Re: Determining that someone is not the author of an offensive email

On May 29, 2007, at 6:42 PM, Flavio Silva wrote:

>> It sounds like you can also challenge the credentials of the  
>> expert, but
>> that might be a problem if they were appointed by the judge.  An  
>> indictment
>> of this technician will essentially be an indictment of the judge.

IANAL, and I've no knowledge of or interests in the particulars of  
this case.  That being said:

There's also the possibility of MITM (via routing or ARP or proxying  
or what-have-you), and then there's the issue of tracing an email  
back to a particular -computer system- does not equate to tracing it  
back to a particular -person- (i.e., did anyone else have physical  
access to the computer, was the computer trojanned/botted so that  
others could remotely control the computer and send email without the  
owner's knowledge, etc.).

Nonrepudiation simply isn't a property of the vast majority of  
ordinary, consumer-grade Internet email systems (assuming that's what  
you're dealing with, in this instance).  This should be quite easy to  
demonstrate in everyday language which a nontechnical person can  
understand.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Roland Dobbins <[email protected]> // 408.527.6376 voice

You may not be interested in strategy, but strategy is interested in  
you.

                       -- Leon Trotsky