New firm, Inquest, able to trace hard drive's history

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Doug Pitt's newest company proves useful for legal field|ret||ret||tab|

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by Maria Hoover|ret||ret||tab|

Inside Business Editor|ret||ret||tab|

mhoover@sbjl.net|ret||ret||tab|

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Inquest Inc. is a detective agency of sorts, uncovering the complete histories of computer hard drives, according to owner Doug Pitt.|ret||ret||tab|

"Every picture that was ever viewed on that computer, every file, every e-mail, chat discussion, your online history (is available)," Pitt said. "If you stopped and visited a site for 14 seconds, we'll be able to tell you. Every file that you printed and then deleted."|ret||ret||tab|

Pitt said Inquest can pull information from a computer even if it has been reformatted from, say, Windows 98 to Windows 2000. "We can still go back and get that old information back when it was a 98 machine," Pitt said.|ret||ret||tab|

Inquest, which opened in 2002, shares space with Pitt's ServiceWorld Computers at 1409 W. Sunshine. In addition to tracking down old information, Inquest also does file verification to find out "when a file was created, when it was edited, where it was moved to, if it was deleted," Pitt said, adding that file verification often comes into play in situations that involve contractual issues.|ret||ret||tab|

Law enforcement, the legal community and private investigators are the three main areas from which Inquest derives its business, although the company also works with individual computer owners. Pitt estimates that about 50 percent of Inquest's business involves family law issues.|ret||ret||tab|

"We do a lot of issues dealing with child custody where a parent has suspicions about another parent. There may be financial issues, and holding money, estate issues," Pitt said. "Unfortunately, it can be deviant issues as well. They think a spouse is into something they shouldn't be, and we're able to get on and get that information." |ret||ret||tab|

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Finding the data|ret||ret||tab|

Pitt said there are several tools used by Inquest to find hard-drive histories, and most of those are software, although there are a few hardware pieces. |ret||ret||tab|

The type of tool depends on the type of software that Inquest if trying to pull information from. Specific types of software used for hard-drive mining aren't something Pitt shares with the public.|ret||ret||tab|

And finding the information isn't easy.|ret||ret||tab|

"When we get it, it's really alphabet soup, and we have to go in and we have to lay out the searches ourselves. It's not like we can just pull up this directory and have it go find files," Pitt said. |ret||ret||tab|

Retrieval success isn't 100 percent, Pitt said, but "it's darn close." |ret||ret||tab|

"The hard drive needs to be spinning, and as long as it's spinning, then we can usually get that data off," he said. Viruses don't usually hamper the searches, he said.|ret||ret||tab|

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A separate entity|ret||ret||tab|

Hard drives searching originally was offered through ServiceWorld, Pitt said. "But because of the legal nature in dealing with all the different types of cases that we've done I just felt it was better to have a separate entity involved," he said.|ret||ret||tab|

Pitt operates Inquest with the help of Rob Neal, who works for the new company and ServiceWorld.|ret||ret||tab|

A key part of the training for Inquest, according to Pitt, involved policies and procedures for handling data.|ret||ret||tab|

"We have to assume every case we do goes to court, although they hardly ever do," Pitt said. "But to be admissible in court, the chain of custody is extremely important. The way that we capture the data, the way we house it, how it's viewed and then just the chain of custody of the equipment itself."|ret||ret||tab|

In regard to legal casework, Pitt said: "From our standpoint, we just report data. We weigh no opinion. A lot of times, it's exonerating somebody. Really, the data speaks for itself. If it's there, you can almost guarantee we're going to get it." |ret||ret||tab|

Criminal defense attorney Dee Wampler, of the Law Offices of Dee Wampler, has used Pitt and Inquest for a couple of cases, one of which was a federal child pornography case.|ret||ret||tab|

"We needed to see whether or not a person had ever visited those sites on a computer," Wampler said. "I really don't understand how they do it, but they convinced me."|ret||ret||tab|

One case for which Wampler used Inquest's services hasn't gone to trial yet. Another, Wampler said, concluded in a way that was satisfactory for his client. |ret||ret||tab|

"It's a very detailed, highly specialized field and (Pitt's) good," Wampler said. " I don't know where I would've gone (without Inquest). I really don't. I would've had to have gone to the Internet to look under experts,' and probably had to have gone to some large town 250 miles from here. And heaven knows what it would've cost."|ret||ret||tab|

According to Pitt, Inquest's hourly rate is $105, generally with a minimum of five hours. |ret||ret||tab|

"In that five hours, we'll be able to give you a report back, and from that point, you can pretty much tell what the success level is," Pitt said. Sometimes, depending on what's found in the first five hours, clients will want more searching. |ret||ret||tab|

"It's not uncommon to spend maybe $1,000 on this type of search," Pitt said.|ret||ret||tab|

But that price is just fine with Wampler. |ret||ret||tab|

"They charge a reasonable fee, and in that particular type of case, I desperately needed his expertise," Wampler said. "It was very helpful to me in advising my client as to whether the government could prove that my client had viewed certain pictures on this hard drive."|ret||ret||tab|

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Loss prevention|ret||ret||tab|

Inquest complements ServiceWorld's business, because in addition to its investigative qualities, it can also help clients with something as simple as retrieving lost files.|ret||ret||tab|

"We had a gentlemen who was a client who lost years of genealogy work. He had probably five or six years of research gone. We were able to go and get it all back for him," Pitt said. |ret||ret||tab|

One thing computer owners can do to prevent losing data from hard drives is to be very careful when using cleanup programs, Pitt said.|ret||ret||tab|

"Sometimes when they buy these cleanup programs, they go in and try to clean house eliminate files and unused space," Pitt said. "Sometimes they get a little bit happy in picking files. They don't know what they do, so that causes problems. When you're doing some spring cleaning, you need to make sure they're just document files and not program files."|ret||ret||tab|

Backing up files is also a good idea, as long as users make sure it's done correctly. |ret||ret||tab|

"A lot of times they think they're getting the backups done and going through the motions, but they're not actually capturing the data that they need to," Pitt said.|ret||ret||tab|

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