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Software Sorts Electronic Evidence

Posted by michael on from the civil-action dept.

securitas writes: "The New York Times has a very interesting article about the legal industry using new search software to sort through electronic evidence such as e-mail, documents and recovered files, and the process that they go through to make the evidence usable. It has spawned an industry."

3 of 85 comments (clear)

  1. Useful against spam? by M_Talon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Wonder if they would be kind enough to run that against my email box and sort out all the spammers for me? Then I could take it to court to request compensation for the bandwidth consumption as well as "emotional damages" because of all the pron spam :)

    --
    Electronic Frontier Foundation for online civil rights information
  2. Biased Searches? by Robber+Baron · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I can see a potential for even more widespread abuse. Couldn't searching for keywords give some bloodthirsty prosecutor the ability to present a biased, subjective, out-of context version of what was communicated? We already know of several instances where a lack of understanding of the technology coupled with a lack of understanding of the context under which a message was communicated has led to abuse by those in positions of authority.

    --

    You're using her as bait, Master!

  3. Other application of this tech: viruses! by cyberdonny · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If this software is so good at finding "hot" (i.e. incriminating or embarassing) documents, how long before the virus writers will "discover" the same techniques. Rather than just SIRCAM'ing out a random file out of the My Documents folder, spider the whole hard disk, and all reacheable network drives, and selectively mail out those items that score high on a "hotness" scale. This would make opening those SIRCAM attachments (using a Linux office suite, for safety...) much more rewarding...