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CERN Research Paper Urges "Checksums Everywhere"

Error levels in modern magnetic storage are very, very low. Unfortunately, personal hard drives are now very, very big--and that means you're virtually guaranteed to have multiple corrupted files on your disk, just by virtue of its sheer size. That according to a recent study out of CERN/IT, the IT group at the world's largest particle physics laboratory. According to the executive summary, "We have established that low level data corruptions exist and that they have several origins. The error rates are at the 10Exp-7 level, but with complicated patterns. To cope with the problem one has to implement a variety of measures on the IT part and also on the experiment side. Checksum mechanisms have to implemented and deployed everywhere."

ProofSpace Announces E-Discovery Framework

The worlds of Information Security and e-Discovery are coming together in a structured framework to encourage discussion among legal, security and records management professionals. Last week ProofSpace introduced the Information Security e-Discovery Framework (ISEF), a unique framework for discussing the specific role of information security before, during and after e-Discovery. The objective--bridge the gap between legal and security stakeholders. The result--a more effective response and successful outcome to an e-Discovery process. Soon a discussion white paper will be released, explaining how the ISEF was created and how it can be used. This release will also initiate a comment and review period on the ISEF. View the announcement PDF here.

The Next Big E-Discovery Challenge: Authenticity

Up until now, most of eDiscovery has been basic "blocking & tackling". That meant a lot of cataloging and indexing of data, records retention work, legal holds, destruction policy establishment, and deploying "vaulting" technologies. But the future costs and benefits of eDiscovery will likely pivot on something much different: how you handle authenticity challenges used as a negotiating tactic in a lawsuit.

Publicity-shy Sedona "Working Group One" Meets in Hilton Head

Mark Reichenbach writes in his blog about the very quiet star chamber gathering last week at Hilton Head, South Carolina for the Sedona Conference Working Group One annual meeting. He writes, "Before you ask, there will be no blogging from Sedona, er, Hilton Head. It doesn't work that way." Earlier in his post, he reports "Analogous to the Paris Air Show and its relation to the spy community, Sedona's annual meeting brings together a special combination of the brightest and best in the e-discovery legal community... make no mistake, there will be new work product teed-up for discussion, and you should understand that even though the dialog 'stays in Sedona' the fruits of the group's collective effort don't." Past publications from the influential group can be found here.

Cargoes Stolen with Counterfeit Electronic Release Documents

The International Transport Intermediaries Club (ITIC) warned members that misreleases of valuable container-ship cargos are becoming a major factor in claims by principals against their agents, and claimed that carelessness in dealing with telex releases has contributed to these losses. "Telex release" is the industry term for the release of cargo at one port when the original bill of lading has been surrendered at another. Today, despite its name, the telex release is almost always made by email. There have been multiple accounts of telex releases (emails) received by discharge port agents which have been manipulated to appear as though they have originated from the load port agent, and authorizing the release of cargoes and confirming that freight has been received, when it has not. ITIC is now recommending that agents verify the authenticity of messages before releasing cargo.

Iron Mountain Buys e-Discovery Software Provider Stratify

Byte and Switch reported last week that Iron Mountain will shell out $158 million in cash to buy e-discovery vendor Stratify Inc. "Customers have been asking us for this... It's a white-hot market, by all accounts a billion-dollar market... We're seeing estimates between $4 billion and $12 billion in the next few years," said Iron Mountain president and COO Bob Brennan during last week's earnings conference call. Stratify's applications sift and search email, scanned documents, and electronic files for specific items, and they also map out relationships among threads and document groups, which attorneys can review when preparing for litigation. Iron Mountain will probably also attempt to leverage Stratify's Digital Repository to enhance its information retrieval services.

Universal Data Retention Specification Demoed... without Data Integrity Safeguards?

Computerworld reported last week on a new "universal" data retention spec that "divorces data from the applications that created it". While the article doesn't really offer much detail on how the technology actually works, the really interesting omission is any mention of security or control mechanisms in the proposed protocol. Brings to mind an early large-scale XML implementation at a large financial services firm that a ProofSpace staffer worked on in a previous life, where nobody gave access control a moment's thought... and the systems ended up being wide open to anyone who got their hands on the data definitions.

Vendors such as EMC Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Vignette Corp. demoed their software interfaces for the new specification that offers a universal way for users to store and access unchanging or fixed data regardless of the application that created it. The specification, eXtensible Access Method (XAM), was demonstrated at Storage Networking World last week for the first time. The specification was announced last spring and is expected to be presented to the American National Standards Institute for review as a standard early next year.

Chain-of-Custody... Or Chain-Saw?

"Exploring the issues surrounding chain of custody for electronic evidence may sound like a great cure for insomnia... But a string of recent judicial sanctions over chain of custody for electronic evidence has made the dry issue a hot topic: One that can make or break your case." In other words, unless you can prove chain-of-custody and data integrity for any electronic documents that your lawyers are trying to submit into evidence, you're going to find yourself up a legal creek without a paddle. That's what Christy Burke writes in this month's Law.com Legal Technology column. "...in the next two to four years, most or all states will be creating legislation with real teeth when it comes to keeping scrupulous security measures to secure digital evidence and ensure a proper chain of custody."

Storage on Trial

What is a good data-retrieval plan worth to a company caught up in litigation? For Morgan Stanley, $15 million. The average Fortune 500 company has over 150 lawsuits in active litigation at any given time. As document retrieval requests from the legal department start piling up, IT departments are just starting to realize how big and scary the eDiscovery monster really is, with retrieval eating up increasing amounts of IT time and budget.

In 2006, Morgan agreed to pay the hefty $15M fine to resolve an investigation by U.S. regulators into its failure to retain e-mail messages. E-mail played a central role in the (later overturned) $1.58 billion judgment in favor of Ronald Perelman in the case of MorganStanley v. Coleman. Perelman is a billionaire investor who said he was defrauded by the firm over the sale of a business. The judge, frustrated by Morgan Stanley’s inability to produce e-mails demanded by Perelman’s lawyers (the firm said backup tapes had been overwritten), took the unusual step of shifting the burden of proof to Morgan Stanley, so that the firm had to prove its innocence.