Speeding Up Criminal Reference Checks

The federal government is implementing new digital technology to speed up the process for obtaining criminal reference checks. This change will be welcome relief to employers who are required to perform criminal reference checks on employees or prospective employees, such as school boards and social services agencies. A link to a CTV article on the announcement is here.

Investigating Computer Abuse – Help for Human Resources

My colleague Kathryn Bird and I presented today at the HRPA 2011 conference on “Investigating Computer System Abuse – Help for HR.” It was our aim to help human resources professionals charged with investigating computer-related misconduct to identify issues, ask proper questions of internal IT and know when to get professional IT forensics and legal help. We covered investigation basics, sources of digital evidence, preservation best practices, interview tips and managing the investigation record. Big thanks to Kevin Lo of Froese Forensics for reflecting on some of our ideas over beers. Slides are below.

The Special Case of E-Mail (as Electronic Evidence)

I attended and presented at Day 1 of the Osgoode Short Course in Obtaining, Producing and Presenting Electronic Evidence.

Thank you to Chuck Rothman of Wortzman Nickle for fielding my question about preserving web based communications. He suggested that Adobe Acrobat does a good job of producing a reasonably true copy of web page renderings, but should be used in conjunction with good evidence handling practices – e.g., keeping a log of steps, hashing the file produced and so on. Chuck also mentioned Facebook’s new feature that allows users to download profiles as worth thinking about when dealing with Facebook preservation issues.

I presented with John Gregory on “The Special Case of Email.” John is a true authority on electronic evidence, and I’ve been lucky to do this presentation with him a few times now. Our slides are below.

For some of John’s materials on electronic evidence, check out his web page here. We also noted Stephen Mason’s excellent website as a resource on electronic evidence. It is linked here.