Heri Andreas is standing in a concrete alley in Pluit, a working-class district

5 min readNov 14, 2020

Zeidenberg, Peter. “A hard lesson for prosecutors.” Politico, April 1, 2020. accessed 28 August, 2020.

What their cumulative data revealed was that Pluit and other sections of northern Jakarta — streets, buildings, everything — had sunk two to five feet since their first measurements. The fatal flooding was proof of the consequences — with the ground level dropping, the rainwater collected in gigantic streams, turning densely populated neighborhoods into death traps. In all, buildings housing some 4 million people were at risk.Commonwealth v. Mangel 181 A.3d 1154 (2018). accessed 27 August, 2020.If you considered the earliest known measurements — in the 1920s — it was a dramatic collapse. Year-to-year subsidence measured in 1925 and 1926 by a Dutch engineer named J.H.G. Schepers was so minute that experts thought his leveling scope might have simply been off. Now, though, the Bandung group reckoned the capital might be fast heading to a crisis.

Walthers v. Hon. Astrowsky State. №1 CA-SA 17–0106. Petition for Special Action from the Superior Court in Maricopa County No. CR2014–108856–001. Filed May 18, 2017. accessed 27 August, 2020.

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Schnack, Troy. “Timelines in P2P Forensic Cases.” Troy 4n6 blog. March 11,

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Nine years later, they discovered they were right. The year 2007 began with severe rain that flooded three-quarters of Jakarta, the worst, some said, in three centuries. Chest-high water submerged some neighborhoods, and about 80 people died. By this time, the core Bandung group had winnowed down to just two — Andreas and Abidin, his professor. They were an odd pair — the ramrod straight, polished and dapper Abidin and his shorter, insistently disheveled protégé, on his way to a PhD though still often unshaven and clad in a T-shirt.These methods could go beyond helping attorneys and investigators. They could have a knock-on effect to juries, too, as they weigh digital evidence — in other words, “…whether an expert in the instant case actually applied the methodology that the judge found valid generally is a matter of weight, as is any conclusion the expert reaches that is applicable to the litigants.” (23)

In other words, attorneys and forensic examiners — on their own “side,” not just opposing counsel’s — can serve as valuable checks and balances on each others’ thought processes. This might seem to create additional effort at a time when courts are more seriously than ever strained by backlog. That, however, is a good argument to apply more scrutiny, not less.

Siewert, Patrick. “Screen Shots Are Not (Good) Evidence.” Pro Digital Forensic Consulting & Investigation blog. April 24, 2020. accessed 26 August, 2020.In the late 1990s, Hasanuddin Abidin (right), then a professor at Bandung Institute of Technology, and Heri Andreas (left), one of his students, confirmed that Jakarta was dramatically sinking after taking measurements over three years.Brignoni, Alexis. “Trust but verify: Formats, timestamps, and validation.” Initialization Vectors blog, March 17, 2020. accessed 28 August, 2020.April of 2007 brought more flooding, and so did June. Some months that year, the floods seemed to arrive from nowhere. Under a cloudless sky, the Java Sea would mysteriously begin to rise, breach the city’s 20-inch seawalls, and rush into the city.Escamilla v. SMS Holdings Corp., No. CV 09–2120 (ADM/JSM), 2011 WL 13243580, at *39 (D. Minn. June 28, 2011) accessed 27 August, 2020.Andreas has been observing Jakarta’s steady subsidence for more than two decades. In the late 1990s, Andreas, then a sophomore at the prestigious Bandung Institute of Technology, was part of the first systematic study of the capital’s elevation. He and a dozen or so classmates, working under a popular, Canadian-trained professor named Hasanuddin Abidin, used then-commercially novel GPS equipment to show that, from 1997 to 1998, the ground under Pluit had sunk two inches. The next year, their instruments revealed another 2.3 inches of sinkage, and in 2000 an additional 2.1 — more than a half-foot in just three years.

Faigman, David. “Evidence: Admissibility vs. Weight in Scientific Testimony.” The Judges’ Book: Vol. 1, Article 11. 2017.

Broderick, Sean et al. “Criminal e-Discovery: A Pocket Guide for Judges.” Federal Judicial Center. Third Printing, 2019.

Heri Andreas is standing in a concrete alley in Pluit, a working-class district

Written by Mohiddit