E-Discovery Ireland 2011 - Whitepapers for Download
We finally have a chance to get back to our own Cernam blog after a hectic couple of months organising the E-Discovery Ireland conference. It was a pleasure to be such an integral part of Ireland’s first e-discovery and digital evidence conference and we are hoping to run a similar event in the near future (yes, we are crazy!). We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for attending the conference. It was great to meet so many people who are interested in this area.
Two of our recent white papers were distributed at the event and they are available for download below. If you would like to speak with us about any of our work in this area, please get in touch (karen@cernam.com / owen@cernam.com) or have a look at our other blog posts. We look forward to meeting you all again at a similar event!
Facebook New Messages - Facebook Content as Digital Evidence
Business Records Online - Facing the Reality of End-User Adoption
This Week in Online Evidence – July 8th 2011
Highlight - Procter & Gamble sign up 18,000 employees for Box.net
Our highlight for this week is the news that Box (formerly Box.net, the online collaboration service) have signed Procter & Gamble as a client. Per Robin Wauters at Techcrunch (Box Scores A Big Enterprise Deal), Box will be providing content sharing and collaboration services for 18,000 P&G employees around the world. The scale of this deal reinforces the maturity of online productivity services and the increasing enterprise adoption of what would once have been seen as consumer services. Congratulations to Box on a fantastic win and a significant milestone for online collaboration services. Read more
This Week in Online Evidence – July 1st 2011
Highlight: Google launches Google+, a new social networking site
Our highlight this week is the introduction of Google+, the new social network from Google. The social networking tool is currently in beta, or as Google is terming it “a field testing phase”, but there are already a large number of active users and the service is generating significant interest online. Although this is not Google’s first attempt to enter the social networking market the high demand for invites to the beta is a promising start and suggests that Google may recover from recent lacklustre products such as Google Buzz and Google Wave.
Google already have a loyal user base including those who use Google search, Gmail, Docs, Picasa, Maps etc. Although it will be difficult for Google to compete with established networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn there are some novel features in Google+ which will attract users. Here at Cernam we will be tracking Google+ closely since it has the potential to become a very important source of online evidence, potentially mirroring the importance of Facebook data in litigation and corporate investigations.
Senator John Ensign’s guide to electronic evidence: hide the email, destroy the email, delete the mailbox
In our recent paper on Facebook’s new messages system we mentioned in passing issues caused by the use of personal webmail accounts for business or government purposes. We specifically mentioned the example of US Senator John Ensign, which we also touched on in last week’s seminar in Dublin. Having mentioned Senator Ensign several times we realized his case may not be widely known, despite coverage by e-discovery commentators such as Perry Segal and in the press.
John Ensign was a United States senator for Nevada who was elected for the Republican Party in January 2001. In May 2011 he resigned from the Senate as a result of an investigation into ethics violations. The background to his resignation lay in an affair he conducted with Cynthia Hampton, a member of his staff. Disclosure of the affair led to investigations by the FBI and the Senate ethics committee amid allegations that Ensign broke the law in order to cover up his affair and made inappropriate payments to Hampton including a an alleged severance payment of $96,000.
This Week in Online Evidence – June 17th 2011
Highlight: UK joins the club on online juror misconduct
For several months we have tracked developments in online juror misconduct as part of these weekly summaries. In the United States this is a serious problem which has led to numerous mistrials as jurors use social networking sites to discuss deliberations or make inappropriate contact with parties in a case.
This week saw the culmination of the first UK trial for juror misconduct, when Joanne Frail received an eight month sentence. The UK’s Telegraph has a good summary of the case: “Facebook contempt case: juror jailed for eight months” while the story was also widely covered in technology (TheRegister) and legal circles (WSJ law blog). Although the facts of this case mirror many US cases which we have covered previously, it was interesting to note that Frail had both carried out independent research in the form of web searches and, more seriously, engaged in lengthy online discussions with the defendant in a criminal case.
Facebook New Messages & Digital Evidence: Looking on the Bright Side
For the fourth instalment in our series analysing Facebook’s new messaging system we want to look at some of the positive points of “New Messages” as digital evidence. For the background to this post you might like to read our introduction to New Messages; a summary of the main changes in the new system; and our notes on some of the digital evidence downsides.
Although we have mainly discussed negative aspects of Facebook Messages, for example the risks introduced by the Facebook.com webmail system, there are aspects of New Messages which will be very helpful in using Facebook Messages as evidence.
Cernam Seminar: Facebook’s New Messages & Digital Evidence
Special seminar in Dublin on Facebook’s upgraded messages system
Facebook is one of the most popular electronic messaging systems in the world, with close to 700 million users exchanging over 4 billion messages each day. In December of last year Facebook announced an upgrade to Messages and this improved feature is now being made available to users outside of the US.
New Messages fundamentally changes the nature of Facebook Messages and the associated risks. Did you know for example that Facebook users can now exchange Office documents and other attachments via New Messages? Or that switching to New Messages provides a Facebook.com email address which can be used to send and receive emails outside of Facebook? Read more
Breaking the Bad News: Facebook’s New Messages & E-Discovery
This is the third in our series of posts on Facebook’s updated messages system. In our two previous articles we introduced New Messages and discussed the main changes which it introduces. In this post we will look at the emails generated by New Messages and the difficulties which will arise in relation to electronic discovery.
A radically different view of email
Facebook users who are switched to the new Messages system will receive a Facebook.com email address based on their choice of Facebook username, for example a username of MarkZ would give an email address of MarkZ@Facebook.com. New Messages will generate email messages when a user communicates with another Facebook user who is offline and when an email address is entered as the recipient of a Facebook message. Facebook users can also receive external emails via their Facebook.com email address, with emails being delivered to the Facebook messages inbox. Read more
Apple iCloud – Cloud Computing for your Grandparents
The announcement this week of Apple’s “iCloud” service is an enormous step forward for cloud computing. To date “cloud” has been a marketing buzzword, a hassle for IT departments, a concern for legal departments and a major focus for investors. However, for the general public the topic has been of little interest and the majority of computer users have continued to use much the same technology as 5 years ago. With the news that Apple is rolling out an integrated suite of cloud services for iPhone and iPad users this situation has changed, with cloud computing entering the mainstream virtually overnight courtesy of a Steve Jobs’ keynote.
Apple’s iCloud announcement came in the same week as a Forrester research report looking at the market for personal cloud services. Forrester’s research focussed on the type of service which we have referred to as online productivity services: tools for creating and sharing documents; data backup services; task and project management tools etc. Forrester estimate that the worldwide personal cloud market will be worth $12 billion by 2016, while in a blog post they go on to say:
The personal computing experience has become a major pain in the neck, as people add smartphones and tablets to the growing number of PCs they use at work and at home – more than half the US online population, about 135 million people, have the challenge of managing their content across multiple PCs and smartphones.
Forrester believes that a new computing experience is emerging, based on the personal cloud concept, that will redefine the computing experience around a user’s personal and work information, so that it’s seamlessly accessible across all of an individual’s devices.
Although Apple were arguably falling behind Google and even Microsoft due to their lack of cloud services the introduction of iCloud has immediately changed the market. Frank Gillett of Forrester even suggests that Apple now lead Google on personal cloud services (prior to a single customer going live on iCloud!) and estimates that Apple’s innovation around cloud services is “on par with the most notable startups in the personal cloud space, such as Dropbox, Box.net, and Evernote”. Read more
This Week in Online Evidence – June 3rd 2011
Highlight: Why would China target personal Gmail accounts?
Our news highlight for this week is the sophisticated attempt to hack accounts on Google’s Gmail service which has been widely reported as an espionage operation by China. Writing in the Washington Post Cecilia Kang and Ellen Nakashima reported that:
Hackers based in China gained access to hundreds of Gmail accounts, including some belonging to senior U.S. government officials and military personnel. The personal Gmail account of one Cabinet-level official was compromised, an official with knowledge of the breach said.
This Gmail compromise was based on a targeted “phishing” attack which relied on tailored emails to have the victims visit a malicious website which requested Google credentials. This type of attack is common but this instance has generated significant interest based on the individuals targeted and the fact that it appears to have been successful, at least in part. Read more
