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The Importance of Deleting Old Stuff
An anonymous reader writes: Bruce Schneier has codified another lesson from the Sony Pictures hack: companies should know what data they can safely delete. He says, "One of the social trends of the computerization of our business and social communications tools is the loss of the ephemeral. Things we used to say in person or on the phone we now say in e-mail, by text message, or on social networking platforms. ... Everything is now digital, and storage is cheap — why not save it all?
Sony illustrates the reason why not. The hackers published old e-mails from company executives that caused enormous public embarrassment to the company. They published old e-mails by employees that caused less-newsworthy personal embarrassment to those employees, and these messages are resulting in class-action lawsuits against the company. They published old documents. They published everything they got their hands on."
Schneier recommends organizations immediately prepare a retention/deletion policy so in the likely event their security is breached, they can at least reduce the amount of harm done. What kind of retention policy does your organization enforce? Do you have any personal limits on storing old data?
Sony illustrates the reason why not. The hackers published old e-mails from company executives that caused enormous public embarrassment to the company. They published old e-mails by employees that caused less-newsworthy personal embarrassment to those employees, and these messages are resulting in class-action lawsuits against the company. They published old documents. They published everything they got their hands on."
Schneier recommends organizations immediately prepare a retention/deletion policy so in the likely event their security is breached, they can at least reduce the amount of harm done. What kind of retention policy does your organization enforce? Do you have any personal limits on storing old data?
Official Nazi Memo
Please do not keep documents about Concentration-Camp details more than 3 Months.
If the gold in the inmates' teeth have been molten and the lamp-shades with their skin have been shipped all data about it can be shredded and burnt.
Once the Jews, the intellectuals and the gipsies have all been cremated, the documents about it can be safely destroyed.
We don't have to keep statistical data about the efficiency of the Zyklon B showers more than 1 month either, it's cheap enough.
Immediately dismantle showers and crematorium after use, we wouldn't want the public getting a bad impression.
PS. Do not make jokes about Leni Riefenstahl in your official communications.
No jokes about Sonja Henie as well.
Also, do not propose Jesse Owens as the next James Bond.
PPS. Don't talk to Goebbels about Company secrets, he keeps a diary.
PPPS. If anybody asks, Treblinka was a summer camp. //For the sarcasm-detector: this is a test
Retain everything.
Just make sure that anything past your legal retention limit is only retained offline.
How hard is that? Standard practice as far as I'm concerned - when you hit the limit on what you need to store, archive it to get your space back but keep the archives around just in case you need them later (e.g. lawsuits, etc.). There's nothing stopping you putting your old tapes, or old NAS disks, into storage because by the time the data is about to retire, so are the old units that stored it.
Not saying keep them around forever, but just keep what you don't NEED to keep offline. Otherwise you're just chewing disk space for no good reason anyway.
Then when you do come across your (encrypted) backup tapes in the archives in a few years time, you know you can safely ditch anything there should you be short of space, and that you can probably restore anything that might be there if the lawyers send you in. And nobody can access it but you. Hell you could store it live, but encrypted, and just archive the encryption key for each year that you don't need.
Air gap and encryption, people. Seems like it should be pretty basic stuff to a company as HUGE as Sony.
My company deletes emails after 90 days unless you jump through burning hoops to save a limited number of them. And has IM logging forced to disabled. This REALLY sucks when you want to go back to refer to something. And is so transparently a CYA move.
How about instead of deleting everything people just are not a-holes? And if they can't help themselves maybe they should be exposed. Instead they make us all work in circles as we forget our past.
Things we used to say in person or on the phone we now say in e-mail, by text message, or on social networking platforms. ... Everything is now digital, and storage is cheap — why not save it all?
Sony illustrates the reason why not. The hackers published old e-mails from company executives that caused enormous public embarrassment to the company. They published old e-mails by employees that caused less-newsworthy personal embarrassment to those employees, and these messages are resulting in class-action lawsuits against the company.
Never Write what you can Phone;
Never Phone what you can Say;
Never Say what you can Whisper;
Never Whisper what you can Nod;
Never Nod what you can Wink.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
She never forgets anything I say. ever.
Gently reply
Research data usually needs to be kept for 7-10 years after the conclusion of the grant, then usually stored much later after since the people involved have left and nobody knows what to do with it. In our research of a 2PB file server, over 1/2 of the data hadn't been touched in over a year. The desire there is to move the data to cheaper tape backup and free up spinning disk. The problem with that is it's cheaper to buy more spinning disk than it is to buy a brand new tape array that will last for 10-15 years and be able to store a few PB of data. Think of it as initial vs. incremental cost.
But the part about employees leaving and not knowing what to do with their data is a big one. I'm sure there's leftover data from when I parted ways with my previous employer - I was there for 11 years and did a lot of work for them during that time, with data scattered all over the place. But since I'm gone there's no way they can ask me to come back and help, so all they have is what's left and if they delete any of that they have no idea what they're going to lose.
This is why I kept telling people to delete emails. Don't save everything, get rid of it. Set Outlook to auto delete on exit and don't give people the option to delete.
But no, they whine and whine that they need to keep stuff even though they haven't looked at it in five years and the project it referred to is gone.
Delete, delete, delete.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I don't do or email anything that would "cause enormous public embarrassment" to the company if it got out.
I worked for one corporation with a 30 day email retention policy, and the servers were configured that way. After that, anything of importance was supposed to be printed and filed for future reference. And this was in the 90s. Of course, people still had email on their desktops, etc., but I'd guess it let them respond to lawsuits' discovery in a more limited manner than trawling through all email ever sent by anyone about anything, limiting risk of embarassment. I follow the logic, but pragmatically speaking it's convenient to have past emails easily searchable.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
You don't need to keep everything on line. That was the thing that was so stupid. They had everything online with a common key to access everything.
First, Sony knew they had a problem over a year ago. They're refusing to admit it but everyone knows.
Second, they way Sony laid out their network was dumb. They should have compartmentalized and archived.
Third, when you know you are getting hacked don't just sit there with your thumb up your ass. Do something about it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Frosty godwin
If huge corporations started following some basic legal and ethical guidelines, they wouldn't have to worry so much about old documents getting leaked. If your business strategy is to f##k your customers and/or your partners, sooner or later you will pay for it, documents or no documents.
Time flies when you don't know what you're doing
This is the most effective form of security, and often the hardest. If you have nothing of value, there is no risk. Of course that ideal state is impossible but that doesn't mean opportunities to reduce risk by reducing the impact are overlooked.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Was when I worked for the RI Secretary of State's office. The Archives divisions prepared all sorts of data retention schedules and we used them.
A philosophical argument for those cheap Western Digital external disks.
I work in a school. When a term or a year closes, I do a big deletion of email that becomes moot at the end of that term or school year. A year-end cleanout often ends up with my inbox being chopped about 75%. If you have frequent senders who send mails with temporary topicality, you can sort by sender and get rid of their older mails.
Every company I worked for had a specific retention policy. What they didn't have is any automated means of enforcement.
While a central server hack will get the stuff that's most easily handled automatically, lawsuits get to dig into the ugly bits that are still hanging out on the laptops of the employees waiting to be discovered.
I think a lot of company communication retention policies are based on risk management. They are afraid to delete anything in case they get sued. Depending on the industry they may be required to retain data by law.
It seems this can work equally in their favor or against them.
I have worked for a lot of big companies and realized from day one of email that there is literally zero privacy. Once you hit the send button you have no idea who is going to read what you wrote. I have always refrained from putting anything in a company email (or in a personal email accessed via company networks) that could come back and bite me in the ass. No jokes, no comments about coworkers, the boss, or management in general, no comments about the futility of the project I'm assigned to, etc. Keep it strictly business. Likewise for telephone conversations where one or both ends are in the company phone network. Likewise for web browsing and searches.
Anyone who thinks any form of communication at their place of employment is private is an idiot. Always assume every word said, written, or typed will be heard/read by someone who was not intended to be part of the communication, either now or in the future.
If you think it is necessary to save it, create another folder and move it there.
My personal emails I just keep forever, but work stuff get's deleted.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Why didn't you burn the tapes?
He says because he was under medication...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Don't be a dick. Should be easier to manage than a complicated document-deletion-strategy.
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act says you should retain company/corporate documents, and emails are company documents despite the triviality on the comments within.
So by all means delete the emails, and then when the SEC comes knocking and asks about the deleted emails you've got to convince them they were only pics of cute kittens off the internet and not insider dealing. So to cover yourself you backup and retain everything for a period as designated in company policy.
So ensure you have a short retention policy.
After all the e-mails that were flouted around in the Microsoft Antitrust case, you would have thought that businesses would have caught on by now. Having an active retention policy and following it does provide some collective amnesia because in any litigation situation if the information still exists it's discoverable. Personally I don't want someone delving around my e-mails from 20 years ago but unfortunately it has happened to me. The last thing you want is to be sitting in a deposition while opposing council tries to dissect your intonations and try and determine the definition of what "is" is. If you don't need it, delete it.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
The big problem with this is that storage is too cheap. ie. it's cheaper to keep buying more storage than to spend the time deciding on what to retain and what to delete.
And this was a point made 5 years ago, not by me, but a senior exec from storage division of a technology giant developing new ways of increasing hard disk capacity!
As others have already alluded to, you are screwed if you retain and screwed if you don't.
If you retain data "forever" then you can be subpoenaed "forever."
If you destroy documents or entire categories of documents on a regular schedule and you are sued or prosecuted for crimes that have very-long statutes of limitations (certain tax frauds, for example), you won't have documents that exonerate you.
If you cherry-pick which documents to destroy, or destroy them (other than on a longstanding destruction schedule) shortly before a prosecution or lawsuit, you'll be accused of deliberately destroying evidence.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I get about 10GB of email a year, and do my best to purge what I can up front, but also try hard to save everything. Most of the girth is due to file attachments... And yes they really should have been saved to the file server, but sometimes it is missed. Little obscure pieces of information often come up as being useful years later-- one recent example was trying to figure out how certain financial information was derived 5 years ago.
But the bottom line is 99% of the information stored will never be used again after 6 months. Automatic expiry assignments would be cool, but wow that would be tough to track.
A common answer to the question "why do you/your company do something that seems so utterly stupid" is "because our insurance company/contracts/applicable laws make us do it and/or our lawyers tell us that it's better if we do it that way."
I've worked for companies that had short data-retention policies. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most rank-and-file employees whose productivity depended on holding on to old data probably found some way to do so. Maybe they printed out all emails except the obviously ephemeral. Maybe they exported them. Maybe they bulk-forwarded them to themselves every 89 days. Maybe they [insert other easy solution that worked for them]. You get the idea.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Rules:
1) Don't delete other people's stuff. IT workers / Lawyers I'm looking at you. You should never delete something without a specific verbal or written OK from the document owner. When you automatically delete my stuff I find ways around your scripts.. It does no good, because I WILL retain my records indefinitely. So just stop wasting my time and leave my stuff alone.... The only justifiable reason to delete my files is: the Server harddrive is full. But it costs less to buy a freaking hard drive, than to decide what documents can be deleted...
2) Document Retention Policy: Min: Legally required length of time Max: FOREVER. See Rule #1. You should NEVER touch my inbox, Network Drive, or any other place I store documents with an automated script, deletion of files should only occur by hand by the document owner...
3) Don't do unethical things. You don't have to worry about what's in the document if you did the right thing in the first place... You should fire any employee who is unethical and as a corporation take responsibility if those unethical things embarrass the company. This is what reviews (code, business, technical etc) are for, you're supposed to check that your employees are following good practices... Then that circumspect code, business practice etc, would've never seen the light of day in the first place. When a corporation fails that they shouldn't hide it, they should admit it and take their licking...
My email contains important technical information that I may need for years after I composed that email. When you delete it for me. You waste valuable company time as I recreate the exact same information I already "knew" which may have never made it into a formal document.
JUST STOP IT. There is nothing illegal about keep business documents forever. There is something highly unethical (and possibly illegal!) about a practice that stems from the idea of destroying evidence. So stop it. The ethical, right, and more reasonable thing to do is enforce from the IT perspective the minimum retention policy. After that, (ie when you delete) should be based on business need: 1) I really will never need this again and 2) The storage costs don't justify the (low) possible future return. Since storage is CHEAP, #2 should pretty much never come into play...
What I see is the opportunity for evidence of wrong doing to be leaked to the public.
Sony is "embarrassed"? Sony is a corporation, not a human. As such it cannot be embarrassed.
But it can be found guilty of it's crimes, as can any other corporation.
Let the madness begin!
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
The lesson is always assume whatever you put in a computer will eventually become public.
I think it will be quite useful if my entire life, from birth to death, became public 100 generations (or 2000 years, whichever comes later) after I die. Apply that to a representative sample of every culture that ever lived or will live and it would be a boon to anthropologists 2000 years from now.
However, once you start talking about making my life public within a few generations of living memory, or worse, within living memory, that could get dicey and cause real harm to specific people who are still alive ("your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather screwed my ancestor out of a plot of land, I'm going to kill you and all of your relatives" kind of thing).
In cases where knowing my life 2000 years from now is likely to cause or inflame ancient-but-still-living hatreds (think: some of the conflicts in and around the location of the modern state of Israel), push the date back further until this is no longer an issue. In other words, 2000 years/100 generations may be too short of a time before my life can be made public without hurting people.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"I think you know we now live in a world where you can make a fairly benign statement and their exists a very real possibility someone with an axe to grind may strip it of its context and use it against you. "
Nothing new; see Cardinal De Richelieu (1585 -- 1642): "Give me six lines written by the most honorable person alive, and I shall find enough in them to condemn them to the gallows."
As a socially-minded countess who lived through WWII told me once somewhat tounge-in-cheek yet also very seriously (paraphrasing, and she probably got it from elsewhere in those times):
"If you think, don't talk;
If you talk, don't write;
If you write, don't publish;
If you publish, don't sign."
So, again, this is not a new issue. That is one reason for the protections in the US constitution against "fishing expeditions" in people's lives. "Selective enforcement" of the law or "selective scrutiny" of political adversaries is a corrosive thing in a democracy.
But the problem is, in order to make social change on a broad scale, such as Martin Luther King was involved with regarding civil rights, is that you have to think, talk, write, publish, and sign. And as I've said before, that is the problem with an emphasis on security through "encryption" as opposed to community if you are interested in social change, because in order to make social change you need to spread a message generally in a very public and committed way. Related comments by me:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Perhaps people will now be more circumspect in what they put in emails. As Martin Lomasney allegedly said, ""Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink."
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Well said, turbidostato, well said!
See also a book by a founder of MasterCard which even included a section on the importance of "open books [for accounting]" that can be inspected by all employees and customers:
"Honest Business" By Michael Phillips
http://www.amazon.com/Honest-B...
"An inspirational guide to ethical business practice explains how to create and manage a small business that emphasizes openness, personal integrity, and community involvement as the keys to success."
Another related thing is Dee Hock's (founder of Visa) work on the Chaordic Commons as value, purpose, and principles-driven fractally-organized organizations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://www.griequity.com/resou...
That said, I have a lot of respect for Bruce Schneier, especially for writing stuff like this:
"The War on the Unexpected"
https://www.schneier.com/blog/...
"We've opened up a new front on the war on terror. It's an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected; it's a war on different. If you act different, you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and even arrested -- even if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of doing anything wrong. The problem is a combination of citizen informants and a CYA attitude among police that results in a knee-jerk escalation of reported threats...."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I work for a company that has very strict data retention policies. As a matter of fact one of the things you sign when hired is an explanation of these policies and that you both understand them and will adhere to them.
After the legal mumbo jumbo there is a paragraph that basically says "since we retain this stuff for years never put something in an email or code comment that may embarrass you in the future."
At the time it made me think of the MS engineers who used "Netscape engineers are weenies!" as a decoding phrase in a .dll I am sure it was good for a laugh in the lab but they looked pretty stupid when it got exposed.
Anytime I warn someone about something they have written that they shouldn't have - that incident always comes to mind.
Once you type words into a computer, whether as email text or documents, you have to assume they will be retrievable by someone at any point in the future. Even if your company has automated retention policies, somebody could easily forward or save whatever you write, an email server somewhere could retain what you sent, a backup system could archive it.
Document retention policies are like school zero-tolerance rules. They are stupid to begin with, and they don't achieve the desired result.