OT: Keeping 3-m4i1 'forever'

[Fairlight]

Simon--er, no...it was Steve Wiltsie--said:
> I've heard that about 2 weeks ago the Supreme Court made a decision that
> basically said businesses needed to keep their e-mail 'forever'.  I've since
> confirmed that information with a lawyer but no one seems to know what
> 'forever' means and if the decision includes all e-mails including spam.
> Does anyone know any more than that about it?  If it is true, what mechanism
> is supposed to be correct for archiving and storing the e-mail?  When is it
> supposed to go into effect?
> 
> I have clients mainly using Outlook and Outlook Express.  None of them has
> an exchange server now although one is going to be joining their parent
> company's domain soon and the e-mail will then all be handled by their main
> exchange server at HQ.  Has anyone heard if Microsoft is going to build
> anything into their products to handle this new requirement?
> 
> Looking forward to hearing any constructive comments on this.

Here's the actual link to the legislation someone posted on Slashdot, since
the original article was very skimpy on details.

http://www.uscourts.gov/rules/EDiscovery_w_Notes.pdf

However, in searching on this, I've seen the same phrase in several places.
This is the excerpt from the /. blurb:

"As of today [Friday], certain U.S. companies will need to keep track of
all the e-mails, instant messages and other electronic documents generated
by their employees, in accordance with new federal rules. In April the
Supreme Court began requiring companies and other entities involved in
federal litigation to produce 'electronically stored information' as part
of the discovery process of a trial."

Note the phrase "involved in federal litigation".

Now, visit:

http://www.saysuncle.com/archives/2006/12/01/the_constitution_and_technology_collide/

Reading the responses, this particular factor seems to be a major deciding
point in which companies are subject to the legislation.  Apparently, from
what I'm gathering, this is meant to cover part of the discovery process.

>From the amount of comments I've read so far, nobody knows when the clock
starts ticking even for companies affected.  The scope seems to be limited
to only certain companies, but nobody knows for sure how this is to be
interpreted...at least I haven't read a good answer yet.

Technically, it went into effect in April, or at least some part of it did.
The rest goes into effect either today or Friday depending what source you
look at.

If you're worried, consult a lawyer; they're the only ones that will be
able to advise you authoritatively.  I'd also get a notarised copy of the
advice in case it ever went to court.  :) :) :)

Personally, I don't think this will fly if challenged on some grounds.
Undue burden has to come into play somewhere, although IANAL.  The problem
is, the courts don't understand the technology, nor the business realities;
as with our politicians, they only understand that "they want THIS, and
they want it NOW"--and unfortunately, we gave them the power to make their
wishes law.

I'd love to see a -BIG- company like IBM start retaining every email,
including all spam--then send the federal government invoices for the
storage media required to comply with the law.

>From everything I've read so far, it doesn't look like the regular company
has to worry about this as a matter of course.  But the information that's
in plain English is sketchy at best, and the rest is indecipherable
legalise that I've only taken a cursory glance at.  It looks like it's
basically an ammendment to some other legislation and there were enough
backrefs that I wasn't going to waste time tracking it down when the scope
seems fairly limited (so far).

Your post was the first I've heard of it, actually, which tells you how
much coverage it's gotten in the media.  They're too busy covering Gibson
and Jolie and Spears.

At any rate, there are a lot of questions--such as, "What if a company
doesn't even keep their mail on their own servers?"  If it's the ISP that's
responsible for this, that's undue burden, I should think.  If you just
make every employee responsible, that may not fly either.  A lot of these
questions have been raised already.  Nobody knows if it's limited to
inbound, outbound, both, IM's even if they're not normally committed to
disk, etc.  

I blame this mess partly on Marc Foley, ENRON, HP, and a host of other
companies and politicians.  They're the reason someone feels we "need" this
kind of legislation.  I blame the people in power for not understanding the
tech well enough to know it's largely infeasible.

My google query was:

     supreme court email retain keep forever

Happy sifting.  I doubt it's worth it unless you're dealing with certain
kinds of companies.  Finding out which that is should be an adventure for
some time to come.  If you find out more, post back.

mark->
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