Jim, The bloke with the extra ventilation notwithstanding, with an open OS and open applications it seems easy to do pretty much whatever you want with disk data and logs regardless of what the letter of the law says. Electronic data is so malleable that its use as evidence seems questionable to begin with. It's not like a gun or a car which has a physical presence and cannot be duplicated or altered *quite* as readily as bits. ( Though I would expect some coarse grit emery run down the barrel and some random prick punch action on the bolt might do wonders for ballistic analysis ). This whole mess of communications and data privacy and copyright will be plaguing us for a long time and the most likely outcome is authoritarian legislation. Unless some Bush SC appointees are libertarians. Seem pretty likely? Mike