If you are interested in attending, the details are here.

The presentation material is here (also on the right column of this page under “Materials”).

Typically, as we’ve discussed here before, judges will take one of three approaches: (1) granting access as a normal part of discovery; (2) requiring some threshold indication that there is something discoverable on Facebook; or (3) simply denying the request.

No indication what a “neutral forensic computer expert” may be relative to Facebook.  Maybe a lawyer with a blog?

A full background discussion can be found in Discovery of Facebook Content in Florida Cases.

Case is Perrone v. Lancaster Regional Medical Center (Judge James P. Cullen).

The order is here.

Yes, according to several recent cases and a broad exception to the Fourth Amendment (search and seizure).

Read “Can They Search Your iPad or iPhone at the Border?” from the May 2013 Palm Beach County Bar Association Bulletin.

And, yes, that case to the right is for sale here .

On the other hand, the plaintiff can serve e-discovery on the defendant: in that situation, the individual plaintiff likely has little to none but the defendant corporation is now scrambling with retention policies, multiple devices, and gobs of data.

Are social media and e-discovery treated the same by the courts?

This article, Defendants Want Social Media, Plaintiffs Want E-Discovery, from the April 2013 Palm Beach Bar Bulletin discusses these (developing) legal trends.

According to Swanky Apps LLC v. Daren Horning and Roony Invest & Finance, S.A., the answer is “no.”

A dispute arose between the parties and suit was filed in Miami.  The Defendant filed a Motion to Dismiss, raising the lack of personal jurisdiction.

The facts involve the Plaintiff, while temporarily in Florida, making a phone call to Defendant in New York.  While Plaintiff was in Miami, the parties also exchanged emails and Defendant was permitted to remotely access Plaintiff’s computer to download or edit files.  The court repeatedly referenced that the Plaintiff was in Miami “temporarily” which sounds like a business trip or vacation.  The parties have no other Florida contacts.

Bottom line: receiving calls from Miami Beach and exchanging emails and files with someone “temporarily” in Miami, without more, does not create jurisdiction.

We have, however, a long history of blaming entertainment for societal ills… even to the point of Congressional hearings on the comic book.

Moreover, as a legal issue, we’ve been down this road quite recently — the 2011 US Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Entertainment, which discussed these very issues at length as well as the “evidence” surrounding a connection between games and guns.

The article, Don’t Bring a Video Game to a Gun Fight, discusses these issues in the March 2013 Palm Beach Bar Bulletin.

The discussion continues and we could probably clean up much of society in a number of ways to fix gun violence.  Re-read Brown and see how you feel about spending time and money on video games (and whether laws regulating video games are worth the effort).

The court held that the statute is violated when (1) a person writes or composes a threat to kill or do bodily harm, (2) the person sends the communication, and (3) the threat is to the recipient or a member of his family.

Here, Defendant went on a rant about a relative, posting on Facebook that he was “gonna fuck you up and bury your bitch ass. [...]  I’ll tear up the concrete with your face and drag you back to your doorstep.”  The entire post is set forth in footnote two of the opinion.

Without comment, the court deemed this post to be a threat to kill or do bodily harm.

The court held that the post was “sent” since the statute was amended in 2010 to include “electronic communication” and that, by the very nature of Facebook, “it is reasonable to presume that the [Defendant] wished to communicate the information to all his Facebook friends.”

Finally, the Defendant had previously sent a Facebook friend request to one of his relatives, Michael.  At the time the post was made, Michael had accepted the request and was a Facebook friend of the Defendant.  Michael showed the post to another relative, who then showed it to the victim (it appears all persons were related).  The court concluded that Michael was the recipient and the threat was directed at a member of Michael’s family.

Both the trial and appellate court made note of the fact that Defendant’s Facebook page was public at the time the post was made.  It appears the trial court relied in part on the public status of the Facebook page when it ruled on whether the post was “sent.”  In what appears to be dicta, the First District notes that “electronic communications” on the Internet are frequently not direct communications but sent to groups on social media sites.  Thus, this opinion may leave to future cases the specific question as to whether a public post on a social media site is “sent” to a victim.

In a slip-and-fall personal injury action, Palm Beach County Circuit Court Judge Meenu Sasser entered a January 29, 2013 Order Sustaining Plaintiff’s Objections to Social Networking Discovery.

Judge Sasser’s 11-page opinion enters the fray among other trial and intermediate appellate court opinions on the discoverability of social media information.

Judge Sasser references the 2012 article, Discovery of Facebook Content in Florida Cases, on page 1 (obliquely) and page 5 (directly).

She also discusses the 2011 order in Beswick v. NW. Med. Ctr, 2011 WL 7005038, where the trial court ordered social media production.

On the other hand, there has been plenty of coverage of the U.S. memo entitled the Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against U.S. Citizen Who Is A Senior Operational Leader of Al-Qa’ida or an Associated Force.

So now you can read both memos, back-to-back.

The Al Qaida memo has seemingly not hit the news yet  – google “Al Qaida memo drones” and only one story appears in Fast Company, Terrorists May Know How to Avoid Drones, Memo Says.

If you thought that Al Qaida had a lack of technical experience, this memo enumerates 21 ways to avoid drone detection (starting with hiding from under a tree and then it moves towards jamming frequencies).  There is even a discussion of the “War of the Drones” and how, according to Al Qaida, the US moved from F-16 fighters to less expensive drones.  Shockingly, it discusses using a $3,000 system called Skygrabber which you can buy off the internet at Skygrabber.com.  There is a YouTube video showing how Skygrabber can intercept (or at least in 2009) Drone communications.

For context of the US memo, Michael Isakoff’s (NBC) article on the revelation of that report is here.

Special thanks to Gizmodo, which brought the Al Qaida story to our attention (their article includes both the original Arabic as well as link to the English translation, if you are so minded to check that out).

This seminar discusses:

1.  Top Ten Things to Know About E-Discovery (from Chin to Zublake, Litigation Hold Letters to Predictive Coding)

2.  New Florida E-Discovery Rules (SC11-1542)

3.  Sample Litigation Hold, Responses, Internal Letters

4.  Social Media Discovery

The Powerpoint for the seminar is here.  The sample letters are here.  Also on the right column of this site under Materials.