I wasn't going to include this article, thinking that there had been too many e-discovery horror stories – but I got thinking that the “pictures taken on an employees cellphone” was not the most extreme example of “electronically stored information” I could think of. Take a minute and see if you can't come up with 25 items that have never (yet) been subpoenaed...

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/S/STORING_EMAILS?SITE=VALYD&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

New E-Discovery Rules Benefit Some Firms

By CHRISTOPHER S. RUGABER AP Business Writer Dec 1, 6:31 PM EST

... "Companies used to be focused on how they store information," Matus said. "Now they're focusing on how to retrieve it."

... Under the new rules, an information technology employee who routinely copies over a backup computer tape could be committing "virtual shredding" once a lawsuit has been filed, said Alvin F. Lindsay, a partner at Hogan & Hartson LLP and expert on technology and litigation.

... Large companies are likely to face higher costs from organizing their data, said James Wright, director of electronic discovery at Halliburton Co. Besides e-mail, he said, companies also will need to know about things more difficult to track, like digital photos of work sites on employee cell phones and information on removable memory cards.

... But Martha Dawson, a Preston Gates & Ellis LLP partner who specializes in electronic discovery, said companies will not have to alter how they retain their electronic documents. Rather, she said, they will have to do an "inventory of their IT system" in order to know better where the documents are.

Wouldn't various state laws limit what can be shared? Or is this one of those “We're the Feds, we don't concern ourselves with mere state law...”

http://www.govtech.net/digitalcommunities/story.php?id=102646

Homeland Security "Network of Networks" Faces Privacy Challenges

Shaun Waterman Dec 01, 2006

A new plan from the U.S. intelligence czar will use state police-run intelligence fusion centers as the hubs for a national network of officials from different agencies and levels of government sharing information about terrorism.

In a move likely to rattle privacy mavens, the three year plan for implementing the congressionally mandated Information Sharing Environment, or ISE, also lays out policy designed to ease sharing intelligence with foreign governments, and proposes to widen the definition of terrorism information [to include voting for the wrong party... Bob] that can be shared.

... In an interview, McNamara said the aim was to create "a virtual interstate system," and that the law enforcement fusion centers being set up in states and large municipalities would be the "nodes where information can be processed, condensed and evaluated." [suggesting that they will arrive at 50 different conclusions. Then I'd pick the one I like best and go from there... Bob]

... One of the challenges officials have faced in laying out a roadmap for the ISE is the proliferation of overlapping and sometimes contradictory regulations that different federal and other agencies have to protect information security, and the privacy and other rights of Americans.

Justice Department guidelines dictate, for instance, that information about Americans collected by U.S. intelligence agencies should be deleted after 90 days if it has no continuing relevance. Law enforcement information, because it can generally only be collected about people who are suspect to one degree or another in a crime, can be held for longer.

Information about foreigners, like the biometric data collected by the U.S.-VISIT system at ports of entry, is not subject to privacy or other restrictions and the Department of Homeland Security recently announced that it intends to keep those records for 40 years.

Because the fusion centers are designed precisely to fuse information from all these different sources, data governed by many different regulations will find its way onto their databases.

... Rollins said there had been some institutional competition between the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security about who should lead federal efforts to share terrorism information with state and local governments and with the private sector, and that there had been a "big push to fund and staff" the centers. [We know how good the FBI is when it comes to computer systems... Bob]

The plan says it will supersede individual departmental approaches to assigning personnel to centers, such as those being developed by homeland security and the FBI. [Now that's just stupid. Bob]

... Two contentious areas his plan proposes to push ahead on are the sharing of information with foreign governments and the sharing of information with and from private sector firms.