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Judge Gives Intel More Time To Find Missing E-mail
narramissic writes "ITworld is reporting that Intel has until April 17 (7 days more than the original deadline of April 10) to 'explain to a judge why it lost e-mail records that could provide proof that the chip maker used anticompetitive practices as alleged by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD).' According to an order from Vincent Poppiti, the special master hearing negotiations of the case, the court is looking for an accounting of Intel's document preservation problems and a proposal for a better solution for archiving future records."
... we can't find them because we deleted them.
This whole thing sounds like crap from Intel. "Whoops, your honour, we, a giant, multibillion dollar organization, staffed with the brightest engineering and IT minds that money can buy, accidentally forgot to keep email archives. TeeHee. No idea how that happened. Oh well, since there's no evidence of our transgressions thanks to this 'oopsie', we'll just go home now..."
I mean, does anyone actually believe that they forgot to uncheck that annoying little box in Exchange labelled "Delete all incriminating emails after 30 days"? I could believe that a few emails got misplaced, even believe that one set of tapes was damaged or corrupted... but "the staff wasn't doing it, IT didn't think about it, and the system was automatically deleting them"?
I think I may just keep buying AMD, mostly because I'm worried that Intel quality control is about the same as their IT competence, and I'll open up my new Core Duo to find a severed human finger in there.
(but safely wrapped in a clean room suit).
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
why people expect others to keep incriminating, or even non-incriminating emails
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Excuse me for asking, but if that is their official standing, why did they need the 7 day extension? What's gone is gone, isn't it?
46487 466780 252994 376409 96920 39622 205366 244315 622115 512361 668040 63608 259203 955314 811176 652718 166330 23922
Man, and I thought my mail server needs an upgrade to cope with all the spam. Intel's must really suck.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
These email lapses and information destruction policies are becoming turning points in lawsuits all too often. It is absurd that major corporations are not required to keep all executive email on record, forever. Not just for lawsuits, more so to protect investors and the public against illegal and unethical behavior by the company's officers. The Sarbanes-Oxley act requires that records be made available to "Understand how significant transactions are initiated, authorized, supported, processed, and reported;", and I would think email is a significant component of this.
FTFA:
Yeah, sure. Email sent by the corporate executives accidentally deleted?
People get their asses fired and sued for much less than that.
The people responsible for the email of the executives don't do anything of the sort unless they're explicitly told to.
So I think it's about as likely that the email messages in question got "accidentally" deleted as it is that the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was "accidentally" bombed.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Intel plans to announce future document retention will be on zip drives.
This reminds me of something Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1343- October 25, 1400) said, "If gold rusts what should iron do?" If giant corporations cannot keep track of their data how can one expect the average Joe to keep his information backed up properly?
We run a small computer repair company and constantly hound our clients to backup all their data to an external hard drive. Here we are asking the average consumer to do what Intel cannot manage to do for themselves?
Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.
This reminds me of politicians who have to testify at a hearing for whatever indecent they've managed to get themselves involved with.
"Sorry, I have no memory of that event."
"Sorry, I have no recollection of that phone call."
"Sorry, I cannot recall that conversation."
Unfortunately we're screwed either way. If they're lying, then they can't be trusted to run a country. If they're telling the truth, then they have shown an extraordinary inability to remember important details, they have chronic memory problems and as such they still can't be trusted to run a country.
Open System Manager, hold down the CTRL key, while typing 'BillGATES'.
A virtual drive of unknown origin will appear on the desktop, containing all the missing email.
It is up to you whether to make copies, or to delete the files.
Type 'AMDisOURbitch' to make the files invisible again.
If they do recover the emails, they'll just show every email they've got EXCEPT the incriminating ones.
Instead of letting them try to find the emails, why doesnt the judge require an external source to find the email...?
I'm sorry, judge... I'm not sure what this 'ee mail' is that you keep talking about. We use interoffice memo's here. That's right, paper. Good old shred-able paper. And for the incriminating stuff we just shout over the cubicles.
A couple years ago after the suit was filed, the court ordered Intel to retain all documents that could possibly be relevant, including emails.
If this was a minor case with only some mid level managers involved I could see where something might slip through the cracks, but it is hard to believe that the CEO, Chairman and other top level execs just assumed that IT was retaining the emails for them, and IT assumed they were retaining the emails on their own.
These execs were quite aware of the lawsuit and likely had discussions about it with their attorneys on a regular basis. If they were truly innocent, you would think they would be very interested in insuring the proof of their innocence was maintained because the court may draw some very negative inferences from a failure to maintain emails from such high level corporate executives in a major company with a world class IT infrastructure. It strains credulity that everyone just assumed someone else was taking care of this.
You can bet that if Intel had needed to retain these emails to protect themselves, instead of to incriminate themselves, they would have double, triple even quadruple checked that the emails were being retained.
"Do you expect me to talk?"
"No Mr. Bond, I expect you to AutoReply!"
Rather than just granting more time to do the same, the judge should have offered Intel another option. "I'll give you another 30 days, before I allow AMD to "put Humpty-Dumpty back together again".
Having worked for Intel for 8 years (left the company just few months ago), I can say with a resonable degree of confidence the courts will find nothing illegal at Intel. They won't find anything like those stupid e-mail exchanges that were leaked from Microsoft. Every action in the company is checked and doubled checked by a paranoid legal department. Also employees received extensive legal training on how to avoid potential legal landmines. Things that could cause Intel legal harm are discussed verbally so there won't be any trace of it. But in general, people are trained to be politically correct on everything they say. For instance, instead of saying "this will kill the competition", they will say "this will bring value to customers". In fact, at one of the training classes, they go over a long list of terms to avoid and their respective 'politically correct' equivalents. So they all know the code words when they hear them.
I work for Intel. We shred EVERYTHING after one year. Email that is not backed up is deleted after about 30 days. The why is very simple; we loose things, we forget things, we are human. If we did not have such a policy someone might ask for data we may or may not still have after a couple of years. If we cannot find it, it is suspicious, but if we have a 1 year shred policy I do not have to remember where I put each document, where I got the data, and have it backed up FOREVER six ways from Sunday. In an industry that remakes itself every six months all documents are out of date twice over anyway.
Do you know how many emails a company executive receives every day? You had better believe that I would use an auto delete policy and if I was an assistant I would not want to find an email more than 30 days old in that mountain. I think most S&P 500 companies have an even stricter shred policy.