12. September 2008 by admin.

The Wired Gadget Lab blog yesterday had a post saying that the iPhone takes a screen shot of practically every action you perform.  It stores these screen shots to support its visual effects and supposedly deletes them after the application is closed.  But, like a lot of computer data, even though it is deleted, that does not mean that it cannot be retrieved.  Forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski is quoted in the post as saying that this information can be used to nab criminals.  It could well also play a role in civil litigation.

Zdziarski also demonstrated how to bypass the security of the iPhone.  This could also be valuable information for forensics experts and attorneys.  He has a book coming out on iPhone hacking.

Among the other concerns in modern eDiscovery, it is clear that the number of places that responsive evidence could be stored is also increasing.  More and more business and personal “artifacts” contain memory that may be holding sensitive information.  On the opposite side, all of this stored information, while convenient, and, in the case of the iPhone, esthetically pleasing, also raises serious privacy concerns.  As the saying goes, don’t do anything on your iPhone that you would not want to appear on the front page of the New York Times.

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13. August 2008 by admin.

Another case of inadvertent information release occurred last week.  Some MIT students did a project under the supervision of Ron Rivest, who is very well known in computer circles as an,  inventor of several key hashing and security algorithms, including RSA, which is the algorithm in those keyfobs that  companies like eTrade rely on to provide secure access to brokerage accounts.  These students analyzed the security of the magnetic fare cards and RFID cards (Boston’s Charlie Card and Charlie Ticket) used by the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority.  These students were to present their findings at the DefCon hacker  conference in Las Vegas, but the MBTA went to Federal Court and got a temporary restraining order that prevented them from discussing their work.

Without making any judgment about the appropriateness of the MBTA’s suit or the students’ research, it is clear that suing in Federal Court mainly succeeded in making the information more widely available than if it had just been presented at the conference.

The slide presentation had already been publicly posted.  But more to the point for the present discussion, the attorneys for the MBTA themselves released additional information (provided by the students to the MBTA) in the public court documents.  The very information that the MBTA was trying to protect was released along with increased publicity for the vulnerability, the presentation, and the students.

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16. June 2008 by admin.

Search has become increasingly important in dealing with Electronically Stored Information as the volume continues to grow.  The Radicati Group estimates that the average business mailbox contains 4.3 GB of potentially discoverable ESI.  The burden of dealing with that volume is obvious, but dealing with that burden is still an issue. Automated tools to help identify responsive and privileged documents are being used more and more as the only viable way to deal with these massive volumes of information.  

I will be heading to DC next week to join the faculty of a Federal Judicial Center Training workshop on eDiscovery.  We will be discussing the technical aspects of eDiscovery.  

Some of the judges have already begun to explore how to evaluate eDiscovery in cases involving disputes over the adequacy of search.  For example, Judge Facciola, who will also be on the faculty of this workshop, has called for evidence of search effectiveness.  Another faculty member, Judge Grimm has recognized that

The only prudent way to test the reliability of the keyword search is to perform some appropriate sampling of the documents determined to be privileged and those determined not to be in order to arrive at a comfort level that the categories are neither over-inclusive nor under-inclusive.

We will be fleshing out these ideas and offering practical suggestions for how these standards can be applied to eDiscovery without breaking the bank or delaying the matter unnecessarily.

Click here to read a paper on Common Sense Sampling that I will be presenting at this workshop.

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14. June 2008 by admin.

This blog is about the technology that supports eDiscovery, with an emphasis is on search and analytics.

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