SOCIAL NETWORKING FORENSICS Social media is more than LOLs, OMGs, “likes this” posts, and 140-character Tweets. Important evidence and even corporate business records have migrated to social networking sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, FourSquare and other Web 2.0 venues.
Their content is often highly relevant to:
- Conducting a background check or impeaching a witness;
- Determining a corporate position on an issue, or its acknowledgement of a fact or circumstance;
- Proving whether a person was cyber-bullied or threatened by another, including in witness-tampering cases;
- Establishing whether a subject associates with another person of interest;
- Evidencing intent, predisposition or motive;
- Challenging an individual’s physical location alibi.
What is more, litigation has proliferated about whether social networking site content violates others’ intellectual property rights; whether the sites themselves infringe the privacy of their own users; or even whether fraudulent or other illegal activity, such as the sale of “knock-off” luxury goods or the promotion of prostitution, occurs with actual or constructive knowledge. In all of these contexts, adequately preserving the content at issue is critical, which can be challenging given its dynamic, evanescent, and often multi-format nature.
To properly collect and authenticate social networking content, we develop and run custom programs and tools, execute emerging forensic methodologies, and maintain robust chain of custody documentation to ensure that this highly relevant evidence is authenticated for admissibility. After the preservation phase, significant forensic skill is required to analyze and quantify the preserved data to answer questions like:
- Who posted the offending content?
- Can the offending content even be attributed by convincing evidence to a real, live person?
- When was the offending content posted?
- How much of it exists across the entire social networking platform?
- What other evidence corroborates or supports interpretation of the relevant content?
- How accurate is the reported physical location?
Stroz Friedberg is on the cutting edge of preservation and analysis in the Web 2.0 realm, and can make sure your side gets it right. K? GTG.
