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Do IT this week: Layering
Medina company retrieves evidence from electronics
By Paula Schleis Beacon Journal business writer
Published on Monday, Nov 19, 2007
Damon Hacker knows better than anyone else the kind of electronic fingerprints we leave behind on a daily basis.
Did you use a computer today? A cell phone? A Blackberry? Swipe a card to enter your workplace? Drive a car? Send a fax? Print a document? Take a photo? Access voice mail? Use a credit card?
Hacker can re-create most of your day by dissecting little hard drives that record the most routine activities.
He and his partners at Vestige Ltd. are forensic experts of the wired world, experienced at locating digital clues for use in civil and criminal legal cases that range from intellectual property theft to wrongful termination.
And the past year has been a good one for the Medina company.
Hacker isn't surprised that business is up 30 percent since a Dec. 1, 2006, amendment to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure outlined how electronic information should be collected and shared in the discovery process of a court case.
What surprises him is that it took so long for the legal world to acknowledge the value of digital evidence.
''Up until 2004, 2005, we still had attorneys who would tell us, 'I've been practicing for 20 years, and I've never looked at information coming off a computer,''' Hacker said. ''That was amazing to me.''
In many cases, Hacker sensed a ''don't ask, don't tell'' attitude.
''It was like, 'I know there are things I want off your system, but if I ask you, you'll want stuff off mine, so it's better we just don't talk about it,''' Hacker said.
For many years, the courts didn't push for the information, either, preferring to deal in the world of paper.
About 2001, Hacker said, some judges started getting ''really close'' to telling attorneys that failure to seek electronic information could be considered malpractice. But it was a slow wake-up call.
In 2005, a committee of the U.S. Department of Justice drafted new discovery rules, and Vestige weighed in at a federal hearing.
To counter arguments that collecting electronic information was too time-consuming and expensive, Hacker said, he argued
that ''you shouldn't limit what should be done just because the technology today doesn't meet the requirements, because somebody will come in and figure it out.''
''Somebody like us,'' he said.
The committee apparently agreed.
Among the 2006 regulation changes: Electronic media must be made available in the way it is stored. That's because in its original environment, documents and e-mails are embedded with invisible clues: what computer created it, the date and time, whether it was printed and previous drafts.
''An e-mail printed out isn't the e-mail. It's a copy of the e-mail,'' Hacker said. ''Documents should be given in their native format and not converted.''
The same month the new federal rules went into effect, Vestige opened an office in Pittsburgh in anticipation of a growing market.
The company is actually a marriage of two firms.
Hacker and his partner, Greg Kelley, started a technology consulting company in 1998.
''With a name like Hacker, I guess I was predestined'' for such a career, he joked.
That same year, Cleveland-area attorney Donald Wochna launched Computer Investigation & Evidence.
In 2004, the two competitors decided that merging their tech and legal backgrounds would make them a powerhouse in the emerging field.
Today, the company markets its ''One-Pass'' service, a unique method that preserves electronic media by cloning it.
Hacker said most people still rely on the more-common ''crawl'' method, referring to the way people traditionally crawl through e-mail and computer files looking for information requested by an attorney.
It's time-consuming and easy to overlook forgotten communications, and the average person doesn't have access to hidden files that were deleted from a program but not erased from the hard drive, Hacker said.
Also, as the facts of a case change, attorneys might need to go back repeatedly and request more information — and if the request comes six months later, relevant material might be gone or changed.
Vestige's cloning method preserves all electronic information as it exists on a given day. The company can clone any hard drive — from PDAs to cell phones to the little black box that records the last seconds of a vehicle's activity.
As new gadgets come on the market — such as the iPhone that hit stores this summer — the cloning technology is adapted.
Weekends, nights
In a recent case, the Vestige staff cloned 120 computers and 35 servers in two 12-hour shifts. Working weekends and nights reduces disruption in the office and gives the client the option of keeping the whole affair covert.
Once the hard drives are cloned, Vestige condenses all the material into one database, where it can search for relevant data as requested by attorneys in the case.
Some companies have called Vestige simply based on suspicious activity.
In 2005, what started as a Streetsboro company's curiosity about a rival opening in nearby Tallmadge turned out to be a case of intellectual property theft. A search by Vestige turned up communications between a company manager and the competitor.
Cases that Vestige has been involved in are about evenly divided between plaintiff and defendant, Hacker said. And often, the firm finds information that exonerates a suspect.
In one case, an insurance company wondered if an over-prepared client had burned his house down. After a review of a home computer's Internet search history, Vestige was able to show that the client's thorough list of items with estimated values was prepared after the fire.
ABOUT VESTIGE LTD.
Location: Medina
Phone: 330-721-1205
Web site: http://www.vestigeltd.com
Service: The company can clone electronic information from a variety of sources (for example, computers, cell phones, Blackberry units, cars, printers) and then search it for evidence for use in civil and criminal legal cases.
Location: Medina
Phone: 330-721-1205
Web site: http://www.vestigeltd.com
Service: The company can clone electronic information from a variety of sources (for example, computers, cell phones, Blackberry units, cars, printers) and then search it for evidence for use in civil and criminal legal cases.
Paula Schleis can be reached at 330-996-3741 or pschleis@thebeaconjournal.com.
Damon Hacker knows better than anyone else the kind of electronic fingerprints we leave behind on a daily basis.
Get the full article here.
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