I’ve released a new version of the Electronic Evidence Workbook used in my three credit E-Discovery and Digital Evidence course at the University of Texas Law School, UT Computer Science School and UT School of Information. I prefer this release over any before because it presents the material more accessibly and logically, better tying the technical underpinnings to trial practice.

The chapters on processing are extensively revamped. I’m hell bent on making encoding understandable, and I’ve incorporated the new Processing Glossary I wrote for the EDRM. Glossaries are no one’s idea of light reading, but I hope this one proves a handy reference as the students cram for the five quizzes and final exam they’ll face.

Recognizing that a crucial component of competence in electronic discovery is mastering the arcane argot of legaltech, I’ve added Vital Vocabulary lists throughout, concluded chapters with Key Takeaway callouts and, for the first time, broken the Workbook into volumes such that this release covers just the first eight classes, almost entirely Information Technology.

Come Spring Break in mid-March, I’ll release the revamped omnibus volume adding new practical exercises in Search, Processing, Production, Review and Meet & Confer and introducing new tools. Because university students use Mac machines more than Windows PCs, the exercises ahead employ Cloud applications so as to be wholly platform-independent. The second half of the course folds in more case law to the relief of law students and chagrin of CS and IS students. The non-law students do a great job on the law but approach it with trepidation; the law students kiss the terra firma of case law like white-knuckled passengers off a turbulent flight.

Though written for grad students, the Workbook is also written for you, Dear Reader. If you’ve longed to learn more about information technology and e-discovery but never knew quite where or how to start, perhaps the 2022 Workbook is your gateway. The law students at UT Austin pay almost $60,000 per year for their educations; I’ll settle for a little feedback from you when you read it.

In the introduction to my Electronic Evidence Workbook, I note that my goal is to change the way readers think about electronically stored information and digital evidence. I want all who take my courses to see that modern electronic information is just a bunch of numbers and not be daunted by those numbers.

I find numbers reassuring and familiar, so I occasionally forget that some are allergic to numbers and loathe to wrap their heads around them.

Lately, one of my bright students identified himself as a “really bad with numbers person.” My lecture was on encoding as prologue to binary storage, and when I shifted too hastily from notating numbers in alternate bases (e.g., Base 2, 10, 16 and 64) and started in on encoding textual information as numbers (ASCII, Unicode), my student’s head exploded.

Boom!

At least that’s what he told me later. I didn’t hear anything when it happened, so I kept nattering on happily until class ended.

As we chatted, I realized that my student expected that encoding and decoding electronically stored information (ESI) would be a one-step process.  He was having trouble distinguishing the many ways that numbers (numeric values) can be notated from the many ways that numbers represent (“encode”) text and symbols like emoji.  Even as I write that sentence I suspect he’s not alone.

Of course, everyone’s first hurdle in understanding encoding is figuring out why to care about it at all.  Students care because they’re graded on their mastery of the material, but why should anyone else care; why should lawyers and litigation professionals like you care?  The best answer I can offer is that you’ll gain insight.  It will change the way you think about ESI in the same way that algebra changes the way you think about problem solving.  If you understand the fundamental nature of electronic evidence, you will be better equipped to preserve, prove and challenge its integrity as accurate and reliable information.

Electronic evidence is just data, and data are just numbers; so, understanding the numbers helps us better understand electronic evidence.

Understanding encoding requires we hearken back to those hazy days when we learned to tally and count by numbers.  Long ago, we understood quantities (numeric values) without knowing the numerals we would later use to symbolize quantities.  When we were three or four, “five” wasn’t yet Arabic 5, Roman V or even a symbolic tally like ||||. 

More likely, five was this:

If you’re from the Americas, Europe or Down Under, I’ll wager you were taught to count using the decimal system, a positional notation system with a base of 10.  Base 10 is so deeply ingrained in our psyches that it’s hard to conceive of numeric values being written any other way.  Decimal just feels like one, “true” way to count, but it’s not.  Writing numbers using an alternate base or “radix” is just as genuine, and it’s advantageous when information is stored or transmitted digitally.

Think about it.  Human beings count by tens because we evolved with ten digits on our hands.  Were that not so, old jokes like this one would make no sense: “Did you hear about the Aggie who was arrested for indecent exposure?  He had to count to eleven.”

Had our species evolved with eight fingers or twelve, we would have come to rely upon an octal or duodecimal counting system, and we would regard those systems as the “true” positional notation system for numeric values.  Ten only feels natural because we built everything around ten.

Computers don’t have fingers; instead, computers count using a slew of electronic switches that can be “on” or “off.”  Having just two states (on/off) makes it natural to count using Base 2, a binary counting system.  By convention, computer scientists notate the status of the switches using the numerals one and zero.  So, we tend to say that computers store information as ones and zeroes.  Yet, they don’t.

Computer storage devices like IBM cards, hard drives, tape, thumb drives and optical media store information as physical phenomena that can be reliably distinguished in either of two distinct states, e.g., punched holes, changes in magnetic polar orientation, minute electric potentials or deflection of laser beams.   We symbolize these two states as one or zero, but you could represent the status of binary data by, say, turning a light on or off.  Early computing systems did just that, hence all those flashing lights.

You can express any numeric value in any base without changing its value, just as it doesn’t change the numeric value of “five” to express it as Arabic “5” or Roman “V” or just by holding up five fingers. 

In positional notation systems, the order of numerals determines their contribution to the value of the number; that is, their contribution is the value of the digit multiplied by a factor determined by the position of the digit and the base.

The base/radix describes the number of unique digits, starting from zero, that a positional numeral system uses to represent numbers.  So, there are just two digits in base 2 (binary), ten in base 10 (decimal) and sixteen in base 16 (hexadecimal).  E-mail attachments are encoded using a whopping 64 digits in base 64.

We speak the decimal number 31,415 as “thirty-one thousand, four hundred and fifteen,” but were we faithfully adhering to its base 10 structure, we might say, “three ten thousands, one thousand, four hundreds, one ten and five ones.  The “base” ten means that there are ten characters used in the notation (0-9) and the value of each position is ten times the value of the position to its right.

The same decimal number 31,415 can be written as a binary number this way: 111101010110111

In base 2, two characters are used in the notation (0 and 1) and each position is twice the value of the position to its right.  If you multiply each digit times its position value and add the products, you’ll get a total equal in value to the decimal number 31,415.

A value written as five characters in base 10 requires 15 characters in base 2.  That seems inefficient until you recall that computers count using on-off switches and thrive on binary numbers.

The decimal value 31,415 can be written as a base 16 or hexadecimal number this way: 7AB7

In base 16, sixteen characters are used in the notation (0-9 and A-F) and each position is sixteen times the value of the position to its right.  If you multiply each digit times its position value and add the products, you’ll get a total equal in value to the decimal number 31,415.  But how do you multiply letters like A, B, C, D, E and F?  You do it by knowing the letters are used to denote values greater than 9, so A=10, B=11, C=12, D=13, E=14 and F=15.  Zero through nine plus the six values represented as letters comprise the sixteen characters needed to express numeric values in hexadecimal.

Once more, If you multiply each digit/character times its position value and add the products, you’ll get a total equal in value to the decimal number 31,415:

Computers work with binary data in eight-character sequences called bytes.  A binary sequence of eight ones and zeros (“bits”) can be arranged in 256 unique ways.   Long sequences of ones and zeroes are hard for humans to follow, so happily, two hexadecimal characters can also be arranged in 256 unique ways, meaning that just two base-16 characters can replace the eight characters of a binary byte (i.e., a binary value of 11111111 can be written in hex as FF).  Using hexadecimal characters allows programmers to write data in just 25% of the space required to write the same data in binary, and it’s easier for humans to follow.

Let’s take a quick look at why this is so.  A single binary byte can range from 0 to 255 (being 00000000 to 11111111).  Computers count from zero, so that range spans 256 unique values. The following table demonstrates why the largest value of an eight character binary byte (11111111) equals the largest value of just two hexadecimal characters (FF):

Hexadecimal values are everywhere in computing.  Litigation professionals encounter hexadecimal values as MD5 hash values and may run into them as IP addresses, Globally Unique Identifiers (GUIDs) and even color references.

Encoding Text

So far, I’ve described ways to encode the same numeric value in different bases.  Now, let’s shift gears to describe how computers use those numeric values to signify intelligible alphanumeric information like the letters of an alphabet, punctuation marks and emoji.  Again, data are just numbers, and those numbers signify something in the context of the application using that data, just as gesturing with two fingers may signify the number two, a peace sign, the V for Victory or a request that a blackjack dealer split a pair.  What numbers mean depends upon the encoding scheme applied to the values in the application; that is, the encoding scheme supplies the essential context needed to make the data intelligible.  If the number is used to describe an RGB color, then the hex value 7F00FF means violet.  Why?  Because each of the three values that make up the number (7F 00 FF) denote how much of the colors red, green and blue to mix to create the desired RGB color. In other contexts,  the same hex value could mean the decimal number 8,323,327, the binary string 11111110000000011111111 or the characters 缀ÿ.

ASCII

When the context is text, there are a host of standard ways, called Character Encodings or Code Pages, in which the numbers denote letters, punctuation and symbols.  Now nearly sixty years old, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII, “ask-key”) is the basis for most modern character encoding schemes (though both Morse code and Baudot code are older).  Born in an era of teletypes and 7-bit bytes, ASCII’s original 128 codes included 33 non-printable codes for controlling machines (e.g., carriage return, ring bell) and 95 printable characters.  The ASCII character set follows:

Windows-1252

Later, when the byte standardized from seven to eight bits (recall a bit is a one or zero), 128 additional characters could be added to the character set, prompting the development of extended character encodings. Arguably the most used single-byte character set in the world is the Windows-1252 code page, the characters of which are set out in the following table (red dots signify unassigned values). 

Note that the first 128 control codes and characters (from NUL to DEL) match the ASCII encodings and the 128 characters that follow are the extended set.  Each character and control code has a corresponding fixed byte value, i.e., an upper-case B is hex 40 and the section sign, §, is hex A7.  To see the entire code page character set and the corresponding hexadecimal encodings on Wikipedia, click here.  Again, ASCII and the Windows-1252 code page are single byte encodings so they are limited to a maximum of 256 characters.

Unicode

The Windows-1252 code page works reasonably well so long as you’re writing in English and most European languages; but sporting only 256 characters, it won’t suffice if you’re writing in, say, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic or Hebrew, and it’s wholly unsuited to Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean. 

Though programmers developed various ad hoc approaches to foreign language encodings, an increasingly interconnected world needed universal, systematic encoding mechanisms.  These methods would use more than one byte to represent each character, and the most widely adopted such system is Unicode.  In its latest incarnation (version 14.0, effective 9/14/21), Unicode standardizes the encoding of 159 written character sets called “scripts” comprising 144,697 characters, plus multiple symbol sets and emoji characters.

The Unicode Consortium crafted Unicode to co-exist with the longstanding ASCII and ANSI character sets by emulating the ASCII character set in corresponding byte values within the more extensible Unicode counterpart, UTF-8.  UTF-8 can represent all 128 ASCII characters using a single byte and all other Unicode characters using two, three or four bytes.  Because of its backward compatibility and multilingual adaptability, UTF-8 has become the most popular text encoding standard, especially on the Internet and within e-mail systems. 

Exploding Heads and Encoding Challenges

As tempting as it is to regard encoding as a binary backwater never touching lawyers’ lives, encoding issues routinely lie at the root of e-discovery disputes, even when the term “encoding” isn’t mentioned.  “Load file problems” are often encoding issues, as may be “search difficulties,” “processing exceptions” and “corrupted data.”  If an e-discovery processing tool reads Windows-1252 encoded text expecting UTF-8 encoded text or vice-versa, text and load files may be corrupted to the point that data will need to be re-processed and new production sets generated.  That’s costly, time-consuming and might be wholly avoidable, perhaps with just the smattering of knowledge of encoding gained here.

“Time heals all wounds.”  “Time is money.” “Time flies.” 

To these memorable mots, I add one more: “Time is truth.”

A defining feature of electronic evidence is its connection to temporal metadata or timestamps.  Electronically stored information is frequently described by time metadata denoting when ESI was created, modified, accessed, transmitted, or received.  Clues to time are clues to truth because temporal metadata helps establish and refute authenticity, accuracy, and relevancy.

But in the realms of electronic evidence and digital forensics, time is tricky.  It hides in peculiar places, takes freakish forms, and doesn’t always mean what we imagine.  Because time is truth, it’s valuable to know where to find temporal clues and how to interpret them correctly.

Everyone who works with electronic evidence understands that files stored in a Windows (NTFS) environment are paired with so-called “MAC times,” which have nothing to do with Apple Mac computers or even the MAC address identifying a machine on a network.  In the context of time, MAC is an initialization for Modified, Accessed and Created times.

That doesn’t sound tricky.  Modified means changed, accessed means opened and created means authored, right?  Wrong.  A file’s modified time can change due to actions neither discernible to a user nor reflective of user-contributed edits.  Accessed times change from events (like a virus scan) that most wouldn’t regard as accesses. Moreover, Windows stopped reliably updating file access times way back in 2007 when it introduced the Windows Vista operating system.  Created may coincide with the date a file is authored, but it’s as likely to flow from the copying of the file to new locations and storage media (“created” meaning created in that location). Copying a file in Windows produces an object that appears to have been created after it’s been modified!

it’s crucial to protect the integrity of metadata in e-discovery, so changing file creation times by copying is a big no-no.  Accordingly, e-discovery collection and processing tools perform the nifty trick of changing MAC times on copies to match times on the files copied.  Thus, targeted collection alters every file collected, but done correctly, original metadata values are restored and hash values don’t change.  Remember: system metadata values aren’t stored within the file they describe so system metadata values aren’t included in the calculation of a file’s hash value.  The upshot is that changing a file’s system metadata values—including its filename and MAC times—doesn’t affect the file’s hash value. 

Conversely and ironically, opening a Microsoft Word document without making a change to the file’s contents can change the file’s hash value when the application updates internal metadata like the editing clock.  Yes, there’s even a timekeeping feature in Office applications!

Other tricky aspects of MAC times arise from the fact that time means nothing without place.  When we raise our glasses with the justification, “It’s five o’clock somewhere,” we are acknowledging that time is a ground truth. “Time” means time in a time zone, adjusted for daylight savings and expressed as a UTC Offset stating the number of time zones ahead of or behind GMT, time at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England atop the Prime or “zero” Meridian.

Time values of computer files are typically stored in UTC, for Coordinated Universal Time, essentially Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and sometimes called Zulu or “Z” time, military shorthand for zero meridian time.  When stored times are displayed, they are adjusted by the computer’s operating system to conform to the user’s local time zone and daylight savings time rules.  So in e-discovery and computer forensics, it’s essential to know if a time value is a local time value adjusted for the location and settings of the system or if it’s a UTC value.  The latter is preferred in e-discovery because it enables time normalization of data and communications, supporting the ability to order data from different locales and sources across a uniform timeline.

Four months of pandemic isolation have me thinking about time.  Lost time. Wasted time. Pondering where the time goes in lockdown.   Lately, I had to testify about time in a case involving discovery malfeasance and corruption of time values stemming from poor evidence handling.  When time values are absent or untrustworthy, forensic examiners draw on hidden time values—or, more accurately, encoded time values—to construct timelines or reveal forgeries.

Time values are especially important to the reliable ordering of email communications.  Most e-mails are conversational threads, often a mishmash of “live” messages (with their rich complement of header data, encoded attachments and metadata) and embedded text strings of older messages.  If the senders and receivers occupy different time zones, the timeline suffers: replies precede messages that prompted them, and embedded text strings make it child’s play to alter times and text.  It’s just one more reason I always seek production of e-mail evidence in native and near-native forms, not as static images.  Mail headers hold data that support authenticity and integrity—data you’ll never see produced in a load file.

Underscoring that last point, I’ll close with a wacky, wonderful example of hidden timestamps: time values embedded in Gmail boundaries.  This’ll blow your mind.

If you know where to look in digital evidence, you’ll find time values hidden like Easter eggs. 

E-mail must adhere to structural conventions to traverse the internet and be understood by different e-mail programs. One of these conventions is the use of a Content-Type declaration and setting of content boundaries, enabling systems to distinguish the message header region from the message body and attachment regions.

The next illustration is a snippet of simplified code from a forged Gmail message.  To see the underlying code of a Gmail message, users can select “Show original” from the message options drop-down menu (i.e., the ‘three dots’).

The line partly outlined in red advises that the message will be “multipart/alternative,” indicating that there will be multiple versions of the content supplied; commonly a plain text version followed by an HTML version. To prevent confusion of the boundary designator with message text, a complex sequence of characters is generated to serve as the content boundary. The boundary is declared to be “00000000000063770305a4a90212” and delineates a transition from the header to the plain text version (shown) to the HTML version that follows (not shown).

Thus, a boundary’s sole raison d’être is to separate parts of an e-mail; but because a boundary must be unique to serve its purpose, programmers insure against collision with message text by integrating time data into the boundary text.  Now, watch how we decode that time data.

Here’s our boundary, and I’ve highlighted fourteen hexadecimal characters in red:

Next, I’ve parsed the highlighted text into six- and eight-character strings, reversed their order and concatenated the strings to create a new hexadecimal number:

A decimal number is Base 10.  A hexadecimal number is Base 16.  They are merely different ways of notating numeric values.  So, 05a4a902637703 is just a really big number. If we convert it to its decimal value, it becomes: 1,588,420,680,054,531.  That’s 1 quadrillion, 588 trillion, 420 billion, 680 million, 54 thousand, 531.  Like I said, a BIG number.

But, a big number…of what?

Here’s where it gets amazing (or borderline insane, depending on your point of view).

It’s the number of microseconds that have elapsed since January 1, 1970 (midnight UTC), not counting leap seconds. A microsecond is a millionth of a second, and 1/1/1970 is the “Epoch Date” for the Unix operating system. An Epoch Date is the date from which a computer measures system time. Some systems resolve the Unix timestamp to seconds (10-digits), milliseconds (13-digits) or microseconds (16-digits).

When you make that curious calculation, the resulting date proves to be Saturday, May 2, 2020 6:58:00.054 AM UTC-05:00 DST.  That’s the genuine date and time the forged message was sent.  It’s not magic; it’s just math.

Had the timestamp been created by the Windows operating system, the number would signify the number of 100 nanosecond intervals between midnight (UTC) on January 1, 1601 and the precise time the message was sent.

Why January 1, 1601?  Because that’s the “Epoch Date” for Microsoft Windows.  Again, an Epoch Date is the date from which a computer measures system time.  Unix and POSIX measure time in seconds from January 1, 1970.  Apple used one second intervals since January 1, 1904, and MS-DOS used seconds since January 1, 1980. Windows went with 1/1/1601 because, when the Windows operating system was being designed, we were in the first 400-year cycle of the Gregorian calendar (implemented in 1582 to replace the Julian calendar). Rounding up to the start of the first full century of the 400-year cycle made the math cleaner.

Timestamps are everywhere in e-mail, hiding in plain sight.  You’ll find them in boundaries, message IDs, DKIM stamps and SMTP IDs.  Each server handoff adds its own timestamp.  It’s the rare e-mail forger who will find every embedded timestamp and correctly modify them all to conceal the forgery. 

When e-mail is produced in its native and near-native forms, there’s more there than meets the eye in terms of the ability to generate reliable timelines and flush out forgeries and excised threads.  Next time the e-mail you receive in discovery seems “off” and your opponent balks at giving you suspicious e-mail evidence in faithful electronic formats, ask yourself: What are they trying to hide?

The takeaway is this: Time is truth and timestamps are evidence in their own right.  Isn’t it about time we stop letting opponents strip it away?

Tip of the hat to Arman Gungor at Metaspike whose two excellent articles about e-mail timestamp forensics reminded me how much I love this stuff.  https://www.metaspike.com/timestamps-forensic-email-examination/

Social Media Content (SMC) is a rich source of evidence.  Photos and posts shed light on claims of disability and damages, establish malicious intent and support challenges to parental fitness–to say nothing of criminals who post selfies at crime scenes or holding stolen goods, drugs and weapons.  SMC may expose propensity to violence, hate speech, racial animus, misogyny or mental instability (even at the highest levels of government).  SMC is increasingly a medium for business messaging and the primary channel for cross-border communications.  In short, SMC and messaging are heirs-apparent to e-mail in their importance to e-discovery.

Competence demands swift identification and preservation of SMC.

Screen shots of SMC are notoriously unreliable, tedious to collect and inherently unsearchable.  Applications like X1 Social Discovery and service providers like Hanzo can help with SMC preservation; but frequently the task demands little technical savvy and no specialized tools.  Major SMC sites offer straightforward ways users can access and download their content.  Armed with a client’s login credentials, lawyers, too, can undertake the ministerial task of preserving SMC without greater risk of becoming a witness than if they’d photocopied paper records.

Collecting your Client’s SMC
Collecting SMC is a two-step process of requesting the data followed by downloading.  Minutes to hours or longer may elapse between a request and download availability. Having your client handle collection weakens the chain of custody; so, instruct the client to forward download links to you or your designee for collection.  Better yet, do it all yourself.

Obtain your client’s user ID and password for each account and written consent to collect. Instruct your client to change account passwords for your use, re-enabling customary passwords following collection.  Clients may need to temporarily disable two-factor account security.  Download data promptly as downloads are available briefly.

Collection Steps for Seven Social Media Sites
Facebook: After login, go to Settings>Your Facebook Information>Download Your Information.  Select the data and date ranges to collect (e.g., Posts, Messages, Photos, Comments, Friends, etc.).  Facebook will e-mail the account holder when the data is ready for download (from the Available Copies tab on the user’s Download Your Information page). Facebook also offers an Access Your Information link for review before download. Continue reading →