U.S. K-12 Schools Must Comply With e-Discovery Rule

Lucas123 writes "K-12 school districts throughout the US have a daunting IT homework assignment over the summer: Develop systems that ensure their electronic documents, email and instant messages are in compliance with new federal e-discovery regulations, much in the same way corporations have been preparing over the past year. The new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) are expected to be widely enforced by the end of 2007, according to a Computerworld story. '"A lack of preparation could prove dire for K-12 school districts, which oftentimes lack technical proficiency, funding and legal expertise," said Robert Ayers, technology coordinator for the Kingston, Pa.-based Luzerne Intermediate Unit 18 school district.'"

Comments

What good are logs?

[delirium of disorder]

Any Semi-intelligent person will use cleartext for official but non-confidential business at school and work, and encrypt any email or IMs that contain personal information or nefarious plans. If you are stupid enough to send something revealing over a public, corporate, or academic network, you DESERVE to get caught.

Hopefully as more and more people get caught for using cleartext, crypto will be the norm and all these laws requiring logging will become useless for law enforcement purposes.

Re:What good are logs?

[TheNicestGuy]

Hopefully as more and more people get caught for using cleartext, crypto will be the norm

In other words, you hope that some judge sets a precedent as quickly as possible for encrypted records to not count as "accessible"? Or better yet, that the justice department gets handed the statistics to convince a clueless legislature to outlaw encryption? I mean, if they're going to require these records to be discoverable in the first place, why wouldn't they require by law that prosecutors and judges can actually read them?

My understanding is that when the rules first go into effect, individual judges will still have their own say as to whether the data policies involved in their cases meet the discovery standard of "accessible", and encryption would be a big grey area. If a big case comes up where a company scrupulously retained all their emails, but the suspicious officers in question were all encrypting with their own personal keys, which the company policy conveniently ignored, what would stop the judge from ruling that a retention policy does not keep its data "accessible" if it doesn't actively prevent personal encryption? Or if they didn't feel it was within their power, and it let the next Ken Lay get off scot-free, wouldn't that be a good reason for Congress to start working on laws against civilian encryption? Even if such laws were limited only to data passing through corporate servers, to or from corporate personnel, it would still be a blow to efforts against corporate espionage.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not the least bit anti-encryption. It's just that I've always been a little grateful that encryption had not made its way into the mainstream yet. The post-9/11 political climate is definitely not the time for it to try, because as far as I know there's nothing constitutional to prevent Congress from killing it if they've got a reason.

Re:Another law made by non-it people

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if you go the spoiled child temper-tantrum misfeasance route, and want to flail around trying to break everything within reach while crying like a little baby.

Otherwise, you declare that documents are to be kept N years, that revisions to documents create new documents, that backups will be done differentially, and that in N years, each tape is wiped, wiping all documents that were N years old and not updated. You set up networked file shares, take away all write access to save documents on the local drive, and tell people that if a document is saved under directory X, once it is closed it will be backed up in Y hours, and kept for Z years.

Maybe I should sell my services as a consultant. I have no clue what I'm doing, and I still came up with a better idea than some obtuse phone-home DRM system.

Applicable precedent?

[Phanatic1a]

Printz v. United States was the case that struck down major portions of the Brady gun-control bill. Appellants argued, and the court agreed, that the law's requiring state employees to engage in extra work in order to compose and retain documentation in order to appease federal law violated both federalism and the concept of a unitary executive.

This seems pretty similar.

Re:Not just schools

[PPH]

Our engineering firm is a subsidiary of a foreign corporation. They outsource all IT support functions to jurisdictions where the FRCP doesn't apply.

First, Sarbanes-Oxley pushes companies to list in overseas markets. Now this nonsense. Pretty soon there won't be anything left here.