Full Disclosure mailing list archives
Re: Re: Tools accepted by the courts
From: Paul Schmehl <pauls () utdallas edu>
Date: Tue, 05 Jul 2005 09:44:36 -0500
--On Tuesday, July 05, 2005 02:04:20 -1000 Jason Coombs <jasonc () science org> wrote:
Then you obviously don't understand the adversarial nature of our justice system. It's the job of the *defense* attorney to discredit the evidence presented by a witness for the prosecution. It is *not* the job of the prosecution to torpedo its own case.What I demand to hear spoken by law enforcement, and what I insist prosecutors compel law enforcement to speak if they don't volunteer these words out of their own common sense, is the following: "Yes, that's what we found on the hard drive but there's little or no reason for us to believe that the defendant is responsible for placing it there just because the hard drive was in the defendant's possession. We often see cases where hard drives are installed second-hand and data from previous owners remains on the drive, we can't tell when the data in question was written so it's important to be aware that hundreds of other people could have placed it there. We also see cases where software such as spyware or Web pages full of javascript force a suspect's Web browser to take actions that result in the appearance that the owner of the computer caused Internet content to be retrieved when in fact the owner of the computer may not have known what was happening, malicious Web site programmers know how to use techniques such as pop-unders and frames to hide scripted behavior of Web pages. Furthermore, once the Web browser is closed and its temporary files are deleted, every bit of data that was saved 'temporarily' to a file by the browser becomes a semi-permanent part of the hard drive's unallocated space and we have no way to tell the difference between data that was once part of a temporary file created automatically by a Web page being viewed or scripted inside a Web browser and the same data placed intentionally on the hard drive by its owner without the use of the Internet. Also ..."
Even in an ideal world where no prosecutor is ever over zealous, this would be brain-dead stupid.
Paul Schmehl (pauls () utdallas edu) Adjunct Information Security Officer University of Texas at Dallas AVIEN Founding Member http://www.utdallas.edu/ir/security/ _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.grok.org.uk/full-disclosure-charter.html Hosted and sponsored by Secunia - http://secunia.com/
Current thread:
- Re: Tools accepted by the courts Jason Coombs (Jul 05)
- Re: Re: Tools accepted by the courts Gaurav Kumar (Jul 05)
- Re: Re: Tools accepted by the courts Paul Schmehl (Jul 05)
- Re: Re: Tools accepted by the courts Valdis . Kletnieks (Jul 05)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- RE: Tools accepted by the courts Craig, Tobin (OIG) (Jul 05)
- RE: Tools accepted by the courts Evidence Technology (Jul 05)
- Re: RE: Tools accepted by the courts Nick FitzGerald (Jul 05)
- Re: RE: Tools accepted by the courts pingywon (Jul 05)
- Re: RE: Tools accepted by the courts Eric Paynter (Jul 05)
- RE: Tools accepted by the courts Evidence Technology (Jul 05)
- RE: Re: Tools accepted by the courts Lauro, John (Jul 05)
- Re: Re: Tools accepted by the courts KF (lists) (Jul 05)