Law Commons^™

Whether Section 522(B)(3) Of The Bankruptcy Code Contains An Implied Residency Requirement For Determining Which Exemption Scheme Applies, Christopher Mccune

Bankruptcy Research Library

(Excerpt)

Filing a bankruptcy petition creates a bankruptcy estate consisting of all the debtor’s legal or equitable interests in property, plus any proceeds generated from the disposition of property of the estate. Once a debtor’s asset becomes property of the estate, all the debtor’s rights in that property are extinguished, unless the property is “exempted” under section 522 of the Bankruptcy Code or is otherwise abandoned back to the debtor. Accordingly, while creditors are entitled to seek reimbursement in the rest of the bankruptcy estate, the debtor may retain his or her interest in exempted property.

Thus, section 522 of …

Whether The Doctrine Of Judicial Estoppel Applies If The Debtor Fails To List A Lawsuit In His Or Her Bankruptcy Schedules, Joshua Nadelbach

Bankruptcy Research Library

(Excerpt)

Many different tactics are used by both plaintiffs and defendants to try and gain an upper hand in court proceedings. One particular scheme occurs when parties take an inconsistent position with one they successfully asserted in an earlier proceeding. The idea of the scheme is to be successful initially and then to contradict the position previously taken based on the need of the moment. To combat that particular ploy, the courts developed the doctrine of judicial estoppel.

Judicial estoppel generally refers to “judicially-imposed limitations on litigants who would assert two irreconcilable positions in successive litigations.” The purpose of judicial …

Health Savings Accounts And The Bankruptcy Estate, Michelle Nicotera

Bankruptcy Research Library

(Excerpt)

Section 541 of the Bankruptcy Code defines “property of the estate” to include “all legal or equitable interests of the debtor in property as of the commencement of the estate.” Consistent with a policy of expanding the bankruptcy estate, the property listed under section 541 is available to the trustee to satisfy the estate’s creditors once a petition has been filed. This aggregation provides the debtor an opportunity for a fresh start and ensures effective distribution among creditors and thus “promotes the fundamental purpose of the Bankruptcy Code.” Although section 541(a) defines “property of the estate” broadly, section 541(b) …

Should A Bankruptcy Court Consider A Debtor’S Social Security Income When Determining Whether His Chapter 13 Plan Is Feasible?, Sarah M. Roe

Bankruptcy Research Library

(Excerpt)

Chapter 13 of the Bankruptcy Code provides individuals the opportunity to reorganize their debt obligations. This adjustment chapter permits an individual debtor to keep his nonexempt assets but requires that he make payments for three to five years through a repayment plan. During this repayment period, the individual debtor uses his disposable income to fulfill his debts. After all of the payments are made to creditors, the debtor receives a discharge.

If the trustee or an unsecured creditor objects to the plan, a court must determine if the plan can fulfill the unsecured claim and allow the debtor’s “projected …

Article Iii And Bankruptcy Code Standing: Preserving A Party’S Right To Object To A Proposed Reorganization Plan, James Scahill

Bankruptcy Research Library

(Excerpt)

In a chapter 11 bankruptcy proceeding, a troubled company can either restructure or liquidate through a confirmed chapter 11 plan. To encourage more participation in reorganization cases, courts have broadly interpreted section 1109(b) of the Bankruptcy Code, which determines who may object to a plan. Section 1109(b) states that “a party in interest, including the debtor, the trustee, a creditors’ committee, an equity security holders’ committee, a creditor, an equity security holder, or any indenture trustee, may raise and may appear and be heard on any issue in a case under this chapter.” A party wishing to object to …

Section 365 Of The Bankruptcy Code Preempts Provisions Of State Dealer Statutes, Andrew Ziemianski

Bankruptcy Research Library

(Excerpt)

In bankruptcy proceedings, the rejection of an executory contract by a trustee under section 365 of the Bankruptcy Code constitutes a prepetition breach of contract, which gives rise to a general unsecured claim. The rejection damages claim, which is governed by state common law, will generally not be paid in full in bankruptcy.

The Bankruptcy Code will impliedly preempt state statutes that impose additional statutory damages, as these statutes impose damages for economic benefit of the counterparty and “‘frustrate section 365’s purpose of giving a debtor the power to decide which contracts it will assume and assign or reject …

Poverty Knowledge, Coercion, And Social Rights: A Discourse Ethical Contribution To Social Epistemology, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

In today’s America the persistence of crushing poverty in the midst of staggering affluence no longer incites the righteous jeremiads it once did. Resigned acceptance of this paradox is fueled by a sense that poverty lies beyond the moral and technical scope of government remediation. The failure of experts to reach agreement on the causes of poverty merely exacerbates our despair. Are the causes internal to the poor – reflecting their more or less voluntary choices? Or do they emanate from structures beyond their control (but perhaps amenable to government remediation)? If both of these explanations are true (as I …

Myspace, Inc. V. Graphon Corp.: Ignoring The Basic Premise That 101 Must Come Before 102 And 103, Emmanuel A. Fishelman

Journal of Business & Technology Law

No abstract provided.

Unions And Democracy: When Do Nonmembers Have Voting Rights?, Melanie Stallings Williams, Dennis A. Halcoussis

Journal of Business & Technology Law

No abstract provided.

Locality V. Online Travel Company: Does The Bell Finally Toll For Quill Corp. V. North Dakota, Jaan Rannik

Journal of Business & Technology Law

No abstract provided.

The American Liberty League And The Rise Of Constitutional Nationalism, Jared Goldstein

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Book Review: The Basics Of Digital Forensics: The Primer For Getting Started In Digital Forensics, Stephen Larson

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The Basics of Digital Forensics: The Primer for Getting Started in Digital Forensics is well-named–it really is very basic. And it should be, as the book’s intended audience includes entry-level digital forensics professionals and complimentary fields such as law enforcement, legal, and general information security. Though the copyright is 2012, some of the data is from 2009, and there is mention of estimates for 2010.

“Time For Some Traffic Problems”: Enhancing E-Discovery And Big Data Processing Tools With Linguistic Methods For Deception Detection, Erin S. Crabb

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Linguistic deception theory provides methods to discover potentially deceptive texts to make them accessible to clerical review. This paper proposes the integration of these linguistic methods with traditional e-discovery techniques to identify deceptive texts within a given author’s larger body of written work, such as their sent email box. First, a set of linguistic features associated with deception are identified and a prototype classifier is constructed to analyze texts and describe the features’ distributions, while avoiding topic-specific features to improve recall of relevant documents. The tool is then applied to a portion of the Enron Email Dataset to illustrate how …

Hot Zone Identification: Analyzing Effects Of Data Sampling On Spam Clustering, Rasib Khan, Mainul Mizan, Ragib Hasan, Alan Sprague

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Email is the most common and comparatively the most efficient means of exchanging information in today's world. However, given the widespread use of emails in all sectors, they have been the target of spammers since the beginning. Filtering spam emails has now led to critical actions such as forensic activities based on mining spam email. The data mine for spam emails at the University of Alabama at Birmingham is considered to be one of the most prominent resources for mining and identifying spam sources. It is a widely researched repository used by researchers from different global organizations. The usual process …

Accurate Modeling Of The Siemens S7 Scada Protocol For Intrusion Detection And Digital Forensics, Amit Kleinmann, Avishai Wool

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The Siemens S7 protocol is commonly used in SCADA systems for communications between a Human Machine Interface (HMI) and the Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs). This paper presents a model-based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) designed for S7 networks. The approach is based on the key observation that S7 traffic to and from a specific PLC is highly periodic; as a result, each HMI-PLC channel can be modeled using its own unique Deterministic Finite Automaton (DFA). The resulting DFA-based IDS is very sensitive and is able to flag anomalies such as a message appearing out of its position in the normal sequence …

From The Editor-In-Chief, Ibrahim Baggili

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Welcome to JDFSL’s fourth and final issue for 2014! First, I would like to thank our editorial board, reviewers, and the JDFSL team for bringing this issue to life. It has been a big year for JDFSL as the journal continues to progress. I would like to highlight our critical achievements for 2014 before touching on the papers that were accepted in this issue: 1. JDFSL has gone to a fully open access model without author payment through support from academic institutions. 2. JDFSL has formed and continues to form partnerships with various conferences that relate to cyber security and …

Book Review: Judiciary-Friendly Forensics Of Software Copyright Infringement (Vinod Polpaya Bhattathiripad), Pedro L. P. Sanchez

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Judiciary-Friendly Forensics of Software Copyright Infringement is a book by Dr. Vinod Polpaya Bhattathiripad, published by IGI-Global as part of its Research Essentials series. The book discusses the forensics of software copyright infringement and highlights theoretical, functional, and procedural matters in the investigation of copyright infringement of software products, as well as the development of forensic technologies to detect and avoid software piracy. It is of interest to software forensic experts, lawyers in the field of copyright infringement, judges, software professionals, and students.

Table Of Contents

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Personal Denial Of Service (Pdos) Attacks: A Discussion And Exploration Of A New Category Of Cyber Crime, Michael R. Bartolacci, Larry J. Leblanc, Ashley Podhradsky

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The growth of the Internet has created a corresponding growth in Internet-based crimes and online misbehavior, particularly among younger computer-savvy people. Younger generations have grown up in a world where internet access, social networking, e-commerce and smartphones are commonplace. Given this fact, they have learned how to use, and how to abuse, technology. This leads us to define a new category of cybercrime called a Personal Denial of Service attack (PDOS). A PDOS is a cyber-crime in which an individual deliberately prevents the access of another individual or small group to online services such as email or banking. Due to …

File Detection On Network Traffic Using Approximate Matching, Frank Breitinger, Ibrahim Baggili

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In recent years, Internet technologies changed enormously and allow faster Internet connections, higher data rates and mobile usage. Hence, it is possible to send huge amounts of data / files easily which is often used by insiders or attackers to steal intellectual property. As a consequence, data leakage prevention systems (DLPS) have been developed which analyze network traffic and alert in case of a data leak. Although the overall concepts of the detection techniques are known, the systems are mostly closed and commercial. Within this paper we present a new technique for network traffic analysis based on approximate matching (a.k.a …

Fast Rtp Detection And Codecs Classification In Internet Traffic, Petr Matousek, Ondrej Rysavy, Martin Kmet

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This paper presents a fast multi-stage method for on-line detection of RTP streams and codec identification of transmitted voice or video traffic. The method includes an RTP detector that filters packets based on specific values from UDP and RTP headers. When an RTP stream is successfully detected, codec identification is applied using codec feature sets. The paper shows advantages and limitations of the method and its comparison with other approaches. The method was implemented as a part of network forensics framework NetFox developed in project SEC6NET. Results show that the method can be successfully used for Lawful Interception as well …

Relating Admissibility Standards For Digital Evidence To Attack Scenario Reconstruction, Changwei Liu, Anoop Singhal, Duminda Wijesekera

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Attackers tend to use complex techniques such as combining multi-step, multi-stage attack with anti-forensic tools to make it difficult to find incriminating evidence and reconstruct attack scenarios that can stand up to the expected level of evidence admissibility in a court of law. As a solution, we propose to integrate the legal aspects of evidence correlation into a Prolog based reasoner to address the admissibility requirements by creating most probable attack scenarios that satisfy admissibility standards for substantiating evidence. Using a prototype implementation, we show how evidence extracted by using forensic tools can be integrated with legal reasoning to reconstruct …

Audit: Automated Disk Investigation Toolkit, Umit Karabiyik, Sudhir Aggarwal

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Software tools designed for disk analysis play a critical role today in forensics investigations. However, these digital forensics tools are often difficult to use, usually task specific, and generally require professionally trained users with IT backgrounds. The relevant tools are also often open source requiring additional technical knowledge and proper configuration. This makes it difficult for investigators without some computer science background to easily conduct the needed disk analysis. In this paper, we present AUDIT, a novel automated disk investigation toolkit that supports investigations conducted by non-expert (in IT and disk technology) and expert investigators. Our proof of concept design …

Evidentiary Power And Propriety Of Digital Identifiers And The Impact On Privacy Rights In The United States, Michael Losavio, Deborah Keeling

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Media and network systems capture and store data about electronic activity in new, sometimes unprecedented ways; computational systems make for new means of analysis and knowledge development. These new forms offer new, powerful tactical tools for investigations of electronic malfeasance under traditional legal regulation of state power, particular that of Fourth Amendment limitations on police searches and seizures under the U.S. Constitution. But autonomy, identity and authenticity concerns with electronic data raise issues of public policy, privacy and proper police oversight of civil society. We examine those issues and their implications for digital and computational forensics

Effects Of The Factory Reset On Mobile Devices, Riqui Schwamm, Neil C. Rowe

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Mobile devices usually provide a “factory-reset” tool to erase user-specific data from the main secondary storage. 9 Apple iPhones, 10 Android devices, and 2 BlackBerry devices were tested in the first systematic evaluation of the effectiveness of factory resets. Tests used the Cellebrite UME-36 Pro with the UFED Physical Analyzer, the Bulk Extractor open-source tool, and our own programs for extracting metadata, classifying file paths, and comparing them between images. Two phones were subjected to more detailed analysis. Results showed that many kinds of data were removed by the resets, but much user-specific configuration data was left. Android devices did …

Testing Framework For Mobile Device Forensics Tools, Maxwell Anobah, Shahzad Saleem, Oliver Popov

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The proliferation of mobile communication and computing devices, in particular smart mobile phones, is almost paralleled with the increasing number of mobile device forensics tools in the market. Each mobile forensics tool vendor, on one hand claims to have a tool that is best in terms of performance, while on the other hand each tool vendor seems to be using different standards for testing their tools and thereby defining what support means differently. To overcome this problem, a testing framework based on a series of tests ranging from basic forensics tasks such as file system reconstruction up to more complex …

Technical Soddi Defenses: The Trojan Horse Defense Revisited, Chad M. Steel

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In 2004, the Trojan horse defense was at a crossroads, having been successfully employed in two child pornography cases in the United Kingdom, resulting in acquittals. Despite the early successes, the Trojan horse defense has failed to become a regularly employed strategy. The original Trojan horse defense has now become part of the more general technical SODDI (Some Other Dude Did It) defense, which includes the possibility of unknown actors using unsecured Wi-Fi connections or having physical access to a computer to perform criminal acts. In the past ten years, it has not been effective in the United States for …

Table Of Contents

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

A State-Of-The-Art Review Of Cloud Forensics, Sameera Almulla, Youssef Iraqi, Andrew Jones

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Cloud computing and digital forensics are emerging fields of technology. Unlike traditional digital forensics where the target environment can be almost completely isolated, acquired and can be under the investigators control; in cloud environments, the distribution of computation and storage poses unique and complex challenges to the investigators. Recently, the term “cloud forensics” has an increasing presence in the field of digital forensics. In this state-of-the-art review, we included the most recent research efforts that used “cloud forensics” as a keyword and then classify the literature into three dimensions: (1) survey-based, (2) technology-based and (3) forensics-procedural-based. We discuss widely accepted …

Understanding Computer Forensics Requirements In China Via The “Panda Burning Incense” Virus Case, Frank Law, K. P. Chow, Y. H. Mai

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In March 2012, Mainland China has amended its Criminal Procedure Law, which includes the introduction of a new type of evidence, i.e., digital evidence, to the court of law. To better understand the development of computer forensics and digital evidence in Mainland China, this paper discusses the Chinese legal system in relation to digital investigation and how the current legal requirements affect the existing legal and technical usage of digital evidence at legal proceedings. Through studying the famous “Panda Burning Incense (Worm.WhBoy.cw)” virus case that happened in 2007, this paper aims to provide a better understanding of how to properly …