Software Sorts Electronic Evidence

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."

Comments

search software is good

[perdida]

I am all for the government writing any kind of search program, block program, security program or what have you for whatever purpose it wants.

If we really want the Internet to permeate into our lives, then it should go into our lives as they really are. Perhaps some people will be less wary about leaving evidentiary data lying about on the Net.

When we decry against censorware, or searchware or whatever, we are decrying a social use of technology and not the technology itself. Rather than stifling the developemnt of search technologies or other supposedly "authoritarian" tech, we should be adding to the debate about what kind of a society we live in.

I will be writing a variant of this for a controversial website soon, in support of rigidly restricted appliance computers and limited-access proprietary content AOL style networks developing alongside the open Internet. In this society we have prisons, in which the prisoners can't use the Internet much because the software and hardware that would allow them to use it within prison rules (reliably, monitored by non-technical prison officials) does not exist.

I would rather the educational and self-betterment resources available on the Net be extended to prisoners with the blessing of prison officials, so prisons which have lost their education budgets can restore these services cheaply.