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by SuperNinjaCat 2543 days ago
When I first read this I interpreted it as possibly having something to do with enabling offensive cyber operations (maybe?), it just sounded too weird to be anything else.

One thing I did notice during the ABC raid was how the police ignored general digital forensic practices and simply created an archive on the target drive (overwriting any data previously there), dragged and dropped what they wanted into it, then zipped it up and left (this was according to one ABC employees twitter feed while they were in the office as it was happening).
1 comments
brokenmachine 2543 days ago
That struck me as well. How can they ever use that as evidence in a court case when there is no chain of custody whatsoever?

Who cares I guess, they have the power to modify any data they want anyway. It's crazy.

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SuperNinjaCat 2543 days ago
My first impression was that they had no intention of going to court with the data they were after, but then again I've not read up on any legal case studies involving digital forensic evidence handling which are publicly available in Australia (how would a magistrate even deal with that sort of evidence if it can legally be modified? I'm not sure any of these new laws have been tested in court before).

It's nuts that something that used to be seen as solid evidence in court could now be seen as totally unreliable, and just because someone may present it saying "trust me because I'm a cop" means absolutely nothing when someone has a duty to factor the human element into the equation. The guidelines regarding the handling of digital forensic evidence (and all types of evidence for that matter) were designed to deal with this. So yeah, I think what I'm trying to say here is that among the new laws, that one in particular could do much more harm than good due to being so vague in its wording and scope. From what I've read about the US court system, this type of evidence would no longer be permitted in 99.9% of cases, It wouldn't matter if you're the damn pope presenting it, everyone's human. I actually wish I knew a magistrate in real life to ask them how they would handle a case involving this law and a drive handed to them by some prosecution team involving the AFP.

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