Digital Court Cases

I was able to find several examples of court cases involving digital evidence and its admissibility in court, but the search for specific cases involving searches of seized or suspect digital media was little harder to come by. The laws have changed drastically over the last decade as digital information has become more prevalent in our daily lives. For example, most important court decisions involving digital searches happened within the last five years, which is just crazy considering digital data storage has been used to the point of being commonplace for twenty to thirty years. In 2000, United States v. Scott‐Emuakpor set the precedent when collecting digital evidence, and that was that it was only necessary for testimony of a witness who was present while data was collected from computers for it to be admissible as evidence. Sounds ridiculous in hindsight, know what we know now of the common knowledge of rights to digital privacy. In this case, as an investigator, while waiting for access to the computer’s hard drive, I might try to get a warrant of the ISP of the suspect to get records of e-mails and any other internet traffic. This is only the case because of the court ruling in …show more content…
If the intelligence you have that indicates that the terrorists identity is stored on the laptop, you would still need a warrant to search it unless you could show that you had evidence that the terrorists attack was imminent enough to cause immediate danger to people. Then you could search it right away, while waiting on an easily obtained warrant. If this scenario is to be taken as the exact state of events going on during this case and investigation, it sounds as though enough intelligence exists to make obtaining a warrant to search the laptop an almost foregone conclusion. As the intelligence in question comes from the apprehended suspect itself, searching the laptop immediately would be