|
|
 |
Sanderson forensics were instructed by the defence in a case of conspiracy involving multiple defendants. The salient points of this case were:
The defendants in the case had been conspiring with others via email
The defendant we were representing (A) had been accused of being one of the ring leaders
The evidence involved a number of emails which had been shown to have been sent by A via AOL
The sent AOL emails were found on As' computer
As' defence was that the emails had been sent to her and that A had simply forwarded them
The police could not find any evidence of the received emails on As' computer
When we were instructed, we used standard computer forensic and email parsing (searching) tools to locate all of the email on As' computer. We where able to confirm the findings of the police in relation to the sent emails but were not able to find any of the emails that A said she had forwarded.
Reverse engineering and research into the format of AOL emails stored within the AOL PFC file (Personal Filing Cabinet) revealed that in certain circumstances AOL would compress the content of stored emails thus, as far as simple keyword searches were concerned, effectively encrypting the content. None of the email tools that we utilised seemed able to decrypt the various parts of the emails.
A software program was written to search for and decompress any of these AOL emails and then to carry out a keyword search. Using this technique we were able to find the emails that the Police were unable to find and show that our client was possibly not the ringleader that was being alleged.
At the conclusion of the trial there was a hung jury in relation to A and the prosecution decided not to opt for a retrial.
|
|
|
