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
Google+, the latest social network and newest source of evidence
After a very long wait, Google last week launched their new social networking service, “Google+”. Coming on the heels of several disappointing Google product launches, including the spectacular failure of Google Wave, you would be forgiven for not having high hopes for Google+. However, having used the service for several days we believe Google+ might well make an impact and that, if successful, it will become an important new source of online evidence.
As we have highlighted in our recent posts on Apple iCloud and Facebook’s new Messages system, it is essential to track and understand emerging technologies so that they become an opportunity rather than an issue in identifying and collecting digital evidence. In this post we will therefore introduce Google+ and look at some of the features which could prove interesting in terms of online evidence and 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 24th 2011
Highlight: Forget everything you thought you knew about domain names
Our highlight for this week is a change which will have an enormous impact for years to come: the decision by ICANN to introduce a new regime for top-level domain names. ICANN is the top-level governance body for Internet names and numbers, primarily meaning the domain name system which is the foundation of web browsing, email and other Internet services.
In recent years ICANN has approved the creation of additional top-level domains (or “TLD’s”)such as “.aero”, “.museum” and “.asia”, however real-world of these new TLD’s has been limited and for most Internet users the web still revolves around “.com”, with perhaps limited usage of other long-standing TLD’s such as “.org” or “.edu”. This week’s announcement means that arbitrary names can now be used for TLD’s for the first time, irrespective of objective need or overlap with existing TLD’s.
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.
Facebook’s New Messages System in the Wild – First Observations
Six months after its initial launch Facebook is now rolling out the new Facebook Messages system to users in Ireland, the UK and other parts of the world. Although Facebook often do not announce new feature rollouts it is clear from searching Twitter or Facebook that many users have recently been switched over to the new system. A search using Google Real Time shows a clear peak in discussion of “new Facebook messages” within the last month, beginning at the end of April and continuing throughout May.
Internally, new Facebook Messages was known as Project Titan but it has also been unofficially titled “the Gmail killer”. Commenting on the new system Mark Zuckerberg has said “This is not an email killer. This is a messaging experience that includes email as one part of it”. However, he has also said that “Facebook’s system fundamentally alters the way people communicate” and in this he is correct. Email is becoming more about identity and for a lot of people, their Facebook network defines their online identity. Back in November, Facebook released some shocking statistics on the use of their previous messaging system, specifically that 350 million Facebook users were using the system and were generating a total of 4 billion messages (including Facebook chat messages) each day. To put this level of adoption and usage into perspective, the three main webmail providers (Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail) have around 800 million users between them. Facebook’s new system therefore changes the way that 350 million people communicate in both their personal and professional lives.
This Week in Online Evidence – May 27th 2011
Highlight: VC’s point the way to the future of digital evidence
Next to social media evidence we believe online productivity services such as Google Docs represent one of the most important sources of online evidence and introduce some of the greatest challenges in this area. This week two of the leading tech venture capitalists published blog posts detailing their use of online productivity services, showing how sophisticated information workers are benefiting from online productivity services.
Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures first posted on his popular AVC.com blog about his use of GMail, Google Apps and Dropbox. Fred’s conversion to online services to create and store his data is a great illustration of the potential these services offer: access from any device, anywhere; a strong mobile computing experience; and easy sharing of data with colleagues. To quote his conclusion:
In thinking back to the way I’ve worked over the past twenty years, I am not going to miss taking my laptop back and forth to work. I’m not going to miss trying to sync files across multiple devices. I’m not going to miss upgrading software all the time. I’m not going to miss being anal retentive about backing up all my files. I’m not going to miss windows and windows networking. I’m not going to miss outlook, exchange, and blackberry exchange server. All of that was overhead that got in the way of being productive, mobile, and free and I’m so happy to be done with it. Read more
Facebook’s native production judgment & the Sedona Database Principles
Our team follows many current cases around online evidence and other e-discovery issues but our schedules often don’t allow us to comment here on our blog. We are therefore experimenting with Storify, a new service for “curating” stories by assembling the best references from websites, blogs and other social media.
For our first Storify post we’re looking at a recent case involving Facebook: Read more
This Week in Online Evidence – March 25th 2011
Highlight: Growing calls for true online evidence technology
This has been another long and busy week for us at Cernam so it was rewarding to see not one but two articles validate our view on the future of online evidence.
Firstly Gina Rubel’s piece in the Legal Intelligencer reviewed the many legal issues around social media. The entire article is interesting but the comments from Joel Schroeder of Faegre & Benson are particularly worth a read:
[Schroeder] pondered how a party can accurately produce a non-static, ever-changing website maintained by a third party (such as Facebook or LinkedIn). He said, ‘Until better technology is developed, most parties will need to be content with accepting documents from social media as print-outs.
We also enjoyed an article at CSO Online where Antony Savvas looking at social media risks for businesses. In the article Debra Logan, Distinguished Analyst at Gartner, discusses social networking data as evidence:
In e-discovery, said Gartner, there is no difference between social media and electronic or even paper artefacts. Logan said, “The phrase to remember is ‘if it exists, it is discoverable’”.
