Insights
I write about technical questions that recur in proceedings and about which, in practice, mistaken beliefs take hold. These are texts for people who practise law: they explain the technology, they do not substitute for the legal reasoning.
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How much does a digital forensics report cost in Italy?
A better answer than «it depends»: the factors that move the price of a technical examination, the orders of magnitude seen on the market, the four questions a serious quote answers in writing, who pays the expert and when the cost is recovered.
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Audio recordings as evidence: lawful when? Worth what?
A participant may record a conversation, even covertly. But between the lawfulness of recording and its weight in court lies the whole terrain of disavowal: how an audio file is challenged, what a technical examination can read in it, and how to preserve a recording so that it holds.
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Recovering deleted messages: what is actually possible
The market promises much; the physics of modern storage concedes less. Why recovery from the device is the exception, where data really comes back from — backups, archives, the other participant's phone — what operators cannot give you, and how a recovery acquires evidential value.
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Is the phone being spied on? How to verify — and how to prove it
The symptoms in circulation — battery, heat, data usage — prove almost nothing. How domestic surveillance actually happens, what a serious technical verification consists of, and why cleaning the phone before documenting destroys the very evidence that was needed.
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CTU and CTP: Italy's two kinds of technical expert
The court's expert and the party's expert: two near-identical acronyms for two different jobs. Who appoints them, what powers they have, how they meet in the expert operations, what changes in criminal proceedings and how the costs fall.
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Do WhatsApp screenshots stand up in court?
The question I am asked most often. The short answer is «it depends, and usually less than people think». The long one concerns the difference between a document and a representation, the disavowal mechanism under article 2712 of the Italian Civil Code, and what can be done to strengthen a conversation before it is filed.
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How to challenge the authenticity of an email
An email contains far more than the client displays. The anatomy of headers, what Received lines actually establish, how to read SPF and DKIM without being a systems engineer, and why Italian certified email follows rules of its own.
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Forensic imaging: why the hash is not a technical detail
The reason a copy holds up in court comes down to a sixty-four character number. What a hash function is, why MD5 is no longer enough on its own, how the chain of custody works, and what happens when a link is missing.
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Litigation over AI systems: what can genuinely be established
Litigation about artificial intelligence is only now emerging, between those who claim nothing can be proved and those who promise impossible findings. What is technically demonstrable about a generative system, what is not, and why detectors of machine-written text are not usable as evidence.
Do you have a matter under way?
Tell me what happened and what you need to prove. In a first reply I will tell you whether there is a technical route, what data is needed and how long it takes — before any commitment.