Flash movies pop up every now and again in e-discovery.
Flash movies are more than just movies. They are interactive. Sometimes they can be very complex software applications and can be created in numerous ways.
For discovery, these dynamic files can prove a problem when it comes to disclosure, do you disclose natively? And if you don’t want to, what other options are there?
The SWF movie format, much like any other computer application, can be ‘decompiled’, that is, broken down into the constituant parts that were used to build it. This can mean that sensitive data is passed on if disclosed natively. This might include hidden objects and text, programming code used to create the movie, and data about other embedded objects.
If these sorts of things are sensitive to your case, or even if you’d just like to be thorough, you shoud ‘decompile’ your movie to see whats there. Try something like http://www.swf-kit.com/swftofla-decompiler.html.
A program like this can also be used to convert the flash movie into other formats, that can’t be decompiled, such as AVI, MP3 and FLA. However, these conversions can be limited and remove some of the functionality of the flash movie, thereby excluding some of the content and purpose of the file (i.e. interactive parts of the movie). However, this may be the format that is best suited for disclosure of the content of the file should you wish to withold any of the potentially sensitive information held within.
Another point to consider, if you are going to disclose natively, is that flash movies have some (albeit limited) metadata held within. Newer versions can contain Author, Title, Description and some other basic fields, that can be seen through the properties of the file. You may wish to remove this metadata, but I am unsure how to do this without ‘recompiling the movie’ using Macromedia development tools.
Anyway, this is just a pointer. There is a lot more to this subject, but hopefully the above helps.
Regards
Martin.
Posted by ediscovery 
