Category: Estorian Looking Glass

Today’s financial crisis is not the first one to occur and likely will not be the last. However like previous stock market crashes, such as in 1929, we can expect to see new legislation take effect. Out of the crash of 1929 came the passage of the Securities Act in 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act in 1934 which ultimately resulted in the establishment of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 1934. Since then, the SEC has been actively involved in making changes of the financial regulatory system anytime financial crisis occur and it is safe to say this one will be no exception.

Under the Federal Records Act each federal agency, with help from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), is required to maintain records that document their organization, functions, policies and activities. It is explicitly noted that Federal records should not be destroyed except when in accordance with the procedures described in Chapter 33 of Title 44, United States Code. Recently, in the Washington Post, we find out that not only does the White House lack a comprehensive email archiving solution but past solutions have been riddled with numerous record-keeping problems:

Phishing as a security risk has come a long way since its infancy and while phishing has changed its style; one thing that hasn’t change is its effectiveness in attracting victims. By combining modern technology and social engineering to gain access to information such as credit card numbers or passwords, criminal activity is flourishing across the Internet. In the May 29th, 2008, Quarterly Trends and Analysis Report by US-CERT (United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team), the top reported security incident was phishing. The documented risk noted by US-CERT bears itself out in statistical evidence tracked by organizations such as the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) which showed the number of unique phishing sites reported between January and March of 2008 was a combined 81,215. These staggering numbers highlight the reasoning behind the FTC Red Flag Rules.

If your company acts as a creditor, hopefully by now you have heard about the 26 FTC Red Flag Rules that you must be in compliance with by November 1st, 2008. The FTC reports that an identity is stolen every 4 seconds; and in 2007 identity theft was the number one consumer fraud complaint received by the FTC. So, it is easy to see why these rules and the associated penalties for non-compliance have been formed.

To help eliminate these problems, many organizations turn to email archiving. But not all archiving solutions are created equal. For instance, stubbing is often a key component of the email archiving solution. With stubbing, a pointer is kept in the email server, such as Microsoft Exchange, while the original message and/or attachments is moved off to an archive area. When a user wants to look at an email, the stub is accessed, and then message is retrieved from archive with the expected benefit of a reduced mailbox size. Unfortunately eliminating the problem of mailbox size often opens the door to stubbing issues. Over time, stubs can actually cause performance problems as the number of items kept (messages, including stubs) increases. As a result, stubbing becomes a band-aid that does nothing to mitigate the growing email problem.

Email in the workforce has become more than a tool to distribute thoughts, ideas, and corporate plans; it has become a social medium for silently communicating with the world beyond corporate walls – real and virtual. More importantly, it is now a common method to steal, distribute and leak corporate information and secrets. It is far too easy for an employee to access secure corporate information, cut-and-paste the information into an email, and then send the email to an external email account. Even non-fraudulent activities, with best intentions, such as mailing a spreadsheet to a home email address to work from home can open a Pandora’s box for leaking sensitive information.

Accessing the history of any department within a branch of government can seem trying at times. For example, the technology used by the Office of the President required end users to decide which emails were necessary for long term preservation, as opposed to storing all of the data, regardless of personal interpretation. Therefore, accessing the unabridged version of the email records for the Republics highest office was hampered by user precision and recall, not technology. Where precision represents the number of correct hits in a return set of specified length; recall represents the number of correct returns relative to the total number of possible correct returns. Specifically, deciding which emails should and shouldn’t be kept for long term retention is best left up to software and open records managers.

Individual memory and recognition generally suffers from two academic principals outlined in the seminar “Search and Information Retrieval”, as well as an interview we did with Recomminds David Baskin. The first principal is “precision”; it defines ones ability to correctly identify content. The second is “recall”; it defines the capability to regularly identify new content within the same grouping as the first piece of content. Individuals often have difficulty identifying a proper category for content, and then subsequently pooling new content into the same category. Expecting users to remember emails from partners, customers and coworkers within a specific group for early case assessment will be a lesson in “missed expectations” and can be costly in terms of legal risk.

Getting to the center of a matter by way of custodian and concept searching will improve your legal risk management on a case-by-case basis. However, many mid-sized organizations continue to face challenges in terms of cost and complexity when they want to evaluate email. Estorian LookingGlass Spherical Indexing can manage and evaluate email at low cost, with reduced complexity delivering, making it a valuable solution for the mid-market. Mid-sized companies have much more email than they realize, often exceeding 1-2 terabytes in size. For example, 3000 users manage thirty-five 50 kilobyte messages a day over the course of 365 days will yield 1.35 terabytes of email.

According to The Honorable Judge Peter Flynn of the Circuit Court of Cook County, Chancery Division, Illinois, Meet-and-confer meeting’s are supposed to be about putting your IT cards on the table, what one can and cannot do with respect to data, data types, collections, preservations, data transformations, etc. Judge Flynn responded to a question related to guarded sharing of IT capability during meet-and-confer meetings during last weeks live Panel Discussion on Document Review Acceleration, hosted by Epiq Systems. He responded saying it was “Flat dead wrong, sanctionable.” According to Judge Flynn, guarding IT and ECA information during meet-and-confers is probably illegal. His response and the participant question make it clear that ‘the guarding of information is a competitive advantage in the world of legal wrangling.’