I have been following the stories about the supposed forged CBS documents with great interest. You can find a good introduction to some of the discussion in Ernest Miller's blog entry Corante > The Importance of... > CBS Memo Defense: Richard Katz Is Wrong About Ones and Els.
People like Miller and Seth Finklestein (CBS Forged Memos Comparison Evidence) are unknowingly reinventing the ancient and venerable archival science of diplomatics: "The study of the creation, forms, and transmission of records, and their relationship to the facts represented in them and to their creator, in order to identify, evaluate, and communicate their nature and authenticity." There is great interest being paid to the form of the documents in order to draw conclusions about their authenticity.
We can do that with typed documents from the 1970s, but what clues would we have if these documents only existed in electronic form? What would constitute documentary evidence that could be considered to be legally binding? There is some discussion of this in the CLIR report Authenticity in a Digital Environment, but I would stress the need for an independent third party repository for the documents. Would we be asking questions about the documents' authenticity if the documents had come from the National Military Personnel Records Center in St. Louis (assuming that there was a clear chain of provenace from creation to deposit, and assuming as well that the director of the National Archives, which oversees the Center, was an independent professional and not a political appointee)?
For a quick break (made me laugh out loud), take a look at the Word Paper Clip Guy at Isthatlegal.org via The Volokh Conspiracy Sept 15 at 11:15pm
Posted by: Mary Minow | September 15, 2004 at 09:45 PM