Facebook Cites ‘Smoking Gun’ Proof of Fraud by Paul Ceglia

Facebook petitioned the court and obtained permission to contract a forensics firm to inspect Ceglia's hard drive. My understanding is that the firm Facebook is working with is Stroz Friedberg, which has an exceedingly good reputation. As a result of the investigation, Facebook has now filed a motion saying they have obtained what amounts to clear evidence that Ceglia forged the contract he claims proves his ownership stake in Facebook.

Facebook cannot publicly disclose the evidence their firm found, because they are bound by a confidentiality order that accompanied their access to Ceglia's personal computers.

What more do you want Bloomberg to report? This is clearly a big deal. I see how they aren't fully satisfying your curiosity, but currency and accuracy are probably more important in a news org than "most satisfying writing".

The analysis was conducted by an independent forensics firm. There are many of those; Facebook is apparently working with Stroz, one of the best.

To clarify, you hire some (really expensive) people who start by prying the computer apart and making a copy of the hard drive(s). They then go through it, looking for interesting stuff in files (Word documents can contain previous versions, for instance), in the browser history, in unused parts of the drive (i.e. for deleted files), etc. There is no "operating the computer" in the conventional sense involved: using the computer would destroy evidence (i.e. overwrite deleted files).

In cases like this, I'd imagine one would have an obligation to respect the owner's privacy (except where relevant to the case) - dragging all his/her porn into court is not exactly classy.

It is unlikely that FB was given free reign to the original hardware. A more likely case is that they were given a duped version of the drives.