Burgess Forensics

If television has taught the public anything, it’s that catching a cyberstalker takes about thirty seconds in a dark van with lots of blinking lights and headphones, a hoodie, some scrolling green text, and (if we’re lucky) an overly enthusiastic keyboard…

If you scan the criminal dockets for cases involving cyberstalking, you will notice a persistent pattern.

Your next custodian might not have an inbox, a job title, strong feelings about the office thermostat, or about someone nuking last night’s salmon in the microwave.

We have spent years teaching computers to answer our questions, although sometimes it is the other way around.

TV has made digital forensics seem like it’s a piece of cake—all you have to do is lean toward a blurry security camera frame, say “Enhance,” and it will work.

Deleting the messages was the cheap part.

Your client wanted an early start.

The Fourth Amendment walks into the fourth dimension.

Your phone has been keeping a travel diary.

The messages were set to delete within an hour, and some of those settings were changed after a litigation hold had already landed.

By Steve Burgess, Burgess Forensics, 2026 “He passed last month, and his whole life is locked inside his phone.

“It’s encrypted, so I guess we’re just out of luck.”

You thought you sent a one-page letter.

The format language in a discovery request is easy to skip over.

When a client or opposing party says “he deleted everything,” attorneys often hear a dead end.

A fitness tracker once told me the exact moment its wearer stopped moving.

Twenty years ago, a forensic report about a hard drive was mostly an argument about whether a file existed and when it was last touched.