Canadian Lawyer

w w w . C A N A D I A N L a w y e r m a g . c o m M a y 2 0 1 4 51 lEgal rEport/CRiminAl lAw & foREnSiCS i n what might be the most high-profile seizure ever of a smartphone in Canada, police obtained a court order and trav- elled to the United States earlier this year to extract information from the iPhone of a friend of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford. Toronto police were unable to analyze the device allegedly belonging to Alexander "Sandro" Lisi "because they did not have the current forensic tools to ex- tract information from the phone," stated a sworn affidavit by an officer in the inves- tigation dubbed Project Brazen 2. An assistance order was granted by an Ontario judge compelling Apple Inc. to extract data from the phone, includ- ing photos, videos, text messages, and call logs. e phone was kept sealed and a To- ronto police officer flew to California to meet with Apple's "law enforcement com- pliance team." He returned with extracted data placed on an external hard drive. Lisi is facing extortion charges in connection with alleged attempts to recover a video of Ford smoking crack cocaine and the data from the phone, which police say they did not view be- fore obtaining the court order, is part of the ongoing investigation. In the Lisi case, the process was much more public but everyday across the country, there are seizures of electronic devices by police without such exten- sive efforts to extract data and maintain a chain of custody to ensure the infor- mation is authentic and admissible. e information seized can range from text messages to pictures to social media postings and the amount of data can be overwhelming. A single gigabyte on a smart phone can store over 100,000 e- mails (without attachments) or nearly 65,000 pages of word processing files. More than 56 per cent of Canadians use a smartphone, according to a study released by Google last summer. ere were nearly 20 million Canadian users on Facebook in 2013 and seven million LinkedIn accounts, according to indus- try data. All of these devices and social media sites provide opportunities for the storing of information or posting of utterances New technology, traditional legal tests Forensic evidence gained from online and electronic devices requires rigorous tests for admissibility. by Shannon Kari

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