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U.S. K-12 Schools Must Comply With e-Discovery Rule
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Jun 11, 2007 03:11 PM
from the better-funding-for-education-still-pending dept.
from the better-funding-for-education-still-pending dept.
Lucas123 writes "K-12 school districts throughout the US have a daunting
IT homework assignment over the summer: Develop systems that ensure their electronic documents, email and instant messages are in compliance with new federal e-discovery regulations, much in the same way corporations have been preparing over the past year. The new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) are expected to be widely enforced by the end of 2007, according to a Computerworld story. '"A lack of preparation could prove dire for K-12 school districts, which oftentimes lack technical proficiency, funding and legal expertise," said Robert Ayers, technology coordinator for the Kingston, Pa.-based Luzerne Intermediate Unit 18 school district.'"
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E-Discovery? (Score:5, Informative)
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Mod parent up!
Re:Poor schools (Score:3, Informative)
And those poor districts who barely can provide any computing resources are likely to fold their IT shop as too expensive to maintain due to the legal threat of non-compliance. It's why many schools have a metal and wood shop, most have dropped Drivers Education as part of the regular HS electives.
I took Defensive Driving Drivers ED in High School. Now that I have adopted kids entering HS, we just received a notifi
Heh.. (Score:5, Funny)
Not just schools (Score:4, Informative)
It is important to realize that these rule changes aren't just for schools - they apply to every company in the U.S..
So, for those of you who are the entire IT department where you work, or if you run your own business as a consultant, (or some similar situation), you might want to pay attention to what is required regarding email and IM retention under the new rules.
Re:Not just schools (Score:5, Funny)
-Rick
Parent
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Well, for one, the President's IT staff are not suspected of evildoing!
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Yep. And you can include local municipalities, unions, consumer groups, the AARP etc. -- All are corporations.
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And you might want to get your information from (for instancE) a lawyer familiar with the rules, rather taking on faith the description of the problem from the PR department of vendors trying to sell "solutions".
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First, Sarbanes-Oxley pushes companies to list in overseas markets. Now this nonsense. Pretty soon there won't be anything left here.
Another law made by non-it people (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only is it near-impossible to implement, the only possible implementation would be a solution similar to DRM on media, which as we all know doesn't work, since you already have the content at that moment. Of course vendors like IBM and Microsoft would love to sell you their solution (that requires call-back to the central server which has to be accessible from both inside and outside the network (if you would like to use your documents elsewhere than within the office)) which not only costs a horrible amount of money, the implementation itself is flawed (as is any DRM-solution) and has so many requirements that managing and securing the solutions is going to be a major issue.
I think it's disgusting how companies and their lobby push for these impossible laws so they can sell their software.
Re:Another law made by non-it people (Score:5, Insightful)
A) Have a records retention policy, and
B) follow that records retention policy.
If you're a public school, you probably have a records retention policy already. Many schools don't follow those policies for electronic records like they're supposed to, but there's very likely one that exists. Applying records retention policies to electronic media has been a problem with many public schools and many government organizations. It doesn't necessarily require going through one of those vendors or using those tools- it does require planning.
IT people were definitely involved in the creation of these rules.
I'm not sure what you mean that nothing is allowed to be found- that's what the discovery rules address. The new rules of evidence provide ways to share or shift costs of finding that information. In the past, you would have to pay those costs. With the new rules, either those costs are shared, or if it truly would be very burdensome to recover that information, the company seeking that information could pay those costs.
Parent
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What good are logs? (Score:3, Interesting)
Hopefully as more and more people get caught for using cleartext, crypto will be the norm and all these laws requiring logging will become useless for law enforcement purposes.
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Hopefully as more and more people get caught for using cleartext, crypto will be the norm
In other words, you hope that some judge sets a precedent as quickly as possible for encrypted records to not count as "accessible"? Or better yet, that the justice department gets handed the statistics to convince a clueless legislature to outlaw encryption? I mean, if they're going to require these records to be discoverable in the first place, why wouldn't they require by law that prosecutors and judges can actually read them?
My understanding is that when the rules first go into effect, individual jud
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And as I read this law, there's no requirement that I keep such keys, so long as my self-directed data retention policy doesn't require otherwise.
Electronic Amnesia (Score:4, Insightful)
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Why is this in the Fed's jurisdiction (Score:2, Insightful)
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Neighbor, you've just taken a lot of words to avoid using the word "extortion".
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Most public schools receive federal funding. In order to receive federal funding, you must abide by federal rules. This is one of those rules.
Yes, such federal funding requirements are used to bypass the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. For other examples, see the 55mph speed limit (before it got repealed), the 21 year old drinking age, the Clean Air Act and how it relates to highway funding, etc. (and all of the examples I gave are just in the realm of highway funding. There are plenty of other examples.).
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You want to know why the rules governing civil procedure in the federal courts are in the jurisdiction of the federal government as opposed to the state governments?
Great headline (Score:3, Funny)
some schools can't pay for good IT people much.... (Score:2)
look at that substitute teacher who was facing 40 years for pron pop ups most likely if the School had more or better IT people / payed for the web filter / had some kind of firewall and anti-spyware protections then this may of not happened..
Re:some schools can't pay for good IT people much. (Score:2)
The average school in the US spends about 6K per student some of the schools you might consider poor (lets look at DC) spend upwards of twice that. 12K per kid per year that more than double what many elite private schools charge usually only 70% of that (not the kind with ponies and security teams where diplomats send their kids those are in a league of their own).
So when someone says our schools cant afford this or that I have to wonder when a class of
Re:some schools can't pay for good IT people much. (Score:5, Insightful)
Your estimates for the costs of private education are just as far off as your estimates of the money involved in public schooling. I suspect you have been misled by figures bandied about in the school voucher debate - these tend to lump secondary schools with elementary schools and even free schools to bring the apparent price down to less than the cost of a public school. For example, an often quoted figure for private school cost is $3600 per child - this is arrived at by taking the average for secondary school, elementary schools, free independent schools and church schools - all designed to make the secondary school cost look low. In truth, the average fee level of a private secondary school is rather higher at about $5,500. The gap between the private and public sector can be explained by a few things, such as reduction in bureaucratic red tape and potential increase in efficiency, but also by their frequent status as charitable organizations soliciting donations that can increase this to meet the public level, and their selectiveness; if you don't have to deal with unruly or disadvantaged children you can cut costs heavily.
My final point is that you seem to underestimate the costs in the day to day running of a school rather heavily! Just taking into account the staffing takes your available funds down to around $4k per pupil (and remember the schools that only make $3k per pupil originally?). Then you have to buy computers, books, stationary and furniture, run activities, organize school board elections, pay for heating, lighting and water and provide a bus for disabled students who can't get in otherwise. Depending on your location security might be an issue. And your building and equipment don't last forever with thousands of children inside - you need to make it to the end of the year with some surplus in case someone's broken a telescope or put a broom through the ceiling. (Or get insurance - but that will of course cost more than the average year's renovation costs; that's how insurance works).
My point with all this is that schools don't have millions of dollars sitting around in a cupboard somewhere. They aren't choosing not to employ a team of network technicians, it's just that even a small technical staff - say 2 people - eats into your budget by around $80k year if they're good at what they do. That money doesn't appear overnight.
Parent
Small businesses (Score:5, Insightful)
Now they have to log all electronic communication. Why? How is an email or test message any different than calling someone on the phone or meeting face to face? Will we have to bring a tape recorder to every meeting from now on? When will it end?
If your not a litigant in a federal court case.... (Score:2)
Re:If your not a litigant in a federal court case. (Score:2)
Data DESTRUCTION policy.... (Score:5, Insightful)
You just need to have the policy long in place before someone even thinks of suing you.
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And the rules have provisions for when things aren't completely destroyed. That information can be recovered, if people are willing to pay to discover that information.
Can anyone tell me... (Score:2)
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Were's the P2P mail and IM apps? (Score:2)
Okay, but don't overreact (Score:4, Funny)
I *am* a business. I have my own mail server. I don't think there's anything terribly interesting to the feds in there, but I'll be damned if I want them sniffing around my data!
Quick as a wink, I set up a script that purges and overwrites all stored email, every 5 minutes. Take that, G-man! I sat back in my chair with a satisfied grin.
10 minutes later, I checked for new messages.
Same here. (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Applicable precedent? (Score:4, Interesting)
This seems pretty similar.
ALERT! - This is all VENDOR HYPE!!! (Score:5, Informative)
What the rules DO now officially state (which they didn't before last year) is that electronic communications must now be treated the same as traditional paper documentation.
Specifically, that means that you cant destroy any correspondance or record HAVING TO DO WITH AN ONGOING LEGAL ACTION/LITIGATION or that you can reasonaby expect may lead to litigation. For my organization, that is less than one percent of the volume of data I have. All the vendors are saying that we need to archive ALL our e-mails in a searchable database yada yada yada so that we can protect ourselves against some unknown threat that we may be found in violation of these rules. That simply isn't the case. We will be in trouble if we destroy evidenmce in an ongoing legal case, but that is about it.
What we DO need to do is insure that the HR department and others that typically deal with sensitive legal topics understand the rules, and that they should print out and save anything that they suspect could come back to bite us, like adverse personell actions. We also need to insure that building administrators do the same when it comes to discipline actions concerning students etc.
AGAIN, anyone who tells you that you NEED to archive/store ALL e-mail or other electronic documents is at best completely mis-informed (like most of the journalists parroting back the FUD)or at worst trying to scam you directly with their FUD.
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Why do we all have to become cops? (Score:3, Insightful)
They ought to be able to say, "Beats me; we're in the education business, not the surveillance business. But good luck with your investigation."
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What's .. Bush .. got to do .. got to do with it? (Score:4, Insightful)
The PRESIDENT? What's the PRESIDENT go to do with it?
Quoting Wikipedia:
Internal rulemaking by the JUDICIAL branch - the supreme court and their hirelings - with concurrence from the LEGISLATIVE branch. The EXECUTIVE branch isn't even in this loop.
Are you faulting Bush for failing to stage an unconstitutional armed intervention into the inner workings of the Supreme Court?
Parent
That upper-leg tick really needs attention. (Score:5, Informative)
Federal Rules of Civil Procedure are promulgated by the Supreme Court (and written by their employees), after receiving a Congressional rubber stamp. Bush and his whole branch of government aren't even in the loop.
But somehow it's Bush's fault, right? Did you elect him the official scapegoat? (If you get a cold it's Bush's fault. If the Supreme Court promulgates a rule you don't like it's Bush's fault. He wasn't there for the election - but that's HIS fault.)
You really need to get medical attention for that jerking knee.
Parent