by UKSecretCourt1 on Mon Oct 26, 2009 7:36 pm
I'm Quoting from Privacy Protection and Computer Forensics. I've got long nails at the mo so please excuse the typos.
Quote
1.2.4
Anyone accessing the inernet .... is vunerable to ending up with files on his or her compuer whose possession may be illegal under local law, and yet he or she may never have activley solicited them.
1. While browsing the web, we have all come across web sites that also flash assorted images of nubile females in scant clothing as part of ads that show upon the screen. These images can (and often do) get stored in one's hard disk automatically. If it turns out that the images depic females who are under age, or (in some countries) if the images are merely explicit, regardless of he age of the person in those images, they can be deemed to be evidence of having downloaded and possessed illegal material.
2. When we receive email containing attachments, even unsolicited email that gets deleted without even being read, depending on the email progam used and how it has been configured by the user, the attachents usually stay on one's computer despite th deletion of the email message itself. One must take special steps to delte those attachments or to configure his or her email software to delete attachments when the email that brought them in is itself delted.
3. It has been documented numerous times that, when one isonline on the internet, or on any internal network, it is usually possible for a savvy hacker at a remote site... to gain free run of one's computer and to remove, modify, delete, or add any files to that compuer. This obviously includes being able to add incriminating evidence.
In all of the above cases, it would take an internet savvy defence lawyer to convince a typical nontechnical judge or a jury of non technical "peers" that such illegal data files just happened to be on the accused individual's computer (which, in fact, may well ahve been the case). If the files are deleted by a "semi savvy" hapless user, this can make things worse because those files can often be discovered through computer forensics; at that point, the accused person will also ahve to defend him or herself for not only having ostensibly downloaded and possessed them but also for having taken active steps to delete that evidence.
Innocent individuals who never connect their computer online to anything are not immune from hostile computer forensics either.
Reference
Privacy protection and computer forensics 2nd edition
Michael A. Caloyannides
1.4.6 Digital Evidence is often evidence of nothing.
The potential for miscarriage of justice is vast, given that many defence lawyers, judges and juries are unaawre of the esoteric details of computer science. This "dirty little secret" about digital evidence isconveniently soft pedalled by the computer forensics industry and by the prosecution, ....
1e ... it is a fact that nothing in life is really free, the revenue source for many "free web sites" we visit on the internet comes from advertising in the form of pop up ads, scrolling text, images and the like. Often these advertising images are for facial creams and vacation packages but show unclad underage persons. Although one can rapidly go to a different web site, the fact is, unless one has gone to the trouble to change the web browsers default settings (of storing web pages on the disk) to not storing anything, these offensive images get stored ("cached") on one's hard disk drives.
Over a period of time , enough of them collect in any of ourcomputers and an overzealous prosecutor can claim that there is an "obvious pattern or proclivity that stretches over a few years." A hapless deless defendant will have a very difficult time convincing a technology challenged judge or jury that he or she knows nothing about how those images got ther.
The legal and social problems with this phenomenon is that most individuals in the legal and law enforcement professions are unaware of at least some of the many ways whereby the data they present as evidence is really not evidence of anything because it is routinely placed on computers without the knowledge or complicity of their owners.
How that helps!!
You might want to get this book. It's classic training for the Computer forensics degree. You might want to quote it to the police. Anyone with a degree in Forensics will recognise it. Your lawyer can quote it.
You can see the term "overzealous" and that's pretty appropriate in your case.