Digital documents – Beware! - Part 1

Digital documents – Beware!


 Yes, beware when it comes to the use and exchange of electronic documents in litigation and arbitration. Those emails and office documents you send as attachments to your clients, professional colleagues and weekend acquaintances could land you in big professional trouble. Before I sound like an alarmist, let me lay some foundation as to the scope and relevance of digital and electronic evidence.

Traditionally, lawyers are used to making reference to hard copy document when it comes to discovery and interrogatories. Contemporary trends fuelled by the demands of the fast pace of computer technology has resulted in a paradigm shift.

Document in law, is no longer restricted to hard copies of papers carefully filled away in cabinets. It now extends to cover, digital documents as found in computers and electronic devices like the mobile phone. It extends to volatile data located in the inner recess of a computers memory, all of these digital species of evidence are discoverable as documentary evidence.

Ok! Electronic document is discoverable so what is the big deal you ask? The giant deal, is that electronic or digital documents have attributes that lend them to easy manipulation; complexity in extraction and presentation and above all they carry a history with them whenever they come into contact with a user – who read, modified or deleted the document – this attributes of a document is refereed to as the metadata. Digital documents as a specie of document is not the kind you will find in a file cabinet neatly stacked in compartmentalised folders, waiting to be photocopied or scanned.

Digital documents, reside in the inner recess of computers and digital devices in binary formats – ( 0 and 1). What you see on the computer screen and eventually print out, is a translation of the binary values of your digital document. Extracting digital documents requires the skills of a computer forensic professional. However, creating, reading, modifying and executing the translated binary format of a digital document is a task every computer user accomplishes on a daily basis. Let me expand on this. 

When you log on to your computer and commence to use it for any number of reasons- creating a word document, PowerPoint presentation, Surfing the web, sending and receiving emails, making a call on your mobile phone, copying pictures from your cameras to your computer, down loading the latest music to your ipod, All of these actions constitute manipulating the binary values inside your computer or digital device.

The Computer user is saved the horror of communicating with the computer in binary format. How you ask? The applications you use each day e.g. Microsoft Word has what is called a GUI ( graphic user interface ) that makes it easy for you to point and click on familiar objects (Images and links) that have codes running in the background transparent to the user. These codes are translated to binaries in the background. The product of the keystrokes you produce when you type on your alpha numeric keyboard is translated into binary formats via electrical signals passing through your keyboard and the computer processor. Consequently, between the GUI of applications the operating system and the keyboard, the typical computer user manages to create binary products called digital documents.

Now enough of the background information. Why did I caution,  beware of digital documents? I did for the following reasons:

 · ease of computer data manipulation

· Presence of Meta data

· Need for Redaction

· Chain of Custody

· File format production request

· OLE ( Object linking and embedding)

· Active x

· Web bug

Digital document are capable of being manipulated. Ordinarily, when a document is created e.g a word document it has certain attributes – referred to as the MAC attributes. MAC stand for, M=Modified, A=accessed and C=created. Following from the above, every created document has a modified date and created date and an accesses date. These dates are important in creating a time line as to the history of a document. When a document is accessed by a user all or some of the MAC attributes are affected.

Watch out for part 2 and conclusion of this article.



Karl Obayi - Solicitor
Computer Forensic Attorney
Mob: 075 999 77770

iTevidence
Principal Partner

http://www.itevidence.co.uk/

Computer evidence and fair trials.

Governments through their Judicial infrastructures are investing so much in terms of Training personnel, finance and technology in prosecution of computer related crimes.

However, given the very technical nature of this emergent area of law and science, there is a yawning gap in legal education of lawyers and Judges and paralegals on how to address and tackle issues dealing with computer evidence and digital document management.

This is not a level playing field particularly as it applies to defence lawyers who do not have the same quality and access to specialist training and expert resources. When it comes to sourceing and incorporating computer evidence in a case,a majority of defence lawyers are not well positioned to matched the resources of the State.

Balanced Justice in our legal system requires that both sides of a legal issue have the resources and access required to have their day in court. Unfortunately, the cost of training and the protocol for deploying computer and digital evidence to prove or contest the probity of computer evidence is prohibitive especially for the defence in a criminal matter.


It is suggested, that legal training institutions and the Judicial authorities make the training and deployment of computer and digital evidence a top priority going forward. This is even more urgent, given the fact that about 90% of corporate documents now pass through computers and about 70% of those documents are never printed but remain stored on computers and other digital devices like Mobile phones.

Internet for all - The Finland example

The recent news, that in Finland the Government is in the process of legislating that all its citizens be connected to the internet, is a welcome development. There is no disputing the fact, that the internet has become the medium of choice in social and business communication.

Any legislation that will provide this common medium of communication to all of its citizenry is welcome. However, it is hoped that the means of providing this service is affordable to the ordinary citizen in Finland otherwise, there will be a credibility problem with such a general impact legislation.

This is hoping, that Governments around the world will emulate the Finland example. A simple projection will show, that whether we like it or not there is a great movement towards adopting cloud computing in the provision of educational and social services. Ensuring that the ordinary citizen benefits and is included in this fast evolving technology age is a simply an example of good governance.

We cannot ignore the cost benefit implications of spreading the internet presence to private homes and small businesses. Most government departments are now embracing the edocument culture by making public documents available for download on line. 

Schools are now refering students to web sites to aid the completion of home work and other assignments. If any governemnt is serious about bringing its citizens along to the technology age, the Finland example is definitely the way to go.