Summary
This paper advocates that cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum don’t challenge the current legal system, since they fit comfortably enough into the immaterial asset legal definition. As such, while a blockchain-based cryptocurrency can’t be considered as legal tender or electronic money, it can be exchanged on a contractual basis as it happens with every other kind of good. Continue reading “A contribution to the analysis of the legal status of cryptocurrencies”
The Italian Supreme Court to Outlaw Whatsapp and PGP?
On August, 30 2018 the Italian Supreme Court issued a decision affirming that the use of Whatsapp and PGP – together with Blackberry and “dedicated” mobile phones – was a way, for the defendants, to jeopardize the investigations. Continue reading “The Italian Supreme Court to Outlaw Whatsapp and PGP?”
SOF on Trial. The Technical and Legal Value of Battlefield Digital Forensics in Court
The book Information Security Systems has been published in late 2017 by Springer as part of the ? Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series.
Together with Prof. Luigi Mancini and dr. Agostino Panico of the Information Technology Department of the Sapienza University (Rome) I wrote the chapter titled “SOF on Trial. The Technical and Legal Value of Battlefield Digital Forensics in Court“.
Here is the abstract: Continue reading “SOF on Trial. The Technical and Legal Value of Battlefield Digital Forensics in Court”
No More Data Retention in Italy?
Yesterday the Internet Traffic Mandatory Data Retention regulation expired without being re-enacted by the Parliament. This means that at the midnight of June, 30, all the Italian Telcos and ISPs just (or should have) deleted last year Internet usage information from their databases.
Maybe the Parliament and the Data Protection Authority just had a strike of consciousness and decided so, after having “forgotten” for years to stress test the national data retention legislation to check if it could still stands against the EU Court of justice 2014 decision that bashed the data-retention directive.
Or, maybe, the powers-that-be just forgot about the data-retention.
We’ll never know for sure, but fact is that current high profile criminal investigations are now deprived of an important information gathering tool.
Phoney and the forensics value of Iphone chat
Phoneys is a software that allows a user to change the content of an Iphone chat thus altering the meaning of the conversation.While this is just an entertainment software, it might have some disturbing impacts on a possible criminal investigation.
Indeed, SMS, chat transcripts and messages are routinely used as a source of evidence by lawyers and prosecutors on the basis that if something is on a phone it can be hardly be faked. Of course, this is not always true, of course evidences must be corroborated by independent checks, of course the legal community is not that dumb to give face value to a text on a phone screen. But…
Phoneys allows a malicious person to create a prima facie deceiving fact, by exploiting the fact that a message has actually been sent, thus leading the investigator into thinking that a conversation took place with the intended correspondent. In an emergency context, the necessity of taking immediate action might push him to under evaluate what has been shown as “evidence”, thus jeopardizing the final result.
Maybe this is a either a minor or non-existent issue. But judicial reality has proven to be more surprising then legal-thriller. So, next time you’re confronted with a message as an evidence, why not double check?
Just in case…