WASHINGTON, Aug. 6 -- As a federal grand jury in Washington considers Monica Lewinsky's testimony of her alleged relationship with President Clinton, the physical evidence may include the digital data left behind on her computer -- which she thought she had erased. And while Lewinsky may have thought she deleted old e-mail messages and files, such data in reality often can be restored. Lewinsky's files are believed to be hundreds of archived e-mails from the former White House intern to friends such as Linda Tripp, detailing her alleged affair with the president. The computer Lewinsky used at the Defense Department as well as her home have been seized. Many of the e-mails have been described as containing personal information, the type of which might never have been expected to be made public. The ability of prosecutors to restore such data may well have proved to be a crucial step in obtaining Lewinsky's testimony Thursday. If so, the trail of digital data that began in cyberspace reached all the way to the courthouse steps. The reconstruction of computer records is fast becoming a growth industry for lawyers and investigators, adding yet another tool to piece together civil and criminal cases. Such data restoration often surprises clients, who may have believed their 'delete' button sent the data to cyberspace heaven. But the fact is that deleting a file from a computer usually merely moves the data from one sector of a computer's hard drive to another. In all likelihood, the information still exists.
'Delete doesn't mean delete,' says Evan Hendricks, editor and publisher of the newsletter Privacy Times. This fact can also surprise company employees that may have written potentially embarrassing or damaging records, or sent e-mail that they might wish to stay private. 'When people first learn about this, their eyes get wide and their heart rates tend to go up -- but when we tell them we can routinely restore deleted files, the panic really sets in,' says Joan Feldman of Computer Forensics Inc. of Seattle, Wash. Feldman and other computer investigators often look at the printer buffers in computers, old versions of software programs, and hard-to- access parts of computer's operating systems like Windows to find data once thought destroyed or lost. Contents of computer files can also threaten the security of a business itself if not properly disposed of. Unlike paper evidence, computer evidence can exist in many forms, with earlier versions still accessible on a computer's disk. Alternate forms of the same data can often be discovered. 'There are major liability questions that arise when data is not disposed of,' Holt Hackney of Strategic Forecasting, an Austin, Texas, consulting company, told United Press International. The company has created software that makes certain erased data stays erased. The program, called Shredder, hunts down old files on a computer and writes over them, often as many as 12 times, which makes certain the original information is no longer readable. The same type of liability issue exists when a company sells or donates old computers, believing the original data contained in them has been destroyed. Such data could pose risks if obtained by competitors, or in cases of a law firm, obtained by other litigants. 'It's a matter of time before a due diligence question arises,' Strategic Forecasting's George Friedman, explained to UPI. 'Was a law firm obligated to make sure the computer hard drives it donated or sold through a reseller were properly sanitized, making their client's highly sensitive information unrecoverable?' Friedman asked. While electronic data has been admissible in court for 25 years, these newer issues of liability and data restoration are as new as the digital detectives that search for the lost files. The issue has implications for the legal profession itself, Friedman points out. 'In the future, attorneys who do not properly advise clients about the recoverability of deleted data could possibly face legal malpractice suits,' he suggested. 'We've noticed a perceptible increase in interest from the legal community' in his company's data removal products. ---NEWLN:Copyright 1998 by United Press InternationalNEWLN:All rights reservedNEWLN:---
