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.
