Ride the Lightning

CYBERSLEUTHING: SOME THINGS YOU CAN DO YOURSELF

August 31, 2007

Though I spend most of my time unearthing data from the bowels of computers, cell phones, PDAs, etc., folks often overlook obvious information that they can find for themselves. Two of the best experts in the country are my friends and fellow lecturers Carole Levitt and Mark Rosch. They publish a great book called The Cybersleuth’s Guide to the Internet (more info at http://www.netforlawyers.com/prod01.htm). They have just started up a terrific print newsletter called "Internet Fact Finding for Lawyers" ($149/year). I particularly enjoyed reading about a court that expressed disbelief that a lawyer had failed to "Google" a missing defendant as part of due diligence. My, but times have changed! Subscription information may be found here: http://www.ali-aba.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=publications.publications_content&nojson=1&contenttype=IFFL#top. My favorite research from Mark and Carole, which is dog-eared from constant usage, is The Lawyer’s Guide to Fact Finding on the Internet. This is one of the most useful books I have ever purchased, so I heartily recommend it if you spend a lot of time looking for things on the Net. In computer forensics, we spend a lot of time trolling for the sleeze buckets of the earth in places like MySpace and Facebook, but there are so many sources of information on the Net that it is really useful to have a compendium of sources to refer to. The brand new edition of this book may be purchased here: http://www.abanet.org/abastore/index.cfm?section=main&fm=Product.AddToCart&pid=5110568. If you don’t want to buy anything, just check out http://www.netforlawyers.com and you’ll find a lot of free resources as well.  A tip of the hat to Carole and Mark for such truly useful contributions to mining data from the Net!

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