Bell Case Subpoena

[Declan McCullagh]

On Tue, Jan 09, 2001 at 02:44:57PM -0800, Tim May wrote:
> I expect this upcoming trial will not be the case which hinges on 
> these kinds of issues, but some court will someday have to contend 
> with this utter malleability of received mail files. Unlike paper 
> letters which can be forensically analyzed, e-mail is nearly 
> meaningless.

Yes and no. Courts have figured out long ago how to deal with
malleable computer files, of which email is a special case. And notes
allegedly taken during a telephone call or meeting (which were
important during the MS antitrust trial) are equally malleable.

What the prosecution here is interested in is chain of custody, did
you receive this message, can you verify that Exhibit A is what you
received from someone at somewhere.com, etc. with perjury as a
deterrent. Then they can use phone records to show a defendant was
online then via a dialup connection...

It strikes me that this is a sort of link padding: If you're online
all the time, those phone records will be virtually useless.

-Declan