What Evidence is Real in a World of Digitally Altered Material?

Imagine you are prosecuting a child pornography case and have incriminating chats made through Facebook showing the Defendant coercing and soliciting sexually explicit material from minors.  Knowing that you will submit these chats as evidence in trial, you acquire a certificate from Facebook’s records custodian authenticating the documents.  The custodian provides information that confirms the times, accounts and users.  That should be enough, right?

Wrong.  Your strategy relies on the legal theory that chats made through a third-party provider fall into a hearsay exception known as the “business records exemption.”  Under the Federal Rules of Evidence 902(11) “self-authenticating” business records “provides that ‘records of a regularly conducted activity’ that fall into the hearsay exception under Rule 803(6)—more commonly known as the “business records exception”—may be authenticated by way of a certificate from the records custodian.”  (Fed. R. Evid. 902(11)), (United States v. Browne, 834 F.3d 403 (3d Cir. 2016)).

Why does this certification fail to actually show authenticity?  The Third Circuit answers, saying there must be additional, outside evidence (extrinsic) establishing relevance of the evidence.  (United States v. Browne, 834 F.3d 403 (3d Cir. 2016)).

Relevance is another legal concept where “its existence simply has some ‘tendency to make the existence of any fact that is of consequence to the determination of the action more probable or less probable than it would be without the evidence.’”  (United States v. Jones, 566 F.3d 353, 364 (3d Cir. 2009) (quoting Fed. R. Evid. 401)).  Put simply, the existence of this evidence has a material effect on the evaluation of an action.

In Browne, the Third Circuit says the “business records exemption” is not enough because Facebook chats are fundamentally different than business records.  Business records are “supplied by systematic checking, by regularity and continuity which produce habits of precision, by actual experience of business in relying upon them, or by a duty to make an accurate record as part of a continuing job or occupation,” which results in records that can be relied upon as legitimate.

The issue here deals with authenticating the entirety of the chat – not just the timestamps or cached information.  The court delineates this distinction, saying “If the Government here had sought to authenticate only the timestamps on the Facebook chats, the fact that the chats took place between particular Facebook accounts, and similarly technical information verified by Facebook ‘in the course of a regularly conducted activity,’ the records might be more readily analogized to bank records or phone records conventionally authenticated and admitted under Rules 902(11) and 803(6).”

In contrast, Facebook chats are not authenticated based on confirmation of their substance, but instead on the user linked to that account.  Moreover, in this case, the Facebook records certification showed “alleged” activity between user accounts but not the actual identification of the person communicating, which the court found is not conclusive in determining authorship.

The policy concern is that information is easily falsified – accounts may be created with a fake name and email address, or a person’s account may be hacked into and operated by another.  As a result of the ruling in Browne, submitting chat logs into evidence made through a third party such as Facebook requires more than verification of technical data.  The Browne court describes the second step for evidence to be successfully admitted – there must be, extrinsic, or additional outside evidence, presented to show that the chat logs really occurred between certain people and that the content is consistent with the allegations.  (United States v. Browne, 834 F.3d 403 (3d Cir. 2016))

When there is enough extrinsic evidence, the “authentication challenge collapses under the veritable mountain of evidence linking [Defendant] and the incriminating chats.”  In the Browne case, there was enough of this outside evidence that the court found there was “abundant evidence linking [Defendant] and the testifying victims to the chats conducted… [and the] Facebook records were thus duly authenticated” under Federal Rule of Evidence 901(b)(1) in a traditional analysis.

The idea that extrinsic evidence must support authentication of evidence collected from third-party platforms is echoed in the Seventh Circuit decision United States v. Barber, 937 F.3d 965 (7th Cir. 2019).  Here, “this court has relied on evidence such as the presence of a nickname, date of birth, address, email address, and photos on someone’s Facebook page as circumstantial evidence that a page might belong to that person.”

The requirement for extrinsic evidence represents a shift in thinking from the original requirement that the government carries the burden of only ‘“produc[ing] evidence sufficient to support a finding’ that the account belonged to [Defendant] and the linked messages were actually sent and received by him.”  United States v. Barber, 937 F.3d 965 (7th Cir. 2019) citing Fed. R. Evid. 901(a), United States v. Lewisbey, 843 F.3d 653, 658 (7th Cir. 2016).  Here, “Facebook records must be authenticated through the ‘traditional standard’ of Rule 901.” United States v. Frazier, 443 F. Supp. 3d 885 (M.D. Tenn. 2020).

The bottom line is that Facebook cannot attest to the accuracy of the content of its chats and can only provide specific technical data.  This difference is further supported by a District Court ruling mandating traditional analysis under Rule 901 and not allowing a business hearsay exception, saying “Rule 803(6) is designed to capture records that are likely accurate and reliable in content, as demonstrated by the trustworthiness of the underlying sources of information and the process by which and purposes for which that information is recorded… This is no more sufficient to confirm the accuracy or reliability of the contents of the Facebook chats than a postal receipt would be to attest to the accuracy or reliability of the contents of the enclosed mailed letter.”  (United States v. Browne, 834 F.3d 403, 410 (3rd Cir. 2016), United States v. Frazier, 443 F. Supp. 3d 885 (M.D. Tenn. 2020)).

Evidence from social media is allowed under the business records exemption in a select-few circumstances.  For example, United States v. El Gammal, 831 F. App’x 539 (2d Cir. 2020) presents a case that does find authentication of Facebook’s message logs based on testimony from a records custodian.  However, there is an important distinction here – the logs admitted were directly from a “deleted” output, where Facebook itself created the record, rather than a person.  Accordingly, the Tenth Circuit agreed that “spreadsheets fell under the business records exception and, alternatively, appeared to be machine-generated non-hearsay.”  United States v. Channon, 881 F.3d 806 (10th Cir. 2018).

What about photographs – are pictures taken from social media dealt with in the same way as chats when it comes to authentication?  Reviewing a lower court decision, the Sixth Circuit in United States v. Farrad, 895 F.3d 859 (6th Cir. 2018) found that “it was an error for the district court to deem the photographs self-authenticating business records.”  Here, there is a bar on using the business exception that is similar to that found in the authentication of chats, where photographs must also be supported by extrinsic evidence.

While not using the business exception to do so, the court in Farrad nevertheless found that social media photographs were admissible because it would be logically inconsistent to allow “physical photos that police stumble across lying on a sidewalk” while barring “electronic photos that police stumble across on Facebook.”  It is notable that the court does not address the ease with which photographs may be altered digitally, given that was a major concern voiced by the Browne court regarding alteration of digital text.

United States v. Vazquez-Soto, 939 F.3d 365 (1st Cir. 2019) further supports the idea that photographs found through social media need to be authenticated traditionally.  Here, the court explains the authentication process, saying “The standard [the court] must apply in evaluating a[n] [item]’s authenticity is whether there is enough support in the record to warrant a reasonable person in determining that the evidence is what it purports to be.” United States v. Vazquez-Soto, 939 F.3d 365 (1st Cir. 2019) quoting United States v. Blanchard, 867 F.3d 1, 6 (1st Cir. 2017) (internal quotation marks omitted); Fed. R. Evid. 901(a).”  In other words, based on the totality of the evidence to include extrinsic evidence, do you believe the photograph is real?  Here, “what is at issue is only the authenticity of the photographs, not the Facebook page” – it does not necessarily matter who posted the photo, only what was depicted.

Against the backdrop of an alterable digital world, courts seek to emplace guards against falsified information.  The cases here represent the beginning of a foray into what measures can be realistically taken to protect ourselves from digital fabrications.

 

https://www.rulesofevidence.org/article-ix/rule-902/

https://www.rulesofevidence.org/article-viii/rule-803/

https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-browne-12

https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/1469601/united-states-v-jones/?order_by=dateFiled+desc&page=4

https://www.rulesofevidence.org/article-iv/rule-401/

https://www.rulesofevidence.org/article-ix/rule-901/

https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-barber-103

https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-lewisbey-4

https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-frazier-175

https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-el-gammal

https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-channon-8

https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-farrad

https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-vazquez-soto-1?q=United%20States%20v.%20Vazquez-Soto,%20939%20F.3d%20365%20(1st%20Cir.%202019)&PHONE_NUMBER_GROUP=P&sort=relevance&p=1&type=case&tab=keyword&jxs=

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