Cargo Too Precious For The Cargo Hold

My company does computer forensics. We go through the metadata on a computer to find “fingerprints.” It lets us identify who did what. If you’ve ever read a police case where something was found on the criminal’s computer and used to convict them, that’s us. But it’s also very technical and tricky because we need to prove it was the criminal who used the computer and what specifically they did. “It’s obvious” isn’t good enough.

What that means is that defence lawyers love to find ways to invalidate our evidence. We can’t prove the evidence wasn’t tampered with before we looked at it. For this reason, when transporting the evidence, we cannot let it out of our sight. If the computer has potentially been touched by another person, it can no longer be used as evidence. You don’t want to have to throw out a conviction on a technicality like that.

Anyhow. To the flight attendant who said, “I’m putting this on Not Always Right,” when I told her the second plane ticket was for the computer and that I couldn’t put it in the overhead luggage: that’s why.