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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.'"
It is important to realize that these rule changes aren't just for schools - they apply to every company in the U.S..
So, for those of you who are the entire IT department where you work, or if you run your own business as a consultant, (or some similar situation), you might want to pay attention to what is required regarding email and IM retention under the new rules.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
I am assigned to a committee to see how to implement these 'new' laws into our infrastructure. It's really amazing how incompetent these laws are. They require documents to be stored forever or to expire at a certain date, and as soon as it expires, nothing about the document is allowed to be found. So as soon as the document expires, somebody has to go through all backups, tapes, computers, usb sticks etc. and delete all traces of the document.
Not only is it near-impossible to implement, the only possible implementation would be a solution similar to DRM on media, which as we all know doesn't work, since you already have the content at that moment. Of course vendors like IBM and Microsoft would love to sell you their solution (that requires call-back to the central server which has to be accessible from both inside and outside the network (if you would like to use your documents elsewhere than within the office)) which not only costs a horrible amount of money, the implementation itself is flawed (as is any DRM-solution) and has so many requirements that managing and securing the solutions is going to be a major issue.
I think it's disgusting how companies and their lobby push for these impossible laws so they can sell their software.
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The only rational response to this 300 page regulation - not imposed, note, by any act of Congress - will be to delete immediately all emails upon reading (unless you are in an industry that already has requirements to store them). Good look for the historians of the future trying to decipher the history of the early 21st Century USA - the Courts required us to delete it.
It is becoming increasingly hard for small businesses to do any business these days. Not because they are being crowded out by the larger ones, but because one must higher several employees just to do all the paperwork required to run a business.
Now they have to log all electronic communication. Why? How is an email or test message any different than calling someone on the phone or meeting face to face? Will we have to bring a tape recorder to every meeting from now on? When will it end?
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Rather than trying to archive everything, there is an important alternative, a data destruction policy. You can't discover what doesn't exist.
You just need to have the policy long in place before someone even thinks of suing you.
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That article freaked me out. Sure, schools... it sounds like a tough situation for them -- but I hadn't even known this was happening for businesses.
I *am* a business. I have my own mail server. I don't think there's anything terribly interesting to the feds in there, but I'll be damned if I want them sniffing around my data!
Quick as a wink, I set up a script that purges and overwrites all stored email, every 5 minutes. Take that, G-man! I sat back in my chair with a satisfied grin.
10 minutes later, I checked for new messages.
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.
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.
What the rules DO now officially state (which they didn't before last year) is that electronic communications must now be treated the same as traditional paper documentation.
Specifically, that means that you cant destroy any correspondance or record HAVING TO DO WITH AN ONGOING LEGAL ACTION/LITIGATION or that you can reasonaby expect may lead to litigation. For my organization, that is less than one percent of the volume of data I have. All the vendors are saying that we need to archive ALL our e-mails in a searchable database yada yada yada so that we can protect ourselves against some unknown threat that we may be found in violation of these rules. That simply isn't the case. We will be in trouble if we destroy evidenmce in an ongoing legal case, but that is about it.
What we DO need to do is insure that the HR department and others that typically deal with sensitive legal topics understand the rules, and that they should print out and save anything that they suspect could come back to bite us, like adverse personell actions. We also need to insure that building administrators do the same when it comes to discipline actions concerning students etc.
AGAIN, anyone who tells you that you NEED to archive/store ALL e-mail or other electronic documents is at best completely mis-informed (like most of the journalists parroting back the FUD)or at worst trying to scam you directly with their FUD.
Keep passing the open windows...
The PRESIDENT? What's the PRESIDENT go to do with it?
Quoting Wikipedia:
Internal rulemaking by the JUDICIAL branch - the supreme court and their hirelings - with concurrence from the LEGISLATIVE branch. The EXECUTIVE branch isn't even in this loop.
Are you faulting Bush for failing to stage an unconstitutional armed intervention into the inner workings of the Supreme Court?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Your estimates for the costs of private education are just as far off as your estimates of the money involved in public schooling. I suspect you have been misled by figures bandied about in the school voucher debate - these tend to lump secondary schools with elementary schools and even free schools to bring the apparent price down to less than the cost of a public school. For example, an often quoted figure for private school cost is $3600 per child - this is arrived at by taking the average for secondary school, elementary schools, free independent schools and church schools - all designed to make the secondary school cost look low. In truth, the average fee level of a private secondary school is rather higher at about $5,500. The gap between the private and public sector can be explained by a few things, such as reduction in bureaucratic red tape and potential increase in efficiency, but also by their frequent status as charitable organizations soliciting donations that can increase this to meet the public level, and their selectiveness; if you don't have to deal with unruly or disadvantaged children you can cut costs heavily.
My final point is that you seem to underestimate the costs in the day to day running of a school rather heavily! Just taking into account the staffing takes your available funds down to around $4k per pupil (and remember the schools that only make $3k per pupil originally?). Then you have to buy computers, books, stationary and furniture, run activities, organize school board elections, pay for heating, lighting and water and provide a bus for disabled students who can't get in otherwise. Depending on your location security might be an issue. And your building and equipment don't last forever with thousands of children inside - you need to make it to the end of the year with some surplus in case someone's broken a telescope or put a broom through the ceiling. (Or get insurance - but that will of course cost more than the average year's renovation costs; that's how insurance works).
My point with all this is that schools don't have millions of dollars sitting around in a cupboard somewhere. They aren't choosing not to employ a team of network technicians, it's just that even a small technical staff - say 2 people - eats into your budget by around $80k year if they're good at what they do. That money doesn't appear overnight.
Ah, President Bush. I thought I smelled your foul stench.
Federal Rules of Civil Procedure are promulgated by the Supreme Court (and written by their employees), after receiving a Congressional rubber stamp. Bush and his whole branch of government aren't even in the loop.
But somehow it's Bush's fault, right? Did you elect him the official scapegoat? (If you get a cold it's Bush's fault. If the Supreme Court promulgates a rule you don't like it's Bush's fault. He wasn't there for the election - but that's HIS fault.)
You really need to get medical attention for that jerking knee.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I don't know why all these people are complaining about the extra work forced on them by the government. Sure it took a few extra minutes to write an email purge script, but ever since then my work load has dropped dramatically. Every time I think that I have new work I just have to wait a few minutes and it goes away again. In fact my boss just came in to tell me that I don't need to come to work at all any more. Score!