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Deleting E-mail Could Get You In Trouble
Sterling D. Allan writes "A story in the Deseret News cautions governments and corporations from deleting legitimate email. Expensive measures are being called into place to archive the mail for future subpoena purposes. Think Enron on one hand. Think Monicagate on the other. Next they'll ask us to keep recordings of all our phone conversations? Big brother gets bigger -- with good reasons, as always. What about all those business propositions I get from Nigeria. Do I have to keep those too? "Get rich from home" (to pay for the purchase of a new hard drive to contain all your spam). One man's junk is another man's treasure. You never know what an IRS agent might find lucky."
It's not just your e-mail. The infrastructure belongs to the company. I'd be careful about using my work e-mail to converse with friends. Web based email, pocket PC's, laptops, phones and t9 on a break work just fine.
Yes government had the power. And it's not uncommon for companies to keep a lot of paperwork until long after it was useful, occasionally purging all the really old stuff.
Salt Lake County is looking at a system whereby employees would decide whether the e-mail is a "non-record" (spam or personal; delete whenever you want);
So, no, we don't have to keep spam.
I'm scared of numbers that can't be written as a fraction. It's an irrational fear.
Next they'll ask us to keep recordings of all our phone conversations?
Actually trading corporations (like Bear Sterns or Bloomburg) are required to record all conversations relating to market orders. That means that some phone lines are always being recorded at all times. This is required by the SEC. You'd be suprised what restrictions are already in place to prevent things like insider trading from happening.
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
Some companies have "document retention" policies that require employees to delete email after a certain period of time. It's not to free up space on the servers, it's to make sure the stuff can't be subpoenaed. Many respected companies have policies like this. Many even have tools that make the email deletion automatic, and require management approval to disable the tool.
So maybe this story is really just focused on banning policies like this.
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Actually, I think the regulations are a bit more industry specific. The company I work at is in the Financial Services area, and we are regulated by NASD and the SEC. I believe both have rules for various different forms of communication. 3 years for electronic communications. 7 years for paper xyz forms. 6 years for TPS reports. You get the picture. I've actually seen a huge, 30-page grid of the various regulations that apply to different items - and these were small, 2-line items on each cell of the grid - the number of regulations is staggering.
Other questions come to mind, like what is an electronic communication? E-mail? Instant Messaging? Video Conference systems? VoIP? Regular phone calls? The general answer you will find these days is "yes".
It used to be prior to Enron and Worldcom that most people believed what you don't have can't hurt you, so they'd ignore these regs or at best take a very limited view of their coverage (Joe, you work in the XYZ critical department, so you need to copy all your business email to this mailbox). These days they go for "the whole company gets journaled to an external service provider" type of approach. And apps like Instant Messaging are not allowed unless we have a server to capture all the traffic from the app.
So yeah, if you're a company, big brother can come and get you - or at least one of his smaller, more industry-specific siblings. It really depends on where you are.
-Jack Ash
This is hardly a surprise; the rules have applied to paper documents since forever.
If you've ever worked for company with a clue you surely encountered their "records retention policy", which is actually a "records destruction policy", since the general rule is that you are expected to delete everything as soon as the law allows you to. At places I've worked the managers made no bones about the fact that it was to keep damaging documents from coming out during lawsuits.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> Who's to say I ever got it?
the logs
Stop Computers/Cars Analogies on S
Well, technically, it's not "Who let the government in," it's "Who let the public in" since the government created the Internet (ARPAnet).
I complain when people delete emails anyway... :)
I have every email I received over the past 5 years in my mailbox (with the exception of some spam, though I have a lot of that too since it's automaticly put in my Spam folder)
My maildir only uses 650 MB (150 MB compressed), so it's not like space is a reason to delete email... People just need to make folders and use them.
Luke-Jr
Jon.
No, there is a clear legal standard on document retention. You do not need to keep documents if they are not needed for a business purpose unless you have been notified of an existing legal investigation. So you can destroy drafts of any work and clean out old work at your descretion. However you cannot go back and catch up on your cleaning up if you become the subject of a legal investigation.
"Expensive measures are being called into place to archive the mail for future subpoena purposes."
I work for the State of Washington. In this state's government there is no problem deleting email as long as your department has a written policy defining the retention time for email.
Email is covered by the freedom of information act which means that it is not hard for an average citizen to request copies of email sent and received by the department. There is a procedure, fee and waiting period that discourages someone from coming in and requesting all mail during the retention period. It could be done but it would be very expensive. Not really worth it for someone on a wild fishing expedition but doable for a citizen that wants specific information..
If we receive a subpoena for email that was sent or received within out written email retention policy we had better be able to produce it. If we can't the requesting party could conceivably compel us to hire a very expensive data retrieval company to come in and reconstruct our data in order to comply. And of course if the courts believe that we deleted email prior to the retention date in an attempt to destroy evidence there is a chance that someone could be spending some quality time as Bubba's new love toy. If you know what I mean...
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
"How many years worth of company paper memo's were stored?"
Quite a lot actually, 5 or more years worth in some cases. One of my fathers co-workers quit a fairly decent job to pursue his archival storage bussiness full time as he was making A LOT of money storing back records for various companies to keep them in line with various regulations. We're talking acres of storage space for some storage companies.
Exactly what is kept and for how long varies from industry to industry, and a lot of it is 'liability abatement' paperwork kept till the last possible sue by date is reached. Some of course is government mandated, and some is just becaus.
The interesting thing is a fair amount of the regulated documnets kept are because governmental regulations require paper copies, original invoices, etc. and so are actually printed versions of electronic documents that are also stored on backup.
Mycroft
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There's regulations for certain industries.
However general purging of records (electronic or not) that do not fall under those regulations is definately NOT a crime.
However, the second you become aware they might (reasonably might) be used in a court case, you are no longer allowed to destroy them.
I purge the old stuff regularly until told to do otherwise for a specific reason. Of course, there is no way in hell I'd be given a budget to keep the stuff... so bit-bucket it goes!