Saskatoon Crime Stoppers are poking around for criminal-catching tips in a new way.

The volunteer-based organization, which specializes in acquiring crime tips, has started a Facebook group to help gain information from social networkers in the Saskatoon community.

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There are dozens of ways to get information about people on the Internet. If Friendster, MySpace and Facebook don’t give you enough dirt, there are private online detective services that ask for a small fee in exchange for a promise of a lot of information on whomever you choose to investigate.

My editor, Michelle Holmes, asked me if I wanted to sign up for an online detective service to see how well they work. These are the companies that claim to have information about anyone and everyone, and for a $29 fee, I too, would be able to become an anonymous researcher with all the information about everyone in my world. I was hooked.

Michelle handed me her credit card, and I signed up for Net Detective, a Florida-based company that claims to be the No. 1 spy on the Internet. I eagerly got to work plugging in my name, excited to see what the rest of the Internet world could discover about me.

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So you’ve met someone online. You’ve met a few times and seem to be “clicking.” This relationship has potential. But how do you know that this person you’re dating is really who they say they are?

Online dating “may seem like a convenience for some people, but you don’t really know who is on the other end,” says Ken Plummer, crime prevention officer with the Rochester Police Department.

There are ways to check into a potential partner’s background. Start by typing their name into Google or another search engine to see what comes up. You also can try an online public records search through a fee-based service such as ussearch.com or netsleuth.com. You also can conduct a search of Olmsted County court records on the fifth floor of the city-county Government Center.

Q: My partner of three years and I have a 1-year-old child; there have never been any issues of infidelity on either part. However, I recently discovered that he has a secret email address. Although I don’t have the password to get in to the account, I was able to find out the pass code to change his password in order to gain access. I know that breaking into his account poses huge moral issues, as well as trust issues, but I can’t get this out of my mind. What should I do? - Curious and Confused

A: Having the means doesn’t give a licence to cross boundaries. Nor do you have any evidence of his wrongdoing. You could’ve picked up a phone extension to monitor his calls, steamed open letters addressed only to him, even followed him to work every day to see if that’s where he really goes. But you didn’t because “there have never been any issues of infidelity.”

Meanwhile, his secret email address could be a holdover from the past – a private address he’s never bothered to change; or maybe it’s the one he uses to vent frustration with his buddies. Ask him, if you feel you must.

This past weekend, we passed a milestone — 100 days since the enacting of the new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure as they relate to eDiscovery. In summary, those Rules attempt to give courts guidance for how to treat digital data and information, in whatever form and context it is in.

The Rules try to contain the ever escalating costs that plaintiffs and defendants. So spreadsheets, letters, contracts, e-mails and all of those files that are stored on disk and on tape, on and off the network can, should, and must be “discoverable” to all of the parties engaged in litigation.

So, after 100 days, how are the Rules standing up.

That’s what we’ll be talking about here.

The file is gone. It’s not in the recycle bin. You’ve done a complete search of your files for it, and now the panic sets in. It’s vanished. You may have even asked people to look through their e-mail because maybe you sent it to them (you didn’t). Oops. Now what?

Hours, days, maybe even years, of hard work seem to be lost. Wait! Don’t touch that PC! Every action you take on your PC at this point may be destroying what is left of your file. It’s not too late yet. You’ve possibly heard that things that are deleted are never really deleted, but you may also think that it will cost you thousands of dollars to recover deleted files once you’ve emptied the recycle bin. Suffice it to say, unless you are embroiled in complicated e-Discovery or forensic legal proceedings where preservation is a requirement, recovering some deleted files for you may cost no more than a tune-up for your car.

People go to online dating services every day trying to find a match. What they may not know is that most dating services don’t do background checks on members.

Beth Potter found out the consequences six months ago.

She met a man on americansingles.com. They chatted for weeks, and finally set up a date.

But Beth says right away, things didn’t feel right.

MetaLINCS™, a leading provider of packaged E-Discovery software for litigation readiness and compliance-related investigations, today announced the Department of Justice (DOJ) Anti-Trust Division is extending its use of the MetaLINCS Enterprise E-Discovery Suite™ for use in corporate oversight and enforcement actions. Featuring the industry’s first guided analysis technology, the MetaLINCS Enterprise E-Discovery Suite helps the DOJ speed up the process of discovering relevant information within electronic messages and documents, and improves the accuracy of investigations. MetaLINCS software enables the DOJ to use early analysis functionality to quickly locate important information exchanges between key players prior to reviewing each document.

E-Discovery is now the most costly component of the legal and investigatory process, and as it grows in complexity, the associated costs and risks continue to soar. The ability to assess cases at their earliest stages can reveal important information quickly, reducing overall E-Discovery costs by as much as 75 percent. Early assessment can also lead counsel to conclude that 80 percent of the data they processed is irrelevant, not requiring further examination. Such early insight can inform initial strategic decision-making and drive more favorable case outcomes.

Companies turn to software for storing, retrieving electronic documents

With its early embrace of Linux and its highly reliable online banking site, KeyBank NA is among the most efficient, cutting-edge banks in the U.S. when it comes to IT — except in one area, until recently.

When Al Coppolo was asked by lawyers at the KeyCorp operating unit to produce old e-mails for litigation or regulatory compliance reasons, he would have as many as four members of his IT team trudge to an offsite storage facility to retrieve tapes, then mount them on servers and painstakingly search for the requested messages.

“It was a completely manual environment,” said Coppolo, who is executive vice president and director of infrastructure at Cleveland-based KeyBank. “Sometimes we would have to look through multiple copies of the same e-mail on multiple tapes if there were multiple replies.”

The process was so laborious and time-consuming that usually his team just barely met a 30-day internal deadline for producing e-mails. And, Coppolo noted, the number of legal requests was only growing. Moreover, new federal e-discovery rules went into effect in December that spelled out requirements for submitting electronic documents – including e-mail and instant messaging logs – as evidence in civil court cases.

Users turn to software for storing and retrieving e-mails, instant messages

With its early embrace of Linux and its highly reliable online banking site, KeyBank NA is among the most efficient, cutting-edge banks in the U.S. when it comes to IT — but that wasn’t the case in one area until recently.

When Al Coppolo was asked by lawyers at the KeyCorp operating unit to produce old e-mails for litigation or regulatory compliance, he would have as many as four members of his IT team trudge to an off-site storage facility to retrieve tapes, mount them on servers and painstakingly search for the requested messages.

“It was a completely manual environment,” said Coppolo, executive vice president and director of infrastructure at Cleveland-based KeyBank. “Sometimes we would have to look through copies of the same e-mail on multiple tapes if there were multiple replies.”

• Group for Private Investigators
• Group for Process Servers