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Deleting Emails Costs Morgan Stanley $1.45B
DoubleWhopper writes "The financial giant Morgan Stanley lost a $1.45 billion judgement yesterday due, in part, to their failure to retain old email. The judge in the case, 'frustrated at Morgan Stanley's repeated failure to provide [the plaintiff's] attorneys with e-mails, handed down a pretrial ruling that effectively found the bank had conspired to defraud' their former client. The CEO of a record retention software company noted, 'Morgan Stanley is going to be a harbinger'."
From TFS:
I'd sure hate to be the system administrator who dropped the ball there...
"What do you mean we don't have them archived??? You just cost us 1.45 billion dollars!"
"Don't worry though...you can pay it back....we'll just dock your paychecks by...say...$1000 per pay period. At that rate you can have it all paid back in a little over 55,769 YEARS!!!
^_^
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Only another $39 billion in the bank.
Big investment firms like Morgan Stanley are obligated by law to retain lots of records. This is more of an "Almighty Buck" type of story, IMO.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
I deleted an e-mail that gave me $10 off at tigerdirect...dont think I will ever recover.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
Does this mean that if we want to sell a company a larger mass storage device all we have to do is deluge them with pertinant email with large attachments? How long would it take before they would be forced to upgrade?
Afterall the best way to drum up more business is with deceptive or dishonest tactics.
Like arts? Like cheesy little Indie mags? Check out www.artwerkmag.com, and don't laugh at the bad coding please.
Wow. I can delete mine for free.
I know that where I work there is a basic 6 month email retention policy, which states that all email will be deleted if it is 6 months old. I have always wondered if and when this will change.
There is probably an opportunity here for a company to come up with an extension to an email system which will manage keeping old emails. Something which will allow for the catagorizing of unstructured data. That way the system can trash the not to serious emails and keep the 'important' ones.
Ted Tschopp
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
and just didn't serch them after their primary servers were destroyed. I think the problem was in not turing over what they had. Or to but it in lawyer terms the e-mails were "discoverable" (that is avilable in some form and relevant) and were not "produced" (turned over to the other side) http://litsupportguy.typepad.com/litigation_suppor t_guy/2005/05/the_woodshed_re.html
Even in a "third world" country I visited recently, they had emails dated 1997, stored on a Slackware box!
This time, I agree with the US justice system. They deserved it...I am sorry to say.
I never could figure out what demographic they were targeting with them.
They delete e-mails as a matter of policy and get away with it (for example, the Burst patent infringement case).
I think he really meant "humdinger", no?
Well, for all the money that the financial institutions and banks rob from average people like me, they can afford to pay another billion dollars if you ask me.
My old company did not back up email by design. That way if the company was sued, there was no endless searching through back up tapes for something possibly incriminating. When we had a legal dispute, the company lawyers would tell us all to search the email on our PC's for certain works and forward any hits to them.
Crow T. Trollbot
Maybe not a Harbinger but a real S.O.B. for them.
|:(
(I work at a Bank) Since Sarbaines kicked in, we have to keep a backup of every single file you use for work purposes, not just email. This means archiving every word doc, spreadsheet, database...etc. Starting January 1, they also blocked our access to all external sources of email and external instant messaging clients as well. After seeing this judgement, now I understand why.
ok being serious (no more shinyfeet plugs), I used to work as an admin where the retention policy was 1 year. however, that just meant you rotated the tapes for 1 year. the email growth rate was very small (even though there was 1,000s each day), it was the files that grew beyond the retention. even the attachments and email boxes with 1+GB were safe, as 20 years of email fit onto a single DLT4.
granted, MS, er Morgan Stanley is a much bigger company, but I find it very hard to believe that any retention policy would include email, that has got to be their smallest backup.
do you have shinyfeet?
A government entity sends out an all-staff e-mail saying that in order to conserve space, we are to clean out our e-mail. Trash bin should be cleared out, important documents are to be printed out, filed, and then deleted off the system.
:)
I've always thought that storage was cheap nowadays and that clearing out e-mail boxes was moot. I suppose there's some merit to it as there's definitely space to be reclaimed from the activity...but is it really worth that much considering a couple of hundred bucks would get you another 200GB or so?
Conspiracy theory, anyone?
I was a client of MS/DW. I kept trying to let my financial advisor know about this wonderful pill that would make his penis bigger, and I get the feeling that MY emails were deleted as well!
-- sometimes AND gates turn me on.
Not going to say which one but they only keep backups of email for 14 days! It's the responsibility of the partner to save email and back it up and the parter is the one that gets subpoena'd when the shit hits the fan.
Maybe the warm, fudgy kind you can only get from your mom in a San Francisco stud pub.
I think the issue is "selective memory loss" - Microsoft plays this card all the time in court. Emails from a relevant time period are "deleted" when convenient, while older or newer or even contemporaneous mail is saved... the judge in this case was simply smart enough to call shenanigans.
You can delete old email if you're that hard up for space, just have a rock-solid deletion policy you can prove you adhered to in a court of law.
It also helps to audit your archives and backups regularly, and document what data was lost when. 'Cuz face it, every admin at some point or other loses some data to corruption, hardware failure, bookeeping mixups or user error. Knowing what you forgot and when you forgot it can help in situations where not having the data on hand can cost a billion bucks or so.
SoupIsGood Food
where are my moderator points when I need them.
Most companies purposefully choose short retention policies, in an attempt to avoid these kinds of settlements... it isn't a sysadmin's fault.
The theory was that this would let them discard old emails without having it be intentional obstruction of justice. I guess that theory will be out the window now.
The financial giant Morgan Stanley lost a $1.45 billion judgement yesterday due, in part, to their failure to retain old email. I can relate to that.
Science without religion is lame.
That is the question. The answer is keep it, for a while.
Email records can be subpoenaed just like anything else. If it benefits your case, it would be nice to have, if it hurts our case, it would not be so nice to have.
When I write computer use policies, I recommend keeping it for 1 to 2 years. Depending on the type of business that might get extended out much longer. A start-up company might want to keep it 10 or more years to cover any possible arguments with their VCs over who owns the IP.
So why not keep it forever? Unless you want to have the lady sueing you for sexual harassment making your companies email part of the public record, you might want to set some limits.
The key is to document, in writing, what that limit should be. For example, maybe put it in your companies Computer Use policy. You have one...right?
This came out during a trial where MS appeared to partner with a software company on smartphones, and then terminated the agreement after seeing the technology. Shortly afterwards they announced their own product that had suspiciously similar features to the technology of the cut-out company.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
More like:
MorganStanley suit: Look, heh, heh, couldn't we have just lost those emails the court wants?
Morgan Stanley sysadmin: Maybe, if I just got a $1M raise.
--
make install -not war
i'm an it consultant at morgan stanley, and i haven't heard anyone talking about it around where i work (although that could be just the techies that i spend my time with not caring), and if you read more news stories on this, lots of people, not just inside morgan stanley, are pretty confident that the rulings will be overturned. and if you think the money's an issue, morgan stanley's profits were $4.5 billion last year, and in the first quarter of 2005, $1.5 billion. i'm not saying that this wouldn't be bad if it stands, or that morgan doesn't have any other problems, but the situation isn't as dire as a lot of people are making it out to be.
They spent millions to become SOX (Sarbanes Oxley) compliant and had a rather lavish party after they had achieved it [or so they thought]
2 months ago I was in a tech presentation meeting where there was company promoting their email retention software(sat between the world and the email host, saving all the emails that went through in a read only state). It was specifically aimed at recovery for just this sort of investigation.
The problem wasn't the sys admins, they all saw the need for it, the road block is convincing these companies to buy the needed systems.
I recently had an overnight IT job at a local Morgan Stanley office to covert their network from Token Ring to Ethernet. The funny thing was that the motherboard for all the computers had a built-in Ethernet port, and the relatively new building was wired for Ethernet, but they had Token Ring installed everywhere. Their technology upgrade cycle must be about 20 years long.
I worked at a large broker, and they had to be able to come up with a two-week old email immediately, a year old email within two weeks, etc., back to like seven years I think.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
n : an indication of the approach of something or someone [syn: forerunner, herald, precursor] v : foreshadow or presage [syn: announce, annunciate, foretell, herald]
The CEO of a record retention software company noted, 'Morgan Stanley is going to be a hamburger'.
literacy? Who needs it
A great sage once said, "You're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't."
Yep, it's like the olden days, now that they have essentially busted the unions. We are headed back to the bad old days of time study, 16 hr days, 6 day weeks, etc.
Pretty soon if you get a bad mark on your time study, you will be up for 39 lashes.
Over in Europe, meanwhile, they work 20% less year than we do.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
So, according to the article, you're screwed if you hoard every last email and IM file like some OCD patient, since they can have "compromising material."
And you're screwed if you delete these files for not maintaining proper records, since it looks like you're trying to hide something.
Since the only plausible escape from this bind seems to be hoarding everything, without having any "compromising material," it looks like we're all in for some good ol' compliance training!
(Which, by the way, is also going to set the company back.)
http://augustwestproducts.i8.com
We're supposed to keep them for seven years. SEVEN!! Not just three, as in this case.
And be careful what you write in those notes, or they can come back to haunt you!
"Mary came in today wearing a pleasantly revealing bodice, showing, above all else, an ample bosom that might well be used to serve cocktails...."
http://augustwestproducts.i8.com
Aha! Maybe they aren't so innocent, and the email tends to reveal their real intentions and actions.
Point one: You can't make a lot of money by being completely and absolutely honest. Just how much a "lot" means is subject to debate. The original quote was $1 million, if I recall correctly, but that isn't so much money these days, so I think it would sound better with $1 billion.
Point two: I don't really blame them for going along with the modern trend. Look at the political leaders we have these days--and their popular support. I think Cheney is the No.1 poster child for corporate corruption. A few years of government "service", then he goes to Haliburton and rakes in the big bucks, then goes back to politics and starts an unnecessary war that "purely coincidentally" throws billions of dollars back to his old company--which is STILL paying him deferred compensation. However, he'll be back in business before the government has to try and pay the piper. If he lives so long, I'll have to count it as evidence against the existence of a just God. I really think a just God would have thoroughly smitten Cheney a good while ago.
You'll note that BushCo is also very eager to control their little secrets, and I'd bet they'd be delighted to erase all of their email, too. The next interesting question is whether or not they can do it, given the state of modern technology. How can they make sure someone hasn't burned a CD that contains the truth?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Can someone with more legal understanding than myself please explain why emails can be considered as hard evidence?
1) They can't be authenticated: There's no way to prove if the email was written by the person on record.
2) The contents can not be validated: There's no way to prove that the contents were not altered in transit.
To me, email is so easy to spoof that I would take anything I got from such "evidence" with a huge proverbial bucket of salt. Furthermore, I know that institutions such as Morgan Stanley are required to keep certain records on hand but considering the fragile nature of email I find it quite odd that companies would be required to keep it around. Do IM conversations fall into the same category?
Call me ignorant (I am), but this issue really confuses me. It's not like Morgan Stanly destroyed a bunch of notorized documents.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Think about it...
If it can cost Morgan-Stanley $1.5 billion for not storing email. And 90% of email is SPAM. The risk of deleting/filtering SPAM and losing valid email is going to be too risky.
Therefore, it will become extremely cost effective for Morgan-Stanley (and other large firms) to hire lobbyists to make unsolicited SPAM (with no valid return email addresses) illegal, criminal, and enforced.
email can be faked or altered so easily. why is it even admissible in court as evidence?
I wonder what would be the long term costs of keeping every piece of e-mail that is sent and received at a large financial organization like Morgan Stanley? To be useful in the context of an unknown future legal case, the e-mail would not only have to be backed up but also needs to be organized in some fashion. And it will accumulate over years. What happens if some piece of e-mail that is crucial to a case happened to be classified as junk? Does this mean that the company will have to keep every piece of junk mail received just in case?
A couple of companies I worked for lately had an ever increasing emphasis on cutting expenses in areas like manufacturing and R&D, but the expenses associated with trying to "look good" in reference to new legislation like the Sarbanes-Oxley act was virtually uncapped. According to the company Legal Counsel, if they have to go to court, showing that the company hired $1000/hr consultants to decide the record retention policy would be important. Apparently, what the company did nor did not do is not nearly as important as the company to be able to show that best effort along with the prevalent industry practice at the time was put in.
I think Cheney is the No.1 poster child for corporate corruption. A few years of government "service", then he goes to Haliburton and rakes in the big bucks, then goes back to politics and starts an unnecessary war that "purely coincidentally" throws billions of dollars back to his old company--which is STILL paying him deferred compensation.
I hate to defend Dick Cheney, but saying he only has a few years of government service under his belt is flat-out false.
==
His career in public service began in 1969 when he joined the Nixon Administration, serving in a number of positions at the Cost of Living Council, at the Office of Economic Opportunity, and within the White House.
When Gerald Ford assumed the Presidency in August 1974, Mr. Cheney served on the transition team and later as Deputy Assistant to the President. In November 1975, he was named Assistant to the President and White House Chief of Staff, a position he held throughout the remainder of the Ford Administration.
After he returned to his home state of Wyoming in 1977, Mr. Cheney was elected to serve as the state's sole Congressman in the U.S. House of Representatives. He was re-elected five times and elected by his colleagues to serve as Chairman of the Republican Policy Committee from 1981 to 1987. He was elected Chairman of the House Republican Conference in 1987 and elected House Minority Whip in 1988.
==
From Whitehouse.gov
It's "no one," not "noone." Who the hell is noone anyway?
Bush is the first president to routinely destroy large quantities of documents. So he can get away with it. The fact is the president can pretty much get away with anything when the opposition party is filled with wimps and his own party is in favor of his acts.
I'd have deleted every email they ever saw for only $725 million. Along with every other file on every one of their systems.
For $725 million, I'd have even dynamited some of their servers.
Heck, for that much I'd have even thrown in a building or two getting bulldozed.
Disk space is cheap.
But having the email program dig through years and years and years of email just to get the stuff you received today pisses a lot of people off.
The issue isn't really about disk storage. The issue is that many mail systems are not setup with "live" data disks and "archived" data disks. Everything goes on the live drives unless the user archives it off to a safe location.
But then how do you make sure you have a backup of that archived data?
Currently, we're taking the approach of copying all the email that comes in or goes out to DVD.
It's not a great solution, but the users can do whatever they want with their emails and I'll still have a copy in case any legal issues pop up.
I suspect that, very soon, email systems will be designed to accomodate the concept of archives as a near-line storage system or even a different storage box. Adding space to a storage box probably won't have the same issues as adding space to a live mail system.
And having a system that archives email to a different box after a set time since last access or something would definately improve the speed.
There are rules about retention that are beyond normal companies since they are dealing with money. In most normal cases, you could have a retention policy of 1 week and that'd be fine. So long as your policy was consistent and was something that existed before you were asked for the documents you aren't likely to have any problems.
I mean we get subponea'd for e-mails every so often and we give them what we can. If that's nothing, they are fine with that. The important thing is that we are truthful and consistent.
They should have used gmail. /har har
Someone has to tell them :
:)
2213.404838 megabytes (and counting) of FREE storage so you'll never need to delete another message.
Why yes, you're absolutely correct. Bill and Hillary Clinton were able to promptly find and produce all documents requested in connection with Rose Law Firm.
Oh... they weren't? The statement must be false then.
Quit talking out your ass.
I have email going back to 1994. Is that too long? How far back do the rest of the folks on slashdot go back?
Simple, this administration has a policy not to use e-mail. No e-mail, no records. No records, no scandals.
Python
Infostor did an article in February about how healthcare and financial services companies are now required to keep a lot of stuff, and how they are handling it.
For a large business knowing all the places something might be backed up and how the servers connect to one another requires a great deal of institutional knowledge. Even knowing how to find this sort of thing out requires institutional knowledge and time. Which is to say an experienced system's analyst with the time necessary to do this project and lots of other expert system admins, network admins, etc... for him to talk to.
This is exactly the kind of "fat" that Morgan Stanley and other companies got rid of 4 years ago. They couldn't answer the question because they no longer understand their email system because they fired everybody who had the broad and deep knowledge. They no longer have people on staff who have the experience in doing this sort of research and they don't have the other kinds of experts available to do it in reasonable time.
But they would much rather pay the fine than admit this under oath.
However, what is available for us ordinary users? When I mean "ordinary", I am not just speaking of "Joe Sixpack's" machine (who may or may not care about his data), but also those machines and small networks of machines that us geeks have around our abodes - how do you handle all of the data, in a cheap and reliable manner?
My network at home is small, and my boxes are tiny - but I still don't have a very effective backup solution. My current attempt, which I already see a weak and ineffective in even the short term, was a custom perl script run by crond on a nightly basis to backup any changes (by looking at the timestamps) to a tar.gz, then every weekend take the last tar.gz and burn it to a CD-R. Change CD-R's each week.
This wouldn't backup my entire system, but I envisioned it to backup certain areas of one of my systems, data that I wanted to designate as "valuable" to back up - stuff like mail folders, development data (source code and such), and other mostly-text files. Originally, I was looking at putting my mail folders onto this server (I use Mozilla), and remotely mounting the shares via samba. Then, have the backup software burn those folders as they changed.
The issue that I have run into is that I only have about 700MB per CD-R, and it doesn't do spanning, nor do I want it - I want the backup to be mostly unattended, if possible. I then started looking at my mail folders, and some of them were HUGE! 200-300MB for some - but when I would look at them in Mozilla - the numbers weren't correct! For instance, I have a folder that I use to store junk mail as identified by the junk filter in Mozilla. It automatically moves junk mail there, and I look it over before I delete the junk mail (sometimes I find emails from people whom I haven't communicated with in a while, or from random strangers, etc - but it isn't SPAM). So - there may be 100 spams in the folder, maybe a few hundred to a few meg or so of data, but the mail folder itself (via looking at the directory listing or via 'du') shows the size as something big - several hundred MB or so. It is like when I delete from these folders, the actual email isn't deleted, just a pointer or something in the file or elsewhere. Is this a bug or by design, I don't know...
But, it defeats my backup strategy, regardless, because other folders that I want to keep are also like this - I need them smaller, or I need a larger backup medium. I have looked into using old DAT drives, or into a DLT solution (I don't have the money for anything fancy) - DLT looks OK, DAT I have some drives and tapes for (not sure about a controller though), DVD+/-R is also a possibility, I have also thought about creating a redundant box to stream a backup to another drive on a nightly basis.
Basically, I am wanting to be able to keep a backup of some key files (not everything on the server, it isn't needed at this point), and maybe guard against accidental deletions/changes on a weekly basis (these aren't as important - I figure that if I need something that I deleted or changed, I will need it within a week - not several months down the line). What do others here use? Is it best to go with a tape system? Should I stick with a CD-R solution? Should I move to a DVD solution? Should I go with DAT or DLT? Or, would another box with some old hard drives in it be ok?
I realize that none of these ideas are meant for an "enterprise" solution, and I am not looking for that level of protection. I just would like to have something to protect some key data that I wouldn't like to lose. In many cases (like my development work), I take a "snapshot" of the data as the project(s) progress, and burn it to CD-R so that
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
"You can't make a lot of money by being completely and absolutely honest."
Then you shouldn't make a lot of money. The end does not justify the means.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Not only is there the disk space, and the speed, there is the actual reliability of the email system.
One place where I worked used CC:Mail in-house (yes this was years ago) and they never did the maintenance or deleted old email messages. They were told "It's just like a big file cabinet", After I started the mail servers would crash and take a full day and a night to repair, usually with some loss of email.
It was like pulling chicken teeth (ie very hard) politically to get management to go for weekly (on saturdays) maintenance to keep the post offices up during the week, and even harder to institute a 6 month deletion policy.
We Had to _sell_ the 6 month policy, then a 3 month policy, finally we got down to a 1 month deletion policy before we switched to Lotus Notes.
Email is a database, It needs to be maintained. Usually that includes pointer repair of some sort and empty space reclamation. Hopefully it also includes old message deletion.
(The Saturday thing wasn't bad, I usually got Mondays off so I still had a two day weekend, Tuesdays off if Monday was a holiday)
I know more than a couple particularly large corporations have both technical implementations and strict policies about making it non-trivial to keep email. Currently, any email that sits in my mailbox for more than 90-days unless I back it up gets automatically deleted. This is not due to storage/budget constraints, but entirely due to some perceived decreased liability.
I wonder if this judgement will make them rethink their hopes that if they throw it away it can never come back to haunt anyone..
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I know that once you have been notified of a court case or government investigation it becomes illegal to destroy anything that might be material, including emails. But can anyone cite where SOX or any other law says that you have to keep email for any particular time period if you're not being sued or investigated? I know there are lots of auditors and software companies that can make a bunch of money by implying you should keep them for ever or for a well specified time, but I can't find any legal requirement anywhere????
And that does not cover the most important communication mechanism of all: Speech, so should we insist on audio recorders:
But what about those who communicate outside office hours: at home, in a local bar, ... Help, stop this , I want to get off!!!!
(561) 355-6050 is her PUBLICALLY LISTED PHONE NUMBER. Here's the link if you don't belive me. http://www.southpalmbeachbar.org/courts_&_judges.h tm
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
No,
The same thing that got Morgan Stanley in trouble, failing to supply emails under court order, also happened at the White House during the Clinton Administration. Not to mention the disappearance of materials from Vince Foster's office and their 'magical' reappearance much later.
The Clinton's were already past masters of corruption and coverups from their days running the most corrupt little state in the union.
Read James Stewart's "Bloodsport" sometime. He was chosen by the Clinton's to write a favorable book on them, but he found so much dirt he couldn't go through with it. They stopped cooperating, but he put the book out anyway.
If 'the people' in Amendment 2 are 'the state' then Amendments 1, 2, 4, 9, and 10 benefit the state, not you.
Preferably one of those encrypted types. I will only bill you USD100 MILLION for this advice, and you will thank me for my generosity.
Rose Law Firm != The US govt.
Some lawyer != The president of the united states.
OK republitard?
evil is as evil does
If this is what is coming going forward in American business law, then we are well and truly farked in the head to do this as a country.
Some of you, heck, most of you, may well be knee-jerk thinking that anything that farks corporations is good but this is setting a really bad precedent in the way of requiring you to keep and be ready to produce evidence against you on a legal moment's notice. Essentially, they are requiring these e-mails to be kept strictly on the theory that something might be done and rather than the old method of actually doing detective work, and proving a case in a court of law, and achieving a conviction on merits and works done by law enforcement, YOU are a company owner will now be liable for doing their work for them in advance.
How long until the politicians get the idea that it would be good to extend this to everyone? School teachers, librarians, your pharmacist's e-mail... YOUR e-mail...
I don't think this line of thinking is entirely paranoid given the history of the thinking of politicians in this nation. Our nation is naively obsessed with the idea that you can simply write laws that people must essentially collect evidence of everything they do on the pretext that they might do something and we can't be bothered to detect and catch them at it so they must report on themselves.
While that may be a little far off what is not is the institutionalization of every e-mail and instant message to compose at work and send across the company network to the Internet or within the LAN being read later on by a bloated legal department there to do nothing more than play Big Brother to the proles running around cubicle land. How much more are those company lawyers going to cost a company and how many productive workers doing real useful things are going to be laid off to cover the cost?
Ever since the idea came about of corporate e-mail being fair game for federal and state law enforcement to use, not to mention litigation-happy civil trial lawyers, I've by default said zip, zero, nada in e-mails or on IM that would be of any use regarding anything I do at work. Most of my IM and e-mail use at work is therefore, non work related or work-related fluff and idol nonsense. Real business communication is still by mouth, carried through sneakernet.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
"... court documents claim, Burst.com has evidence that Microsoft followed a policy of deliberately destroying e-mail that could be used as evidence against it."
What opposition party? There is none. What opposition there is amounts to no more than one percent. And you're sure not going to see any kind of "opposition" from the democrats since they feed from the same trough. The real opposition is doing what it can, but until they get some votes, it will be business as ususal. Bush's boys just learned the lesson from Nixon..."Burn the tapes!"
What?
With government and its unique "right" to initiate force so deeply entangled in the market, what exactly did you expect?
You took his stuff. You pound him.
Bush is the first president to routinely destroy large quantities of documents.
Are you fucking kidding me. Ever heard of a little scandal called Watergate??!?!
Sorry for the outburst but people actually modded this up.
A few years of government "service", then he goes to Haliburton and rakes in the big bucks
I hate to defend Dick Cheney, but saying he only has a few years of government service under his belt is flat-out false.
Exactly, if you dislike him because you think he just coasted or something you are completely missing the point. The scary part about him is that he has worked so hard to get all these connections that he is basically selling to the highest bidder.
I work for a big 4 firm, boy is sarbanes oxley and compliance requirments a boon for the auditing industry!
The last administration had the same policy. I think Clinton only sent two emails during his tenure.
Notice the part about "large".
In Watergate, the documents were destroyed and the tapes edited after the break in was discovered and pointed to the White House. This administration is destroying documents proactively. He's correct.
Large quantities. Presidents destroying a file or two is not unusual at all.
Just because Cheney was faster to the trough doesn't make him less of a corrupt pig.
I notice you didn't touch the thorny issue of Cheney's continuing compensation from Haliburton, but I'll add another bit that really annoys me. When Cheney returned to government "service", Haliburton was so sorry to see him go that they gave him a special bonus. My recollection is that it was around $40 million. <sarcasm> Purely coincidental that Haliburton received so much government money under Cheney's watch.</sarcasm>
And no, I am not defending that book as a reliable source, though it's quite interesting in many ways. Actually, it's more of liar's clinic, with an amazing mix of truth, lies, self-contradictions, tautologies, propaganda, and just plain silliness. I plan to write an extensive review this weekend.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
On the other hand, I wouldn't be too surprised if Dubya barely knows how to turn a computer on. He doesn't need high-tech newspapers, either.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
His career in public service began in 1969 when he joined the Nixon Administration ... and a fine, upstanding body of men they were, weren't they. Rumsfeld is another one of Nixon's boys...
Yeah, I'm sure Ashcroft was amazed whenhis handwritten resignation appeared on computers worldwide.
"Wh-wh-wha? They have scanners? We should label scanners a weapon of mass destruction, then push through a bill expanding the FBI's powers so we can gather them up."
FYI, the banking and securities industry is governed by a set of rules that are implemented in various ways. The NASD and SEC regulations essentially boil down to two things:
1) Firms must retain all email and IM communication for at least 3 years, one year in a "readily accessible" location. This is all so that if Mom & Pop Investor lose money, then sue and claim their order execution was botched, the truth should be readily evident. Most places block external email (yahoo, et. al.), block IM, and log everything else. Propriety and compliance takes some sacrifice. Legal compliance divisions are growing every year, while IT is stable/shrinks. Consider that at Career Day!
2) All broker/dealer voice conversations must be recorded for similar time periods. Some places record ALL conversations (including the mail room clerks, support staff, everyone) just to be sure. Watch what you say on the phone at work kids.
[and, maybe relevant, SOX is a financial process compliance law, that extends criminal culpability to officers certifying records (see recent Enron, WCOM, etc. financial scandals for cause), and extends to IT in even more mysterious ways.]
Basically, not much has changed since 1995; most places that want to stay in business for a while err on the side of caution. Back then I sat in on SEC meetings with our legal team and watched them struggle to put the Internet in perspective. Later, our CTO told us to archive all the data going over (at the time) T1s for three years. Yes, ALL the data, which we had to do some basic math to explain that given available technology it would be insanely expensive. Never did happen; we did archive all email though. There are rumors some places still use WORM drives to comply with the old regulations, just to be safe. Probably the only new change is now Facetime, Akonix, and IMLogic make a financial killing with logged IM servers for the places that enable/rely on IM technology.
Summary, the technical requirements are easy but business is not...profit where possible, but try to play by the rules, don't piss off a judge, or you get massive fines and/or sued by Spitzer. That said, this one will likely be reduced on appeal. MS is suing their lead council for malpractice, has plenty of grounds to appeal (not to mention that the applied default-culpability judgement in this case is very, very rare). Business will go on.
I read an an interview with Clinton where he claimed to not know how to use a computer, and had basically delegated all IT matters to Al Gore. I don't know why that sounds "insane" to you, most middle-aged executive-level guys didn't use computers pre-1992. He probably uses one now.
In 99 Bush made some political hash about having an AOL account, and there's a picture of him floating around with a Mac powerbook on his desk, which makes him your archetypal "luser", I guess.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Oh Man you are so wrong. What are you going to do if this ends up on the case records.
By the way I think if the mod got the joke you shoudl have gotten more points.
Or, more topically, Ollie North trying to delete incriminating email from the mainframe PROFS system without realizing that the system kept it's own archives.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Sarbanes-Oxley requires companies that are traded on public exchanges to retain e-mails for 3 years. Companies that are privately owned or traded in non-public exchanges don't have to meet this requirement.
My Sent folder goes back to July 2000... I could probably dig up some archives if I wanted to go back further...
Luke-Jr
Care to read 35 other books that say the same thing? Here's a review of them, and 3 movies: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government.
This is all too often a point of confusion in many debates, sadly.
Morgan Stanley is going to be a harbinger
no....Moran Stanley is going to be pissed......very very pissed.
Which is totally irrelevant because he gets deferred compensation whether he does them favors or tells them to stick a large object in a small orifice.
GWB doesn't email (for record-retention reasons discussed), and iirc Condi doesn't email too much either. Powell was a big emailer, and Karl Rove is too.
All companies large and small, and virutally all individuals in their private lives, have done illegal things of all sorts of magnitudes. Ever mow somebody's lawn for $20 and not reported it on your 1040? Tax evader! Ever download Metallica? Copyright infringer!
Now, I'm sure you're a complete angel and have never done anything even remotely illegal, but would you want every email you ever sent subject to court review?
And while we're playing conspiracy theorist and talking about cover-ups, let's talk about Vince Foster...
"Republitard?" Please. The corruption in the U.S. Government trancends political boundaries. We have had, and continue to have, ruthless, sociopathic politicians in both parties. Whether a "D" or and "R" appears after their name on C-SPAN, the underlying pathology is the same.
I work for a company in an industry that is highly regulated.
Our IT department has many terabytes worth of network attached storage that keeps every email that passes in or out of the company. What I didn't keep I am sure the lawyers could pull up with relative ease.
I believe everything I read on the Web. Really.
Some interview says that Clinton, a brilliant student and vigorous reader never bothered to learn to use a computer. Makes perfect sense!
Whoops, I suppose I better clarify my statement. I really do believe everything I read on the Web. What I believe is that someone wrote it. (Actually even that belief is subject to some epistemological qualifications, such as that my computer and eyes are working properly, etc.) However, I do *NOT* believe in the sense of believing that it is true or even that it has meaning. I believe someone wrote it, and there is a context in which there were reasons why it was written. But true? Just for beginners, the author might be mistaken, though in this case the more obvious concern is that the source is full of shit. True? Sorry, I'm not going to believe it just because some moron on /. says so.
I keep thinking about what has been reported as the marketing slogan for Longhorn: "It just works." If so, that would be the first time in the history of Microsoft. I really doubt it. Yes, I appreciate that Microsoft is sincerely trying to make better software, but they continue to make their software more and more complex, and I'd certainly wager that Longhorn will have bugs. (Actually, I've already won that bet--Microsoft has already begun patching Longhorn's bugs.) There will be lots of times when it will *NOT* just work. They are building their entire marketing campaign on a bald lie.
Sadly, Microsoft is very much in touch with our times--just like Jeff Gannon/Jim Guckert is in touch with modern "reality". Truth is becoming a meaningless notion. Creating "proper" images and making money are apparently the only things that count.
Sad to watch, though from a historical perspective I don't care that much. However, that's just my faith in truth and democracy. I think they are good, and therefore will ultimately prevail--but the current evidence is that the places where they prevail will be elsewhere than my beloved homeland.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Sorry, I'm not here to argue with idiots. Perhaps you'd have better luck on the newsgroups. May I recommend alt.flame.rush-limbaugh?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Doesn't it say something when the hatred of the "tolerant" have forced conservatives to post anonymously?
Was there something, perhaps unrelated to the case, that they really, really, really didn't want to come out?
Tag lost or not installed.
Microsoft? Guckert? Faith in Democracy? Goddamn, that's the best troll I've read in a long while on /. But, you got to get shit that in early on a political story to work.
And I didn't say he never bothered to learn how to use a computer, I said he never bothered to learn when he was president. Just to put things in perspective, he was elected only a short bit after Windows 3.1 was released. Take off your blue dress and provide some contrary evidence.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
The whitehouse.gov site does not quite lie, but they are also selective in what they remember.
For example, they mention that Cheney was elected to congress, but say nothing about what he did there. One of his forgotten accomplishments was his work on the Iran-Contra investigation committee.
Unlike the 9/11 commitee, the Iran-Contra commitee was not able to reach a unanimous conclusion. Cheney was author of the minority report that said that "mistakes were made", but the Pres. Reagan was working to correct them.
No doubt Cheney is proud of his work on the Iran-Contra investigative commitee, but too modest to talk about keeping Bush the elder out of the loop and out of jail.
-- Programmer in Chief
Again, I'm not even trying to say what he did in Congress and the rest of his government career...only that he server more than a "few" years.
It's "no one," not "noone." Who the hell is noone anyway?
Yes republitard. Therepiblitards seems to be especially backwards. After 9/11 I heard one analyst say that the war on terror was a war of modernity against religious fundamentalists. Apparently the republitards have joined on the side of religious fundamentalists. Let's hope science wins again.
evil is as evil does
Whoo hoo, the republitards are now with the gay nigger association of america. Makes sense actually, I mean who hates gays and blacks more then a republitard.
evil is as evil does
Don't these rules apply more to mail sent from the company and internal mail? Surely mail that somebody else wrote is less effective anyway...
Sorry, I'm not here to argue with morons. You can find your soulmates over in alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, and your playmates in alt.flame.rush-limbaugh.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Is Cheney a corrupt bastard?
You can answer yes or no, or you can quibble about "bastard". I hereby predict the quibble, except that the effect of predicting the quibble insures you won't.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
How can they make sure someone hasn't burned a CD that contains the truth?
How can the person who burned the CD prove that it actually is the truth?
Remember, anything on a computer, any sort of file, any sort of document, ANYTHING on a computer can be programmatically generated.
It will look authentic, if read out loud it might sound authentic, but there is NO WAY anyone can actually prove any output from a computer is "the truth". That is, "the truth" meaning unadulterated, unedited, unmodified and to quote Donald Sutherland, "un fooled around with".
If a person has such a CD, the only thing they can prove is that they have a CD with some data on it. Whether that data is actual data, created by the actual people in question, is another, completely separate issue and impossible to prove.
IANAL, but it never ceases to amaze me how easily people look at something generated by a computer and say "Oh! That's gotta be true!" I would think that any lawyer with a moderate level of intelligence and a moderate understanding of information systems would be able to blow holes the size of battleships into any argument that some sort of CD or tape or whatever was actual, "true" data.
Hire a college CS student to whip up a perl program to fill a CD with data that looks just like the CD in question ought to be enough. The only thing left after that would be witness testimony, and you could bring all sorts of reasons why someone would lie about the origin of the CD: afraid of losing their job, etc.
Big companies aren't the only ones that should be saving data. I've got 5 years of instant messages and emails backed up.
That's enough blackmail material to save my ass when my pension fund goes tits up.
Interesting. Mod parent up.
Sometimes, a knowledgeable person takes the time to educate all of us.
Sure you are, because you're a troll. Or a crazy person, but I like to assume the best in people. And you're dead wrong about my politics.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Somewhere along the line you miss out a salient point. If Joe Average breaks the law in the US three times then his ass is in jail for good. If Average Inc does it, there's no similar repercussion.
If companies were held to the same standards as individuals - and if their board members were actually personally responsible for making sure that they met those standards - then we'd have a much better, much more honest and ethical system of capitalism.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
If your lawyers have to sort through all of a department's e-mails to determine which are useless, which must be turned over, and which must be fought over, do you want them sorting through 30-days worth or 3 years worth?
If we could see an itemized bill on what all of SCO's discovery requests have cost IBM just in lawyer fees to review the documents, you might be shocked.
Companies will lobby that 3 years is onerous, anti-business, etc. And in a way, it is. If someone wants to file a nuisance suit, all they have to do is get a broad discovery order to make settling for $100,000 more attractive than paying lawyers $100,000 just to sort e-mails.
Maybe the 3-year rule stands. Then the lawyers start fighting in court over which search terms must be matched to make e-mails relevant, so they can filter through the 3 years worth more effectively. Lowers the cost a bit, but some of that savings is made up on the motions and arguments fighting over the search terms (and additional depositions to make sure there were no code words used to refer to deals or clients).
All in all, IMO, e-mail retention law should be similar to paper retention law. And, as many have said before the advent of e-mail and after, if you don't want it on record, don't write it down... at all.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
OK republitard?
And to think... that some liberals wonder why others call them elitist.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
It's a risk-reduction measure... Even if you are SURE you are completely innocent, it still makes sense to delete email. If you don't delete it, you could perpetually be liable for something that didn't seem wrong at the time. Ethical standards change; what is considered acceptable today might be criminal or tortious in the future.
No, he's right.
The archives of the Bill Clinton presidential library will contain almost 40 million emails by the former US president's staff and two by the man himself.
I think that Cheney is a dangerous warmonger and right-hand man to the Monkey of the Apocalypse, but it's important to get the Halliburton stuff right. To avoid a conflict of interest regarding Halliburton, Cheney bought an insurance policy regarding his deferred payments. So he gets exactly the same money regardless of whether Halliburton soars or tanks.
There's a whole lot of extremely suspicious stuff going on between the Government and that company, but Cheney's deferred payment plan isn't directly a part of it.
Xenu loves you!
Hmmm, while I know nothing of Mr. Cheney, I know he's immortal. All humans are.
Infinite time does leave quite a bit of leeway for the justice of God, never you fear.
As a computational linguist, I was wondering whether what has been turned over [so far] is available, e.g., the Enron email corpus has thus far been very useful.
I'm not sure how this legally works, but does evidence like email automatically become 'public domain' in such cases?
@peetm
It's interesting to read all the responses and, as is typical of many things on /., some are informed, some are mistaken, and some are clueless.
I'm currently leading a project at a large US finanical services firm to switch from one email archival/management/compliance product to another so I have a bit of insight on what is fact and what is fiction.
First, as a few others here have written, both the title and the categorization are misleading. This is about corporate email and litigation and has nothing to do with Your Rights Online. Second, M-S isn't being fined for "deleting emails" - they are losing the judgement because (again, as somebody else correctly posted) for *repeatedly* affirming to the judge that they had found all emails requested in discovery and turned them over . . . then finding more. This eventually honked the judge off and she made her ruling.
Some blanket statements have been made that aren't true (some as a result of broad generalizations made in the article, perhaps a predictable side-effect of such a short article on such a detailed subject).
Point - Financial Services firms (at least U.S.) do NOT have to keep all emails for 3 years. There are specific laws and regulations that state that SOME emails have certain retention periods but by no means ALL. SEC 17-4A, for example, spells out that emails pertaining to the sale of securities need to be retained for a minimum of 3 years and be stored on non-alterable media (WORM). So, in this case, basically the emails to and from anyone with a broker/dealer license are subject but not those of the guy that installs the PC on their desk (or Carol in HR or Joe in Marketing, etc.).
Point - similarly, Sarbanes-Oxley does NOT state that all emails need to be kept for 3 years. Again, emails pertaining to specific subjects (typically accounting/financial reporting and controls over same) have specific retention requirements. The hard part here is that defining which emails those are is a lot harder than it is with the broker-dealers. Typically a review is done of who in the company has the ability/authority to have impact on that reporting or the controls and then their email accounts are made members of groups for specific retention policies.
Point - Spam. We all hate it and some posters correctly noted issues with having to deal with mandated minimum archival of email vs. desire to delete spam. Who wants to be forced to keep spam for 3 years (or longer)? That's just rubbing salt in the wound. This is one the reasons that many companies (mine included) engage 3rd party services to pre-filter spam prior to the email arriving at the corporate gateway. It's not 100% but I saw my spamrate drop from 300-500/day (yeah, somebody really had my number) to 10-20/day. You don't have to archive what you never received.
Point - absent any regulatory reason why email should be retained for a specific period of time a company is free to delete those OTHER emails however they see fit. To do it properly means crafting a policy and then having a process that CONSISTENTLY enforces the policy. If the policy is that after 6 months all email not otherwise subject to compliance-related archival is deleted that's fine - so long as that's what they actually do. Note that most companies add more granularity as, presumably, email also can have business value not just regulatory value. It's more typical to see that email that isn't refiled out of the default inbox/sent folders is deleted after some specific time period.
Now where it's easy to run afoul here is that (A) many email administrators aren't operating at a high enough level to be aware of the legal landmines out there and (B) the people that are crafting the policies aren't technically savvy enough to fully understand the nuances of data/email management.
So a common scenario at a company near you may be that a compliance committee composed of people from HR, Legal, and whatever else but NOT IT will hammer out a policy
"The bigger the lie, the more they believe." - Det. Bunk
espo
Maybe I'm taking this out of context, but I see an obvious reason why they wouldn't want to keep emails very long: cost. All this backup isn't free, and the more data and longer time period you want to back up, the more it costs.
Now it may be an insignificant cost to a big company like Morgan Stanley, but I can see a manager in a small company, or even in Morgan Stanley, deciding that the cost is too high considering the benefits for a huge backup of emails.
It really comes down to a question of neccesity. Perhaps the company didn't find it practical to store every e-mail since the inception of the technology. The signal:noise in the store database would be staggaring, and it costs money to store that much data indefinitely. It may have been a policy that came about for perfectly reasonable sounding reasons. "Why would we need data from 5 years ago, or even last year?"
If companies are forced to store that much information, we then get into the nasty world of potential negligence. What type of backup media is in use? What is its shelf life? Does the storage space have amicable environmental controls in place? If said space is closed down, how/where will they transfer the documents? Is the space properly secured? How much sensitive materials are contained in the stored messages? Who has access? How many employees will come through the ranks, and who takes control? Must the data be stored forver, or is there a reasonable time period? (Statute of limitations in the local state? Other states/countries with whom business is conducted?) Who determines what is in fact a "reasonable" period of time? Local legislature? Could this be a prohibitive cost undertaking for small(er) companies? (Surely not all e-mail storage incidents have the potential loss factor of $1.45 billion)
With the scope and magnitude of corporate e-mails, especially with attachments becomming ever larger (Check out this new movie!!) and with the propensity for SPAM to outnumber legitimate messages (containing images, flash/java/activex other controls/applets) the size requirements quickly mount. When they refer to "1000 tapes"; these could be 20, 40, 80 or even larger in size! That's a lot of archival data to search through! That's a lot of information overload to contend with.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
Companies do it because they can not be sure everyone is innnocent. The CEO and COO and and chain of command 3 levels deep might all be nice honest people. However, what happens when someone 4 layers down does something illegal? Is the whole company evil? No, just one dipshit. So companies do this to protect themselves from dipshit employes.
As for the rest of your statement, have fun in conspiracyland.
Actually, you reminded me of an interesting article that claimed that many of the Web pages now available will never be deleted. Not sure if I buy it, but the marginal cost of keeping the pages available is very small, and declining. The cost of creating them was vastly larger, but it's already expensed and there's nothing that can be done about that. On the other hand, to decide that a page should be deleted is a very difficult and expensive process, since someone has to really get a deep understanding of the material and be reasonably certain that the information will never be needed again. The cost of reproducing it will quite likely be prohibitive, even if it can be done. Ergo, the pages will simply be carried forward forever...
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Please stop repeating the bullshit just because you like to run away from the actual issues. Go play with your butt buddies in alt.fan.rush-limbaugh.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
No, it is a firmly established legal principle that you cannot hold anyone liable for a crime that was defined after the event. About the closest they can do is to try to shoehorn something into an older law that has enough vagueness to it, but even that approach usually fails.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Attack the messenger when you cannot dispute the message. Eh? ;)
That's true with respect to Criminal matters, but civil matters are a different story. Several companies have been known to get out of certain aspects of business when they found health risks, but still lost lawsuits years later filed by former customers and employees.
no big sig
I haven't looked at the regulations, but I would assume this would only affect mail sent by individuals in the company or received by them. If the SPAM is filtered out before it gets to someone's inbox, no one in the company has ever read it so it would not be able to be used in any court case anyway.
it's not a matter of trying to hide things, it's the fact that simply searching through old messages is a huge task.
Linus had to do this for the SCO case and he recently commented that he never wants to go through that effort again so he purges all e-mail after a very short time
Spamhaus.org claims that 76% of all email is spam. Personally, I'd be delighted to bury a legal opponent with all my spam/email and let them sort it all out.
However, what is not questionable is that you are evading the issues with the usual blame-someone-else bullshit. How about if you take it to your "intellectual" peers at alt.fan.rush-limbaugh? Pretty please with sugar on it. You dildo hurler.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
The money Cheney receives from Halliburton is deferred compensation that he earned as its CEO, BEFORE BECOMING the Vice Presidential nominee. This isn't some fancy trick they cooked up to disguise kickbacks; it's a typical part of executive compensation plans, for both financial and accounting reasons.
Before Cheney accepted the VP nomination, he negotiated with Halliburton to replace the performance-related component of his deferred compensation with fixed payments of lower expected value, then took out an insurance policy to insure that he will receive the money even if Halliburton goes bankrupt. The amount he receives is thus utterly independent of how well Halliburton does, or even whether it continues to exist. I'm not sure how he could have handled the situation any MORE ethically.
>When Cheney returned to government "service", Haliburton was so sorry to see him go that they gave him a special bonus.
>My recollection is that it was around $40 million.
Your information and recollection are wrong. Can you cite a source? Mine is
http://www.factcheck.org/article261.html
a) Does this mean that they have to "archive" messages caught by the spam filters?
b) Even if (a) is false... spam could account for a whole lotta email in three years...
/* DISCLAIMER
.
This is not legal advice. You are not a client. I'm not even an attorney. If you want/need legal advice, contact an attorney admitted to your jurisdiction's bar. What I am saying here is probably 100% wrong and if you do anything in reliance upon it, you are a blithering idiot who deserves whatever bad shit is very likely to befall you.
DISCLAIMER */
OK, now that that's out of the way . .
It isn't so much that they deleted the emails, it's that they did so with intent to hide relevant evidence that the other side requested. This deals with discovery abuses committed by Morgan Stanley. Parties to a lawsuit are entitled to information in the possession of the opposing party which is not privileged (e.g., attorney-client, penitent-priest, etc.) and which is relevant to the subject matter of the litigation or is reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence. This duty of disclosure "includ[es] the existence, description, nature, custody, condition, and location of any books, documents, or other tangible things and the identity and location of persons having knowledge of any discoverable matter." See Federal Rule of Civil Procedure (FRCP) 26. "Documents" include emails.
A litigant who withholds discoverable information is subject to sanctions under FRCP 37. This is apparently what happened here. The judge, having grown weary of Morgan Stanley's lack of forthhcoming with discovery, probably ruled that the issue of fraud was admitted. Normally, a fraud plaintiff must prove that a defendant made a statement (1) that was materially false, (2) that the plaintiff justifiably relied upon, and (3) that he suffered damage as a result. As a result of the discovery violations, the judge established (1), leaving Perelman to prove only (2) and (3). In essence, all the jury had to do was decide how much Morgan Stanley had to pay.
Now, there will be an appeal and the award may be reduced, but courts take a dim view of discovery games, so they may not be as inclined to let Morgan Stanley off the hook. This is especially true in light of the fact that punitive damages were only double actuals.
Cheney getting off the hook is evidence AGAINST a just God? What are you, impatient? Respite is the key word, my friend. For anyone, they are given all the time in the world, if they want, they just pile themselves in deeper, and when Judgement Day comes and the paradise and hellfire are visible in front of us, it will be too late to change course.
We wish Cheney would be *ZOT*ted pour encourager les autres. When evil men prosper, reason can only tell us that if God exists He is evil.
I'm not sure whether that means you have no imagination or no ethics. Probably both.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
This post, and its similarly offensive reply, prove the problem with Slashdot "TrollMods". They see a post they don't like, and moderate it "Troll", even if it's not actually a troll. These posts or "Offtopic", or perhaps "Flamebait". The others, with meaningful, relevant content, TrollMods moderate "Troll" just because they disagree, trying to suppress them anonymously rather than even debating as AC.
--
make install -not war