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You Won't Know It When You See It: The Challenges of Fabricated Evidence in the Digital Age
It was a Perry Mason moment for the Digital Age, and it came on one of the biggest of stages — in the midst of a heated, $1.4 billion lawsuit between two oil giants squaring off in a Fort Worth, TX courtroom in 2015. Moncrief Oil International had sued Russian oil and gas giant Gazprom over an unsuccessful contract to purchase part of a Russian gas field in the late 1990s. Moncrief alleged that it had shared inside information with Gazprom in 2004 about a planned natural gas plant in Texas, and that Gazprom used that information to cut a better deal with Occidental Petroleum, the plant's manufacturer. Gazprom denied receiving any trade secrets, only to have Moncrief and its lawyers confront them with a 2004 PowerPoint slide deck. A single slide from that presentation, containing a chart from an analysis of natural gas value claim costs prepared by a University of Texas geologist, was the supposed "smoking gun."
But when Gazprom's legal team did an Internet search that revealed that the information in the "2004" slide was actually prepared in 2012, the "smoking gun" was exposed as a fabrication. Gazprom moved for sanctions, and Moncrief's lawyers — acknowledging that an "employee made a tragic mistake that created a flawed record" — voluntarily dismissed their billion dollar lawsuit with prejudice. All of this was the result of someone putting the title of the chart in question into Google, and seeing the actual author from 2012 appear atop the search results.
How significant is the threat of fabricated digital evidence that can alter the outcome of a case? In today's wired workplace, it's considerable. In 2020 alone, 306.4 billion emails were sent each day with over 4 billion email users worldwide. Facebook Messenger, approaching 2.4 billion users worldwide, features more than 20 billion messages exchanged in a typical month. With an estimated 810 million users and more than 57 million companies represented, LinkedIn clocks over 100 million active engagements per week. When one adds digital collaboration platforms like Slack into the mix, the amount of chat data for even a single company can be staggering: T-Mobile's director of discovery and information governance, for example, says that her company's use of Slack has mushroomed to more than 3 million messages daily.
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