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New Email Rules Effective Friday
An anonymous reader writes "As of today [Friday], certain U.S. companies will need to keep track of all the e-mails, instant messages and other electronic documents generated by their employees, in accordance with new federal rules. In April the Supreme Court began requiring companies and other entities involved in federal litigation to produce 'electronically stored information' as part of the discovery process of a trial." From the article: "Under the new rules, an information technology employee who routinely copies over a backup computer tape could be committing the equivalent of 'virtual shredding,' said Alvin F. Lindsay, a partner at Hogan & Hartson LLP and expert on technology and litigation. 'There are hundreds of "e-discovery vendors" and these businesses raked in approximately $1.6 billion in 2006, [James Wright, director of electronic discovery at Halliburton Co.] said. .'"
Techie:- We need to keep more backups of our e-mail database
Bean Counter:- How much do the tapes cost
Techie:- Lots - we need at least one DLT per backup
Bean Counter:- We can't afford it.
Techie:- We have to afford it
Bean Counter:- Just leave the requisition in my intray
Months Pass
Bean Counter:- The courts are on to us. Where are the e-mail backups for the 1st December 2006
Techie:- I had to overwrite them so as to keep a reasonabley current backup
Judge:- Techie, you shredded evidence - now you're for it
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
I'm an admin in a smaller company as you - shared hosted email. If you really want to play it safe, I would say make the responsibility of saving email the responsibility of each user.
Really this is a bunch of crap anyway. What about companies that don't even CONTROL their employee's accounts and just expect them to use personal hotmail accounts. Catalog all instant messaging traffic? How about clients that might IM that are installed aside from what the company keeps track of. Yeah, let me just start logging ALL network traffic on that 20 trillion terabyte tape I rotate every day.
Besides which how about tracking stuff that's encrypted? What if the messages are IMed through some http system? Now I have to do man in the middle attacks to sniff HTTP connections, then I have to store that information. Because we also do credit card transactions via HTTP I am storing credit card information this goes against Visa's policy for businesses allowd to do credit card transactions. I wouldn't be surprised if it were against the law either.
The Supreme Court can say whatever they want, but I can't do what they're telling me, nor can I raise the dead like Jesus if they required that either. The law is irrelevant unless you PURPOSELY shred / delete documents - and that's against the law already during litigation.