A friend of mine has been harassed on Twitter in the most vile of ways, even to the point of inferring threats (just up to the point of "crossing the line"). The person behind this (we believe it is just one) has been using several Twitter accounts to do this, and each time it is a new account and only sending her Tweets.
She and I have been getting screen caps of all of the stuff lately, but in the beginning we did not, and we now regret that decision because the perp deleted the accounts before we got a chance. In two of the deleted accounts, there was an inference that she should kill herself & one of the usernames for the one account was in and of itself an inference to killing.
Twitter was of course no help, and law enforcement hasn't been a whole lot of help to this point either….because, as I mentioned, the perp. just skates the line.
My question is this. Since we both viewed the Tweets, Twitter pages in question, etc. on our computers, is there any possibility that there is a copy saved anywhere on the hard drives on our computers? I know it would be like finding a needle in a haystack for us to find it, but is it worth the trouble to have a professional search the hard drive? I mean, when you visit websites such as Twitter, would it be saved at least temporarily on your computer that it could still be retrieved (as long as it wasn't written over) even though the original pages online were deleted?
Any insight would be most appreciated!
Sure, there may be copies in TIF or even in unallocated space. A text based search on the screen name used or on some of the known text in the harassing tweet should lead right to the html, provided of course that data area hasn't been overwritten. The amount of time passed and frequency of use directly impact the recoverability of the data.
What is the best and easiest way to go about conducting a text based search to see what I can turn up on my computer? It's been about 3 weeks now, so, I believe there is a chance from what you said so far.
1- take it to a forensic examiner so that it's done properly and will hold up in court.
Or
2- find a bootable Linux CD with some search tools, read the manual, and go at it yourself.
Thanks for your help and advice.