Electronic Discovery and Evidence

Erase Metadata Product

(8-24-04) Scrubbing Content Metadata. "Officials at content collaboration software maker Workshare unveiled a software update to its metadata scrubbing software Monday, promising an end to embarrassing leaks of private information. Content metadata bears only a passing resemblance to the type of metadata most people are aware of. Web metadata is keywords associated with a Web site. By contrast, content metadata tracks a wide variety of information on documents -- previous revisions, hidden text, user e-mail addresses, server names and routers. In all, there are about 18 to 25 different types of metadata found in most Microsoft consumer and business products, namely its Office software suite. . . "

Photograph Metadata to Track Changes

(6-4-04) Adobe Photoshop Helps Police. "Probably the feature that law enforcement has desired for the longest time is a way to automatically create and save a log of all adjustments made to an image. It's finally here, and offers many great features. If your agency has been waiting to go digital until there was an easy and reliable way to track adjustments made to your digital photographs, your wait is over! . . . The History Log can track almost all adjustments made to an image, and keep that log either within the image file itself as metadata, or as a separate text file. The log offers the choice of tracking details of the adjustments, a less detailed list of just the tools used, or a listing only of when the file was opened and closed."

Comment: This will assist in the authentication of electronic discovery and evidence.

Australian Government Purchases Metadata Removal Software

(5-20-04) Canberra crackdown on Office leaks "THE furore over Mark Latham's much-amended speech to the ALP National Conference in January has spurred the Federal Government to address security concerns over functions on Microsoft Word that allow users to track changes to text. The Australian Government Information Management Office has bought copies of a software package that strips metadata - information on document creators and the changes they have made - from government documents before they are emailed and posted online."

Word Processing Metadata Discovery

Attorney General parrots music industry. "Bill Lockyer is California's attorney general. But judging from his mindless recitation of the entertainment industry's anti-piracy schtick, he's really a parrot. Lockyer apparently wrote a letter railing against "peer-to-peer" file sharing, in which many computers hook up to distribute files among them. . . The Lockyer letter reads like propaganda because it is. Hidden information called "metadata" discovered in the Microsoft Word document points to a person in the Motion Picture Association of America as a source. The person in question denies writing the letter, but admits that Lockyer contacted him about the issue. . . This is also a lesson in the hazard of using Microsoft Word. Its metadata, which most people don't even know exists, makes Word dangerous to use for confidential documents. A previous version of a contract, for example, may contain information you don't want disclosed."

Comment: Electronic discovery of this type of electronic evidence may have a very beneficial affect on your cases. However, make sure before sending out word processing documents that you have scrubbed the document clean of metadata.