to electronic discovery. In a previous post, I mentioned that identical files will have the same hash value. What about...
HE?S BAAACK! MITNICK DETAINED BY FEDS
Posted on October 03, 2008On September 16th, former famed hacker and social engineer Kevin Mitnick was detained by customs agents in Atlanta after returning from a trip to Columbia. Since his release from prison eight years ago, Kevin has been squeaky clean, but for...
NOT WITH MY LAPTOP, YOU DON?T: SENATOR FEINGOLD LEADS THE CHARGE
Posted on October 01, 2008Most Americans would be appalled to know that a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agent can explore your laptop at will and without probable cause, having it confiscated if it pleases the agent so the laptop can be explored by...
FACEBOOK HITS HOME IN GRUNDY, VIRGINIA
Posted on September 30, 2008So here, as promised, is my report from Grundy, Virginia and the Appalachian School of Law. Our student tour guide described Grundy as 9 miles long and ½ mile wide. Looks to be about right. Last night when we arrived,...
DO IDENTICAL FILES EVER HAVE DIFFERENT HASH VALUES? AH . . . NO
Posted on September 29, 2008Before I get to the title question above, I have to tell you that we are in W.V., where (could I make this up?) the front page of The Dominion Post has a headline reading ?Charge dropped against man accused...
UPDATE TO THE HACK OF PALIN?S E-MAIL
Posted on September 25, 2008A federal grand heard evidence against David Kernell, the son of Democratic Tennessee State Rep. Mike Kernell, in the hacking of Governor Sarah Palin's e-mail. It failed to return an indictment, but there is an ongoing FBI investigation and subsequent...
RULE 502 BECOMES LAW
Posted on September 24, 2008On Friday, September 19, 2008, the President signed into law S. 2450, adding new Evidence Rule 502 to the Federal Rules of Evidence. For further information about the implications to the electronic evidence world of this rule regarding the inadvertent...
FOUNDATIONS OF DIGITAL EVIDENCE BY GEORGE L. PAUL
Posted on September 22, 2008I want to thank my friend and colleague George Paul for waking dormant brain cells that I thought Captain Jack had killed off long ago. George is a true scholar, and reading his new book, Foundations of Digital Evidence (ABA...
YOU TUBE TASER VIDEO: THE 11TH CIRCUIT SHOULD BE ASHAMED
Posted on September 19, 2008My brother is a cop. I am part of the extended family of cops who worry constantly about what might happen to the person in uniform that they love. But there?s no free pass for being a cop ? no...
GOVERNOR PALIN?S E-MAIL HACKED: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT FOR BOTH SIDES?
Posted on September 18, 2008Hardly new, hacking into someone?s e-mail. But when it is a Vice Presidential candidate, it attracts attention. First and foremost, this action was clearly illegal and cannot be condoned. A group called ?Anonymous? claimed responsibility for the hack, and the...
WEBCAM STRIPTEASES: THE GIFT THAT BACKFIRES
Posted on September 17, 2008There seems to be a growing and incomprehensible (to me) phenomenon of ladies young and old filming themselves doing a striptease (or worse) as a gift to their boyfriends/husbands. So why does someone doing computer forensics know this? Because men...
YOUR MISSION, SHOULD YOU DECIDE TO ACCEPT IT . . .
Posted on September 16, 2008Apologies for the brief hiatus. I have just returned to work after tending to the storybook wedding of one of my daughters. Though I feel as though I?ve been hit by a freight train, I?m back. From the mailbag: A...
FINALLY ? RULE 502 PASSED BY HOUSE
Posted on September 12, 2008Things don?t exactly move fast in Congress. It was a relief to those in the electronic evidence world that the House of Representative passed Rule 502 (S. 2450) on September 8th. As the House version is identical to the version...
FROM THE MAILBAG: HOW TO REPEAL STATE PI REQUIREMENTS
Posted on September 10, 2008I love the thoughtful e-mails from readers of ?Ride the Lightning.? There were several received last week that I want to respond to. E-mails came in from both Michigan and Texas. Texas appears to be working to repeal the PI...
EVER BEEN TO SANTO DOMINGO? OUR CELL PHONE HAS
Posted on September 08, 2008Apparently, cell phone cloning (not the animal kind) is a reality. We know, because we?ve had first hand experience. If you can believe it, we have a cell phone without a camera. Because we have several computer forensics testifying experts...
COME FLY WITH ME. YIKES, WHERE?S MY LAPTOP?
Posted on September 05, 2008Lawyers routinely fly with their laptops, replete with electronic evidence and confidential client data. A new study from the venerable Ponemon Institutes reports that business travelers are now losing about 12,000 laptops a year at U.S. airports, some of them...
DANCING IN THE MINEFIELD: LEGAL OUTSOURCING ABROAD
Posted on September 04, 2008On August 5th, the American Bar Association released Formal Opinion 08-451, regarding a lawyer?s obligation when outsourcing legal and nonlegal support services. There was, initially, quite a ballyhoo over the fact that the ABA had endorsed outsourcing in its opinion...
LAWYER SNOOP RECEIVES TWO YEAR SUSPENSION
Posted on June 13, 2008On May 23d, the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals May 23 suspended Michael P. Markins from the practice of law for two years after he broke into his wife?s law firm computer system while looking for evidence that his...
WHALES SWALLOWING WHALES: FTI ACQUIRES ATTENEX
Posted on June 12, 2008On June 10th, FTI Consulting Inc. announced that it had signed a merger agreement to acquire Attenex. Purchase price? Approximately $88 million in cash. This is now an electronic discovery and ESI processing behemoth and quite a force to be...
ANTI-CHILD PORN TACTIC DOOMED TO FAILURE?
Posted on June 11, 2008It?s no secret that those who seek out child pornography are usually ensnared by a web of electronic evidence. On June 10th, three ISPs announced that they would block access to online child pornography. While their goal is laudable, a...
DRIVECRYPT: FOILING LAPTOP BORDER SEARCHES
Posted on June 09, 2008Ah, those pesky Customs agents who insist on searching laptops with nary a probable cause in sight. Most of the time, the offending material discovered is child pornography. As always in the world of electronic evidence, law enforcement is limping...
TOSSING PRIVILEGE OVERBOARD: VICTOR STANLEY V. CREATIVE PIPE
Posted on June 06, 2008It?s the case everyone is talking about. Defendants inadvertently produced 165 documents which they claimed were privileged. The formidable Magistrate Judge Paul W. Grimm has written a thoughtful opinion which truly bears careful study. In the end, sloppy electronic discovery...
HANY?S MY HERO: DETECTING ALTERED DIGITAL IMAGES
Posted on June 04, 2008They just don?t come MUCH smarter than Hany Farid. This Dartmouth professor, who is widely regarded as the best of the best at detecting altered digital images (and wrote software to assist this process), wrote an article for this month?s...
CLUELESS OR CLUED-UP? EDD READINESS SURVEY FROM XEROX
Posted on June 02, 2008From our foxhole, the number of in-house counsel who are, as our British friends would say, ?clued-up? about electronic discovery remains small. It was interesting to see that a survey commissioned by Xerox Litigation Services and reported today in Business...
MAC NABS CROOKS WITH BACK TO MY MAC AND PHOTOBOOTH
Posted on May 29, 2008A new twist on electronic evidence: Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that a stolen Macintosh computer helped solve a burglary of a New York City apartment. The thieves stole many items, including TVs, iPods and DVDs, along...
SENDING EDD DOCUMENTS ABROAD FOR REVIEW? HAVE YOU WAIVED FOURTH AMENDMENT PROTECTION?
Posted on May 27, 2008K&L Gates had a really fascinating post today about a new federal lawsuit in which the law firm of Newman McIntosh & Hennessey, LLP of Bethesda, Maryland, is seeking declaratory and injunctive relief in order to gain certainty about whether...
HOW TO LOOK LIKE A MORON: METADATA MAKES IT EASY
Posted on May 21, 2008Rick Segal, a venture capitalist and author of The Post Money Value blog, recently posted a hilarious metadata misadventure. Upon receiving a 115 page business plan, he checked the metadata and found that the plan?s author had failed to strip...
JUDGES GO TO ED SCHOOL
Posted on May 19, 2008Last week, John and I taught classes for the Judicial Conference of Virginia. So what are the judges thinking about with respect to electronic discovery? It is always interesting to hear from judges ? their perspective is much different than...
?MY BAD? ? ACCESSDATA GIVES ME A CALL
Posted on May 16, 2008The blogosphere is an amazing place. Very shortly after I published my negative review of FTK 2, I received a phone call from Brian Karney, the COO of AccessData. To give credit where credit is certainly due, Brian offered a...
???MY BAD??? ??? ACCESSDATA GIVES ME A CALL
Posted on May 16, 2008The blogosphere is an amazing place. Very shortly after I published my negative review of FTK 2, I received a phone call from Brian Karney, the COO of AccessData. To give credit where credit is certainly due, Brian offered a...
ACCESSDATA ANSWERS FTK 2 CRITICS - AND APOLOGIZES
Posted on May 14, 2008The following e-mail appears to have been sent (without running a spellchecker!) to FTK?s registered users yesterday. "Dear FTK 2 Customer: The release of FTK 2 has created much more confusion than we had anticipated, so we would like to...
CRAIG BALL BEATS ME TO IT: THE DISASTER THAT IS FTK 2.0
Posted on May 12, 2008Here I had gone to the trouble of asking my partner John to stop grousing about FTK 2.0 and actually write about it and then he smugly points out that he doesn?t need to ? our colleague and friend Craig...
WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE: REPORT FROM SEATTLE ON DISGRUNTLED EMPLOYEES
Posted on May 09, 2008Miraculously, it is sunny in Seattle ? and with luck, we can shortly remove the manacles which bind us to our keyboards and go enjoy the sunshine. John and I have just wrapped up speaking at the ALA annual conference...
WILL BLACKBERRYS BITE EMPLOYERS?
Posted on May 07, 2008The National Law Journal recently featured an article which asserted that employers should be wary of a predicted wave of suits claiming overtime pay is due, those suits supported by irrefutable electronic evidence of e-mailing and dealing with phone calls...
COFEE CAUSING JITTERS
Posted on May 05, 2008Yes, I spelled it right! In case you haven?t heard, the computer forensics world has been buzzing about a free tool provided by Microsoft to members of the law enforcement community. COFEE (Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor) is basically a....
THE BIG DIVIDE BETWEEN ED IN THE U.K. AND THE U.S.
Posted on May 02, 2008Curiously, when John and I visited the U.K. last week, there was no hesitation amongst any of our interviewees when asked to define the major difference between electronic discovery in the U.K. and the U.S. Everyone agreed that ?electronic disclosure?...
WHITE HOUSE TAKEN TO WOODSHED AGAIN OVER MISSING E-MAILS
Posted on April 30, 2008First, apologies for taking a blogging sabbatical while in London, but all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Or Jill a dull girl. Business in London frequently involves a splendid pub lunch and always a pint of...
GREETINGS FROM ACROSS THE POND!
Posted on April 23, 2008No, I am not being a slacker. In fact, I'm in London with John interviewing computer forensics experts for an article for the ABA. Though there is lots to say (when I'm back home), I thought it amusing that the...
PHISHING WITH BAITED SUBPOENAS
Posted on April 17, 2008Just when you think you?ve seen everything, the bad guys invent a new spin on an old game. Phishing for data is now old hat ? we?ve all received notices from banks where we have no accounts telling us we...
HIDE THE BALL, PASS THE BALL: LOSEY SCORES!
Posted on April 14, 2008I always enjoy the postings of colleague Ralph Losey. He is both imaginative and colorful, qualities which make electronic evidence subjects approachable even for those who are not technically adroit. He has scored once again with an excellent posting about...
"LOOK AT ALL THESE PINHEAD LAWYERS": THE CIRCUS IN DETROIT
Posted on April 11, 2008On April 9th, the Detroit Free Press reported that one of Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's attorneys in the whistle-blower lawsuit filed by two former police officers told the City Council he saw no obligation to inform the City Council of a...
RIVERS OF RUPEES: OUTSOURCING ELECTRONIC DISCOVERY REVIEW
Posted on April 09, 2008Mind you, it isn?t just India, though India has leveraged the cost of e-discovery review in the U.S. into a very comfortable living for many of its lawyers. Is it any wonder that news reports yesterday indicated that associates in...
CITY CYBERSLACKERS NABBED BY COMPUTER FORENSICS IN QUEBEC
Posted on April 07, 2008Computer forensics is a wonderful circus ? we get to see all the animals in all conceivable environments. Here?s an example of one investigation we?ve never taken part of ? though it?s logical enough. So what do YOU do at...
TAKING LAWYERS TO THE WOODSHED FOR E-MAIL DELETION
Posted on April 03, 2008Former Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal was ordered to pay more $18,900 in sanctions after he was found in contempt of court for deleting more than 2,500 e-mails that had been subpoenaed for a federal civil rights lawsuit. The...
FROM THE BIG APPLE: THERE GOES THE BEST EVIDENCE RULE
Posted on March 31, 2008Hello from New York City, where there are just too many gerbils in the cage. Simply navigating through the crowds on the sidewalk can turn into a military maneuver. I don?t trust any city where you have to look straight...
QUICK, SEND IN THE CLOWNS. DON?T BOTHER, THEY?RE HERE.
Posted on March 28, 2008Ah, the phrasing of the inimitable Frank Sinatra. Good of him (and Mr. Sondheim of course) to give me the perfect blog posting title. It refers to the idiots that the White House keeps relying on to explain why they...
QUICK, SEND IN THE CLOWNS. DON???T BOTHER, THEY???RE HERE.
Posted on March 28, 2008Ah, the phrasing of the inimitable Frank Sinatra. Good of him (and Mr. Sondheim of course) to give me the perfect blog posting title. It refers to the idiots that the White House keeps relying on to explain why they...
THE FIDELITY FILES: FIRST THE BLOG POST, THEN THE BOOK
Posted on March 25, 2008You may recall a February post about British services where attractive females test the fidelity of husbands and the resulting videotapes appear in court as electronic evidence in divorce proceedings. Apparently, that concept is on our side of the pond...
DUMB AND DUMBER: WHITE HOUSE ?EXPLAINS? MISSING E-MAILS
Posted on March 24, 2008Good grief. The White House, which has always looked dumb in its explanation for its many missing e-mails has inexplicably chosen to look dumber than ever. In its filing with the court on March 21st, the essence of the White...
DUMB AND DUMBER: WHITE HOUSE ???EXPLAINS??? MISSING E-MAILS
Posted on March 24, 2008Good grief. The White House, which has always looked dumb in its explanation for its many missing e-mails has inexplicably chosen to look dumber than ever. In its filing with the court on March 21st, the essence of the White...
THE ITALIAN STALLION: JUDGE FACCIOLA TAKES ON WHITE HOUSE
Posted on March 21, 2008Only because I had the pleasure of lecturing with Judge John Facciola last week at ABA TECHSHOW do I have the nerve to dub him ?The Italian Stallion.? I hope his sense of humor is intact because the moniker is...
ELECTRONIC PEEPING TOM LAWYER MAY HAVE LICENSE SUSPENDED
Posted on March 19, 2008Charleston, WV lawyer Michael P. Markins is in a boatload of trouble after improperly accessing the e-mail accounts of another law firm. Now why would anyone do something so stupid? Actually, I can halfway understand his original motivation ? he...
RECOGNIZING THE BEST OF BREED: EDD UPDATE AND K&L GATES
Posted on March 17, 2008On the final day of the ABA TECHSHOW, I had all good intentions of composing a farewell post. After deciding to lay down and watch CNN for five minutes, I ended up taking an extended nap instead. So much for...
ABA TECHSHOW - DAY TWO: THE MOST DAMNING THING IS THE HOLE WHERE EVIDENCE USED TO BE
Posted on March 14, 2008There is no way to adequately report on a day which held the entire e-discovery track. For my own part, I want to thank my co-presenters from two different e-discovery sessions, Judge Herbert Dixon, Judge John Facciola, Browning Marean, and...
BANK SECRECY ACT GUNS DOWN SHERIFF OF WALL STREET
Posted on March 13, 2008In a truly timely keynote presentation, the Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy and Information Center analyzed the investigation that finally resulted in the abrupt termination of Elliot Spitzer?s tenure as New York?s governor. Marc Rotenberg is a terrier with...
ABA TECHSHOW - WAHOO!
Posted on March 12, 2008From Chicago: Speaking at ABA TECHSHOW is a great honor, but getting to listen to some of the best and brightest in the business is always the best part of my annual soujourns to the Windy City. I am far...
DÉJÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN: QUALCOMM
Posted on March 11, 2008The Qualcomm attorneys previously sanctioned for their egregious misconduct in electronic discovery are now to get another bite of the apple to explain what appears to most experts to be inexplicable conduct. U.S. District Judge Rudi Brewster reasoned that the...
D??J?? VU ALL OVER AGAIN: QUALCOMM
Posted on March 11, 2008The Qualcomm attorneys previously sanctioned for their egregious misconduct in electronic discovery are now to get another bite of the apple to explain what appears to most experts to be inexplicable conduct. U.S. District Judge Rudi Brewster reasoned that the...
THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES INFOGOVERNANCE!
Posted on March 09, 2008It is with great sadness that I say goodbye to the venerable Infogovernance blog written by my friend Rob Robinson. Rob tells me that he is moving on to other endeavors. I wish him Godspeed. For more than two years,...
PROPELLER HEAD ALERT: MORE ON ANTIFORENSICS
Posted on March 06, 2008For the technically inclined among you, there was an excellent antiforensics thread on the Windows Incident Response blog which makes a nice companion to my earlier blog post on antiforensics: http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/2538276/26540438 Thanks to Harlan Carvey for passing this thread along:...
LEGAL SKULLDUGGERY: THE COKE SIDE OF LIFE
Posted on March 05, 2008Why, oh why, do some of our colleagues insist on bringing dishonor to our beleaguered profession? Now we have to buy electronic and paper evidence under the table? According to the blog Legal Pad, there was an unsavory arrangement to...
KEYWORD SEARCHES: SHERLOCK HOLMES OR INSPECTOR CLOUSEAU?
Posted on March 03, 2008On February 5th, the United State District Court for the Southern District of Texas issued a Memorandum and Order in Diabetes Centers of America, Inc. v. Healthpia America, Inc. (Slip copy, 2008 WL 336382). Judge Atlas has clearly had her...
RULE 502 IS HALFWAY HOME
Posted on February 28, 2008On February 27th, the Senate approved by unanimous consent without amendment S. 2450, a bill adding new Evidence Rule 502 to the Federal Rules of Evidence. The bill will now move to the House of Representatives for a vote. The legislation concerns waiver of the attorney-client privilege and work product protection...
ANTIFORENSICS: SLACKER, TIMESTOMP AND SAM JUICER
Posted on February 26, 2008Strange names, huh? Slacker, Timestop and Sam Juicer are all ?antiforensics? software tools designed to foil computer forensic technologists. As we often lament, the criminals always seem to be one step (sometimes miles) ahead of law enforcement. If you are unaware of the many, many tools that now come under the rubric of ?antiforensics,? a recent article from CIO will send shudders up your spine...
MYSPACE FRIEND REQUEST VIOLATES PROTECTIVE ORDER
Posted on February 22, 2008In a potentially landmark decision, a New York judge has ruled that allegations that a Staten Island teen broke the law when she used MySpace to reach out to three people she was ordered not to contact may stand and go to trial. The 16-year old made a MySpace ?friend request? of a 43-year-old woman and her daughters, who had previously obtained a Family Court order against her...
BALLING AND GETTING HIGH: EVIDENCE ON MYSPACE
Posted on February 19, 2008It?s one thing to make a fool of yourself in public, but some folks seem to excel at stupidity in front of the entire world. Recent examples of lawyers using MySpace included one lawyer?s success in admitting the entirety of a plaintiff?s MySpace page...
BRITS HIRE ?HOTTIE? PIS TO TEST SPOUSE FIDELITY
Posted on February 15, 2008Imagine this. You are a married businessman on your way home from work. As is your innocent custom, you stop in for a quick pint at the local pub. A very attractive young lady joins you at the bar and begins to flirt with you. Her ?availability? is clear...
POCKET GUIDE TO ESI FOR FEDERAL JUDGES URGES PROACTIVITY
Posted on February 13, 2008In January 2008, the Federal Judicial Center published Managing Discovery of Electronic Information: A Pocket Guide for Judges. The primary author is Judge Barbara Rothstein, Director of the Federal Judicial Center, along with Judge Ronald J. Hedges (a former Magistrate Judge in New Jersey, now an e-discovery lawyer with Nixon Peabody), and assisted by Elizabeth C...
JUDGE: NO GET OUT OF JAIL FREE CARDS
Posted on February 11, 2008From the Sensei case files: What a difference a judge makes. After many weeks of poison pen letters exchanged between irate counsel who couldn?t agree that two plus two equals four, much less agree on how to handle electronic evidence, the judge had had enough...
EDRM: DOES THE EMPEROR HAVE NO CLOTHES?
Posted on February 08, 2008One of my favorite blogs is Infogovernance http://infogovernance.blogspot.com by blogger Rob Robinson. One of his recent posts struck me as especially significant. I think it is important to consider the questions he asks about the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) and its XML2 (Extensible Markup Language) project...
MURDER MOST WIRED: SEX AND DEATH IN ITALY
Posted on February 07, 2008Hello from sunny L.A. and the ABA Midyear meeting, a long and bumpy plane ride from Virginia. I detest planes (gravity is one of the few scientific concepts that I understand) but I do enjoy having the time to simply sit and read. I finally caught up with a lurid story from the December 3, 2007 edition of Newsweek...
POSTSCRIPT TO THE WHOOPS-A-DAISY DEFENSE STORY
Posted on February 05, 2008Apparently, O?Melveny and Myers is really getting into the electronic evidence world in a big way, and generating a lot of negative press along the way. A reader of Ride the Lightning wrote to add a postscript to my previous posting. My correspondent passed along a post from the blog Above the Law, which said that the firm is furious about comments sent to ATL about the firm?s ?poor performance and underhanded layoffs...
THE WHOOPS-A-DAISY DEFENSE: O?MELVENY APOLOGIZES FOR MISSING E-MAILS
Posted on February 01, 2008For a while the attorneys at O?Melveny & Myers must have been cheerfully singing ?We?re in the Money.? They charged more than $12 million in six months in their representation of New Century Financial Corp, a failed subprime lender. Now the firm has come to national attention after a blistering report was filed by a bankruptcy examiner alleging that O?Melveny misled the court about funds that might belong to creditors...
WHEN LOGIC AND PROPORTION HAVE FALLEN SLOPPY DEAD: JUDGE REFUSES TO QUALIFY CERTIFIED FORENSIC EXAMINER BECAUSE HE HAS A BIOCHEMISTRY DEGREE
Posted on January 30, 2008If you go into enough courtrooms, you?ll see it all. You?ll watch an irate judge order a bailiff to bring him an attorney?s ringing cell phone and throw it out the courtroom window. You see a judge fall sound asleep while hapless attorneys try to carry on...
AUTHOR! AUTHOR! RALPH LOSEY ON ED
Posted on January 28, 2008I was pleased to see an announcement today that the American Bar Association has published e-Discovery: Current Trends and Cases by Ralph C. Losey. Many readers will know Ralph as the author of the e-Discovery Team blog. My copy of the book is on its way to me now, but I have no doubt this will be well worth reading...
THE STATE OF THE STATES: A FLURRY OF ELECTRONIC DISCOVERY RULES
Posted on January 25, 2008As if the new federal rules themselves were not enough to get a handle on, there are now at least 37 United States District Courts which require compliance with special local rules, forms or guidelines addressing the discovery of electronically stored information...
GOOD NEWS, EH? SEDONA CANADA PRINCIPLES FOR ELECTRONIC DISCOVERY PUBLISHED
Posted on January 23, 2008On January 21st, the Sedona Canada E-discovery Principles were posted in English on the Canadian E-discovery Portal, which is hosted by Lexum. The French version will reportedly be posted soon. You will also find Canadian e-discovery related precedents (common law, civil law) on the Portal...
ELECTRONIC DISCOVERY IN THE WINDY CITY: TIME TO SIGN UP FOR ABA'S TECHSHOW!
Posted on January 21, 2008Don't forget that ABA TECHSHOW, the premier national legal technology conference, is coming up fast! As a former TECHSHOW chair, I have a real soft spot in my heart for TECHSHOW, at which John and I have lectured since 2000. The CLE curriculum is fantastic, and for the electronic discovery mavens among you, there is a full day ED track...
CROSS FIRE: ED VENDOR SUED BY CLIENT, SUES CLIENT IN RETURN
Posted on January 17, 2008If you run an ED company, here is your ?wake up in the middle of night sweating buckets? nightmare . . . It was bound to happen sooner or later - a major electronic discovery vendor sued by a major law firm. On December 28, 2007, Sullivan & Cromwell filed suit in the Southern District of New York against Electronic Evidence Discovery, Inc...
LION?S ROAR BECOMES A CAT?S MEOW: QUALCOMM ATTORNEYS GET OFF EASY
Posted on January 15, 2008First, thanks to all who wrote and were worried about me because I took a brief hiatus from blogging. Nothing was wrong ? far from it ? I was cruising the Caribbean with John, whose maritime background means he is always happiest when at sea. And since his happiness is mine, it was a delightful sojourn...
ROBES ON A RAMPAGE: ANOTHER JUDGE SIGNALS ZERO TOLERANCE FOR SPOLIATION
Posted on December 31, 2007Judges have been getting angrier and angrier over what seems to be a non-stop escalation of spoliation and the reckless handling of electronic evidence. In the recent copyright infringement lawsuit filed by The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Judge Florence-Marie Cooper (U...
PARKINSON?S MEDS CAUSED ME TO SOLICIT A MINOR ONLINE (and other folderol)
Posted on December 28, 2007When you do computer forensics for a living, you think you?ve heard it all. Then you read the newspapers, and something still more bizarre comes blazing from the headlines. We have heard that solicitation of a minor (generally captured online by law enforcement) was caused by 1) some unknown someone who mysteriously had access to the computer; 2) alcoholism; 3) drug abuse; 4) depression; 5) insanity; 6) curiosity; 7) journalistic research; and 8) the belief that that the other person was an adult pretending to be a child (that gets points for sheer creativity)...
EVEN A CAVEMAN CAN DO IT: HACKING INTO THE TELECOMS
Posted on December 26, 2007Convicted hacker Robert Moore, who is now in federal prison, says breaking into 15 telecommunications companies and hundreds of businesses worldwide was incredibly easy because of simple IT gaffes. As much as we deal with this truism in forensics and lecture on it non-stop, this is a train that just keeps on chugging down the track to doom...
A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME IS NOT A ROSE: THE NEW F.R.C.P AMENDMENTS
Posted on December 19, 2007Effective on December 1, 2007, the new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure are often referred to as ?the style rules? and some lawyers have complacently chosen not to take a close look at them. This way lies a minefield however ? you really do need to look at the new rules because both numbering and captioning have been changed in some places, including some of the electronic discovery provisions...
COURT DECLINES TO FORCE SURRENDER OF PGP PASSPHRASE
Posted on December 17, 2007In computer forensics, encryption is usually a killer. You groan when you encounter it. Or sometimes not . . . in a couple of notable cases, we?ve found wonderful documents like ?passwords.txt? and (better yet) ?stuffnottoforget.doc? which had the decryption keys in them because the doggone things are so long and hard to remember...
INSURERS GET ON THE ED BANDWAGON
Posted on December 13, 2007It had to happen. Insurance companies have figured out how to get a piece of the ED action. Lexington Insurance Company has announced it has enhanced its Employment Practices Liability (EPL) insurance offerings to include E-Discovery Response(SM), a new endorsement designed to cover an insured´s payroll expenses incurred while retrieving electronically stored information requested during discovery in a covered EPL claim...
THE FOX INVESTIGATES THE HENHOUSE MURDERS: CIA PROBES ITS OWN DESTRUCTION OF TORTURE TAPES
Posted on December 11, 2007Has anyone ever explained spoliation to the lawyers at the CIA? Not until today did it become reasonably clear that the CIA was in fact on notice that it was supposed to preserve the infamous torture tapes (including waterboarding) which have dominated the news...
MORE HAND-WRINGING: 44% OF COMPANIES UNPREPARED FOR NEW FEDERAL RULES
Posted on December 07, 2007A recent LexisNexis Corporate Counsel survey underscores what many of us have known from bitter experience. 44% of corporate counsel reported that their companies were ill-prepared for the new federal rules regarding ESI. Among the top challenges: communicating with IT departments (27%), budgeting monies to put systems and tools and in place (25%), getting buy-in from management on the importance of litigation preparedness (21%) and finding e-discovery staff with a good mix of IT and legal expertise (9%)...
SILENCE IS GOLDEN: ANOTHER SILLY DAY AT SENSEI
Posted on December 05, 2007*once again, cue Twilight Zone music* Woman walks in with a computer and will not speak, instead pointing to a note: ?Computer is watching and recording everything ? it records what we say? Sensei technologist: ?Is the computer on?? Woman shakes head no...
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