1. The Supreme Court of Korea (hereinafter KSCt) handed down a very epoch making ruling (abbreviated as ‘Chong Kun Dang Decision’ hereinafter) about the search and seizure of digital evidence in 2015. Until now 7 articles have been published, which took the commenting of this decision as the central theme and did the following discussions seriously. In this paper, I intend to focus on identifying what the Chong Kun Dang Decision means and what are grounds of the ruling rather than criticizing any argument and ground. This is because the conventional analyses are not successful in explaining the exact meaning of Chong Kun Dang Decision. 2. With the Chong Kun Dang Decision, the issue of “the first issuance of warrant for the search and seizure of evidence related to the alleged abuse of trust → the carrying out the execution of warrant(physical seizure ⓐ, removal of the information storage medium at the scene) → ‘physical seizure ⓑ’ (imaging duplication) → searching for digital information (off–site search) → in case of accidental finding of the irrelevant information, does the investigating agent become obliged to delete irrelevant information?” emerged as an urgent issue. Although Lee Wan–gyu (2015) and Park Min– woo (2016) already discussed this issue, a more in–depth inquiry is necessary. 3. The methodology of this paper is as follows. The 2014, US Second Circuit panel handed down a ruling (United States v. Ganias) seems to have given some impression to the formation of a majority opinion (and separate opinion, supplementary opinion) of Chong Kun–dang decision. Therefore, it is necessary to compare precisely the issues and arguments of the ‘2014 Ganias panel ruling’ and the Chong Kun Dang decision. In this context first of all I attempted to reconfigure the facts of two cases for precise comparison in chapter Ⅱ. 4. In chapter Ⅲ, I try to make a precise comparison of the grounds of Chong Kun Dang Decision (2015) and Ganias panel ruling (2014). The focus of the comparisons are as follows. First, is there an obligation to the investigating authority to delete and discard irrelevant information after separating the related information and the irrelevant information? Second, presence of dominion of the investigating authority on the information that contains related information and irrelevant information. Third, why the deletion of irrelevant information become a problem? Fourth, what is the legitimate response of the investigating agency that witnessed evidence of irrelevant crime? Fifth, conflicts between means (due process) and purpose (substantive truthfulness). Sixth, among series of actions taken by the investigating authority what can be considered as the search and seizure measures of digital evidence?

So-called Wang-jaesan decision (2013do2511) was declared by ‘Korean Supreme Court’ (hereafter ‘KSC’) in July, 2013. The decision had a lot of important substantial and procedural issues in criminal spheres. However, what I have tried to concentrate in this review are only two issues, the one is the issue of the authenticity of electronic evidence (or digital evidence), the other is the issue of the application of ‘the Korean version hearsay rule’ (hereafter ‘KHR’) of the electronic evidence. The methodology of this review is the comparative analysis of the Wang-jaesan decision from the perspective of Federal Rules of Evidence (hereafter ‘FRE’). In Wang-jaesan decision KSC defined the concept of integrity of electronic evidence as ‘the contents of the digital data have not been altered in any manner from the moment that were seized’ or ‘that evidence wasn’t changed after it was captured or collected.’ The meaning of this concept is different from the meaning of the traditional ‘exactness of utterances’(成立의 眞正) of article 312, 312 of KHR. That concept was made from the unique Korean modern legal history. However, it cannot deal with so many hard cases properly. Therefore I suggest in chapter Ⅰ, Ⅱ, Ⅲ, Ⅳ that We Korean legal scholars and practitioners should adopt the concept of authentication something like FRE, even though Korean Criminal Procedure Law does not have clear stipulations about it. In chapter Ⅴ, Ⅵ I did comparing analyses about the applications of KHR by KSC since 1990’s up to the 2010’s. I found that KSC has adopted enormously FRE when there were no clear stipulations in Korean Criminal Procedure Law. This is a kind of interesting phenomenon which deserves to be analyzed from the perspective of comparative law and global legal transplant of evidence rule.