I think it's in the last thread that I addressed this very question and cited rules of professional conduct and reasons that this would be unacceptable. The court can actually require the prosecution to sort it out, it's not fair play if things are hidden in the dump, and it can be cause for sanctions and IIRC appeal. I provided links there, too.
You did address the stigma of data dumping and your reference does state that for delivery to the defense counsel, combining multiple documents into a single PDF or image file is not acceptable; that the original documents must retain their form per their ordinary presentation in the course of business. So a PO needs to look like a PO and an invoice like and invoice and a bank statement like a bank statement, not like a string of comma delimited ASSEMBLER data.
Of course: pure digital data that would not have the established format or invoke an action as per a legal or commercial document, does not have a recognizable "norm" in 2-dimensions: it would nominally never be applied to paper in its continuing, conventional useage. As example: data stored by an auto's ECU and DCU; Wi-Fi contact data; ROM-BIOS data; and similar.
I was trying to indicate that the
SUMMARY of data as presented by an LE technician or an expert witness or similar has never needed to abide by any consistent structuring or format. NOT FORMAT as per PDF, TIFF, HPSC....but the actual orientation and structure of the table as it appears on screen or paper. Consider the Murdaugh trial: the tight timeline for the event was constrained and defined through cell phone pings, cell phone circuitry and screen interactions, actual cellular calls and PMs, traffic camera images, Blue Tooth emulations and a host of other events as a summary eventually presented by a very nervous FBI tech. It was a table driven by source and time and the time divided to the hundredth of a second; synchronized and normalized. The defense counsel objected strenuously to the size, extensivity and intensivity, and relevance of the entirety and of specific portions because (one party particularly to...) the defense was professing continuing incomprehension. The summary had been delivered to the defense quite a bit earlier; some late data came in from On Star (GM) and the summary was reworked and a whole new round of objections and meetings in chambers resulted. As it appeared on screen during trial it was Rev. 11 IIRC. And they kept having to scroll back to find the headings associated with a specific data record because those headings were not at the top of each screen. (no wonder the tech was nervous...) That prepared presentation was a key determinant in the outcome of the trial.
Same trial: The CFO of Murdaugh's law firm showed the firms account entries and check records on paper with selected entries highlighted by hand and manuscript notations. Established format; embellished manually. Not the same thing at all.
Its the
collation of this raw, unformatted, entirely digital data and its specific means of
presentation to a courtroom that needs to be normalized via guidelines and established methodology. The effort of preparing the summary will nominally be on the prosecution in a criminal trial and forwarded to the defense once complete. Otherwise, delivering the raw hexadecimal in discovery is nothing less than a dump; but the extraction and presentation remains subject to challenge so the data needs to be forwarded.
This may well be established, or under consideration, or even at some level implemented but my observations of recent proceedings would indicate it never anticipated the volumes or the variety that could be assembled by LE from our current useage of electronics and digital equipment and security equipment. Every person involved in the ID crime is a prolific data generator, largely passively, as indicated by the size of the digital files already forwarded during discovery. We have another tight timeline for the event; a history of cell phone records at least 5-months long; and E-mails and SM uploads dating back much further than that.
Judge Judge will be considering motion after motion on relevance and verifiability... Its going to be a long trial.