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/
