eDisclosure Information Project

We live in a world where it is necessary to advise people not to drink the hand sanitiser, and where cautious lawyers make you put up notices warning that the water coming from a hot tap may be hot.

In that spirit, I have put a note at the top of my two posts (here and here) about the photographs of President Trump “working” in hospital:

This and its accompanying article are about the probability that the Trump hospital pictures were taken on the date and at the time appearing from the published screenshots of the EXIF viewer. This shouldn’t need saying. but they are not advanced treatises, still less advice, on all the technical and legal issues which can arise when handling electronic data. For that you will want to take specialist advice.

My second post was called Irritating interjections from LinkedIn commentators with nothing worth adding to the subject. The “irritating interjections” were a kind of whataboutery, equivalent to:

Your article about rowing boats on the pond failed to mention the risk of hitting an iceberg at night in mid-Atlantic Continue reading →

This and its accompanying article are about the probability that the Trump hospital pictures were taken on the date and at the time appearing from the published screenshots of the EXIF viewer. This shouldn’t need saying. but they are not advanced treatises, still less advice, on all the technical and legal issues which can arise when handling electronic data. For that you will want to take specialist advice.

The painting “The Irritating Gentleman” by Berthold Woltze is well known now, often used to illustrate mansplaining. It was only when I looked for it as an illustration for this post that I discovered that “Irritating” was Woltze’s label for the man giving his unwanted views to a woman on a train. I had been casting around for a word to describe the people mentioned below, seeking a word slightly softer than the ones I used in the first draft. “Irritating” is perfect for the man (and it’s always a man) who dumps unhelpful comments against a social media post without any positive contribution to the discussion. 

A little man on LinkedIn has challenged the premise of my article about the timing of the Trump hospital photographs. He was rude as well as wrong, but he is not worth powder and shot so I won’t identify him. Another man says that this was “Not the best example of what EXIF can do”. Gosh – how very remiss of me.

It seemed right, however, to double-check the point made by the first observation, and to deal briefly with the second. I do not claim infallibility in this area, but there are two reasons why I felt confident of my ground as to to the dates and times of the photographs. Continue reading →

In Depp v News Group Newspapers Ltd & Anor [2020] EWHC 1689 (QB) (29 June 2020) the defendants’ counsel submitted that Johnny Depp’s mentions in texts to “whitey stuff” were references to cocaine. The Civil Procedure Rules of England and Wales are set out in The White Book. The White Book’s rules and the ‘whitey stuff’ texts collided in a hearing before Mr Justice Nicol last week. The White Book won, and Depp’s case was struck out, subject to an application for relief from sanctions which, the judge said, must be made PDQ because the trial was listed for 7 July.

The main point at issue was whether, on the face of the pleaded cases, the apparent drug use brought certain texts within Rule 31.6. It mattered also that the disclosure was proportionate.

__________

Johnny Depp last appeared in this blog in February, when I commented (cautiously) on a report in the Guardian that his “previous legal team accidentally shared an archive of 70,000 messages with the Sun’s lawyers.” He turns up now because his libel action against his former wife, Amber Heard, fell to be struck out for failure to comply with an order for disclosure made in March. If there is no successful application for relief from sanctions, the striking out will presumably take effect from the expiry of the order referred to below. Continue reading →

When an investigation was announced into the grant made to Boris Johnson’s friend Jennifer Arcuri, I rather assumed that we would shortly hear of missing documents. And so we did. As everyone mocked the elaborate stories told by Boris Johnson’s consigliere Dominic Cummings about his drive to Durham, I recalled another story involving the tracking of a Land Rover Discovery. That journey involved one person being killed with a crossbow; we will never find out how many people the virus-infected Cummings killed with his trip. In both cases, politics and discovery overlapped.

We are short of amusement in these difficult times, but we got some light relief recently when a story resurfaced from last year. Prime Minister Boris Johnson asserted in November 2019 that he had never told a lie in his political career. His life, political and otherwise, has in fact been defined by dishonest assertions, from his days as a journalist in Brussels (when he invented so many of the EU stories which led the less thoughtful of the Telegraph readers to vote Leave), via the Vote Leave campaign itself, on through the lockdown press conferences, and right through to Prime Minister’s Questions last week.

Discovery comes into it, or will do so, in both specific cases and generally. In the wider field, there will in due course be public inquiries into (among other things) the Garden Bridge, the whole conduct of Vote Leave (and specifically into the report on Russian influence in the referendum), the Jennifer Arcuri affair, and the conduct of the Covid-19 reaction. All it needs is for Johnson’s party to turn on him – this will be about a week after the coronavirus dies down so that they can blame him for it without having to handle the problem themselves. The inquiries will flush out some interesting documents which will be used to test Johnson’s assertions, both those made contemporaneously with the events in question and those made in the inquiries. I may book front row seats Continue reading →