News of the World Investigation Expanded to 9/11 Victims

DMandPenfold writes "Police are questioning whether a change in News International's email retention policy was part of an effort to conceal widespread phone hacking by the News of the World, a scandal which is threatening Rupert Murdoch's planned takeover of BSkyB. The trawl for emails and the questioning of changes in News International's email retention policy has important implications for IT security and corporate governance professionals, and is likely to see organizations examining their own policies and reminding their staff on acceptable usage and best practice for email."

Comments

for the wrong reasons

[Trepidity]

is likely to see organizations examining their own policies and reminding their staff on acceptable usage and best practice for email

It'd be pretty sad if the lesson people take from the News Corp fiasco is: man, their IT staff should've really been more on the ball about making sure no evidence of the crimes they committed was accidentally retained.

Re:for the wrong reasons

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

It'd be pretty sad if the lesson people take from the News Corp fiasco is: man, their IT staff should've really been more on the ball about making sure no evidence of the crimes they committed was accidentally retained.

It's been an open secret for well over a decade now that email retention policies are purely legal dodges. There is no other reason to automatically delete such massive stores of institutional memory except for the possible legal threat they may pose. It isn't like email storage requirements are a practical limitation - any company with terabytes of email is going to have an IT budget so large that those costs will be lost in the noise.

And, while I don't have a link at hand, I recall a case a couple years ago where the government was pursuing charges that a large corp's email retention practices were a deliberate form of destruction of evidence - despite all of the lawyerly sign-offs and standardised corporate practices verbiage. I wish I did have a link because I'd like to know how that case turned out.