Submission + - Rising PC Surveillance leading to Divorce Courts
Hugh Pickens writes: ""Google and Yahoo may know everything, but they don't really care about you," says one divorce attorney but "no one cares more about the things you do than the person that used to be married to you." Read an article from the New York Times on how traces of Web site visits, mobile telephone records, and hacked e-mail accounts are becoming the fodder for divorce proceedings. One lawyer says three-quarters of her cases now involve some kind of electronic communications and that she routinely asks judges for court orders to seize and copy the hard drives of her clients' spouses. Although lawyers must navigate a complex legal landscape governing the admissibility of electronic evidence, if the computer in question is shared by the whole family, or couples have revealed their passwords to each other, reading a spouse's e-mail messages and introducing them as evidence in a divorce case is often allowed. "The only thing you can truly erase these things with is a specialty Smith & Wesson product," says one investigator. "Throw your computer into the air and play skeet with it.""
