by Christa Miller

Only a few short years ago, the idea of recovering forensic data from the cloud seemed like either troubling overreach, or unnecessarily redundant given the availability of evidence from mobile devices.

As encryption became more prevalent on those, however, law enforcement has increasingly come to rely on cloud-based evidence to build cases. The law appears to be catching up, too, with legislation like the United States’ Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act and California’s new GDPR-style Consumer Privacy Act, along with decisions like last September’sGoogle LLC v. CNIL, in which a European court held that Europe’s “right to be forgotten” only applies to EU citizens. 

Cloud-based evidence has relevance to civil cases as well as criminal. Business documents are increasingly stored on cloud servers owned by Dropbox, Box.com, Microsoft OneDrive, Google, and many others. Many organizations and individuals also rely on cloud-based messaging…