U.S. K-12 Schools Must Comply With e-Discovery Rule 166
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.'"
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
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Well, for one, the President's IT staff are not suspected of evildoing!
Sure they are. (Score:2)
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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.
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Since the law covers potential civil litigation, not just criminal litigation, it would pretty much cover all correspondence between a school and families. A family can bring a case to civil court for any school action that the family feels harmed by, so the school will have to retain all electronic communication with students and their families.
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The Rules at issue are the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, not the Federal Rules of Evidence.
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For I.T. people this can be generalised to (Score:2)
You can usually define retention policies there. I'm pretty sure that while not quite as flexible or manageable as commercial systems, Bacula can define retention on a per job/filesystem basis. It can back up to tape, library and/or a BFO disk.
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Let's say that you have a nightly backup schedule. VP at ACME sends an email to his broker buddy telling about a pending acquisition. Both delete the emails from their sent / received folders to hide traces. No record, nothing gets backed up.
Archiving needs to be done at a much lower level, such as the gateway / email server / etc.
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What you're saying essentially though is that the IT system has to prevent deliberate circumvention. Sorry, it's just not possible to be 100% leak proof. It's always possible to get round such m
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The Federal Rules of Evidence aren't quite as unreasonable as people seem to think. IMHO, the article is overstating the effects of the newly implemented rules. Important things to remember are
A) Have a records retention policy, and
B) follow that records retention policy.
You simply do no grasp how much of hassle this is. Many of these systems were not designed with retention in mind. How the hell do you implement this for IM and text messages? Hell, how do you implement this is Exchange? Exchange, and most mail servers, assume that users can silently delete their own emails. So, in practice, I would have to set up an nearly identical mirror server (it would need a lot more space, pray nobody in your organiztion uses attachments) which maintains copies for THREE years.
Let m
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These laws don't work with PAPER documents. Remember all the records shredded during the Enron scandal?
Discovery is discovery. Once you sue somebody you try to get what records you can (and hope people are stupid enough to write things down) and t
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To this issue, though, I know that IT people were involved in the creation of the Rules of Civil Procedure, because I had the brief opportunity to speak with some of the people involved in the court cases that led to these rules, as well as some of the people from the Sedona Conference(which releases guidelines and principles related to these rules as well as other issues). It is primarily legal professionals involved, but some of those people have pretty significant technological expertise, and they
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This sounds excellent. The schools can just make the storage policy 24 hours and have a nightly cron job that deletes any documents over 24 hours old. A script could delete any documents that are older than that when a USB disk was inserted (S
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Yeah, and the annoying USDA for some reason requires that we keep track of when meat is a certain age! The entire meat industry will collapse, because there's certainly no way to organize it in advance of storage or anything -- we just throw it all in a warehouse at random and pull out whatever is most convenient when we sell it! I'm sure
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"Some issues"? My company has branches in 23 states. Do you have any idea how bad the federal rules would have to be before they were harder to comply-with than 23 different sets of rules, drawn up by 23 different sets of local yokels?
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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The post-9/11 political climate is definitely not the time for it to try, because as far as I know there's nothing constitutional to prevent Congress from killing it if they've got a reason.
Encryption is here to stay. People seem to forget that the biggest users of encryption are large corporations trying to ward off corporate espionage, prevent data theft by hackers, and protect intellectual property. Large corporations run the government and they want their shit protected.
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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.
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Actually, I'm an anarchist. I personally don't want government to have the right to look at private logs or to require schools or shops to keep logs. I don't even want there to BE any government at all! The State shouldn't exist! However, I acknowledge that there IS a government.
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.
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For that matter, why should public schools have to deal with unruly students at all? Under the curre
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For that matter, why should public schools have to deal with unruly students at all? Under the current system, there seems to be a belief that everyone is entitled to a free education, no matter what. The right to a free education extends just as far as it doesn't interfere with others' rights to a free education. If a student is habitually disruptive or destructive, at some point we should step back and say, "You've forfeited your right to a free education. You can reapply next year. Get out." It would keep our schools focused on education instead of crisis management. Right now, the worst we can do is shuffle a disruptive "student" between schools. This doesn't even attempt to solve the problem. Right now, one or two "students" can completely destroy the learning atmosphere in a class of 30. How is this fair? On one hand, there are kids who actually do want to be there and really want to learn. On the other, there are those in the classrooms that don't want to learn; let them leave. If they're impeding other students, make them leave.
This really is a difficult question to answer - I doubt we'll ever be sure what the solution is. Personally, I believe that everyone is entitled to a free education, no matter what. At the end of the day, these are children; they aren't mature enough to make reliably good decisions, and yet the decisions they make will have a huge effect on the rest of their lives. I'm a strong believer in personal responsibility, but I'm still not quite sure that the behaviour of unruly children is their fault - from my e
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You're right there is a variance but it is down right deceitful of you to tag 'suburban NY' as if to say that inner cities are not spending money. Lets look at DC arguably the worst school system in the nation which spend more than any state (per pupil) except NJ (13K per kid) or NYC, can you get more urban, at nearly fourteen thousand (only 2% less than the state
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You're right there is a variance but it is down right deceitful of you to tag 'suburban NY' as if to say that inner cities are not spending money. Lets look at DC arguably the worst school system in the nation which spend more than any state (per pupil) except NJ (13K per kid) or NYC, can you get more urban, at nearly fourteen thousand (only 2% less than the state average). UTAH as a whole does not spend much money per pupil at 5K per pupil (least in the nation) so picking out Salt Lake City and your example even bolsters my point. West High in Salt Lake city (the school district you mentioned) is one of the top in the nation
"West High School has been named the top high school in Utah and number 158 in the nation by Newsweek and the Washington Post.
Its not the dollars going into the class its how they are getting used.
First, I'd like to point out that variance is not the same thing as variation. I wasn't talking about the variation in the amount spent in terms of school quality, I was discussing the variance of the data; the level of deviance from the mean. My point wasn't to characterize Utah's schools as being of low quality, just to show that your point - that they had money to spend on technology - was unfounded. If you want to discuss quality of schooling in terms of money spent, though, you might want to use an ex
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Did it ever occur to you the reason UTAH spends less it because the cost of living and average salery in UTAH are incredibally low? You can hire a good IT guy for considerably less in UTAH than in DC
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Is there any reason you write "UTAH", by the way? As far as I'm aware it's not an acronym.
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?
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When they pass the Lawyers' Full Employment Act...
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Death and taxes, meet your new friend: paperwork.
--
Toro
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)
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Yeah, well, you can voluntarily decide not to sue anyone in federal court, but its a lot harder to make the decision not to be sued in federal court stick.
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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You also can't present what doesn't exist as exculpatory evidence when you are sued.
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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.
It's all FUD! (Score:2)
All the vendors of e-mail archiving hardware/software want us to think we need to archive everything, but that's just not the case!
Same here. (Score:4, Funny)
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I'm not too familiar with that term. Does it mean the person who reads your G-mail?
Applicable precedent? (Score:4, Interesting)
This seems pretty similar.
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"Appease" is inappropriate here, the word is "enforce". Its important, here, because this law, unlike the Brady law, doesn't mandate state
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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UPDATE!!! (Score:2)
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I'm sure you are right ... but (Score:2)
But somehow -- I'm not sure how -- with no
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That said, I agree with your characterization of it as FUD. Often, this sort of work
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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."
People take Fed.waaay too seriously (Score:2, Informative)
It works like this.
We work and pay taxes to both federal and state.
State runs school on state taxes and gets federal grants.
Too many people believe the power of government flows from the Fed to the state to the people.
FACT: power flows from the people to the state to the fed.
Problem:Fed withholds funds(our taxes)if states aren't politically correct and cause liberal embarassment.
Solution:contact your state representative with your concerns about school funding.Contac
New rules aren't a requirement to save everything (Score:2, Informative)
Here's a link to the original document: http://www.uscourts.gov/rules/Reports/ST09-2005.pd f [uscourts.gov] [PDF file]
Focus on pages 24-36 of the pdf, which discusses the background of the new rules, and 103-240 which include the actual regulations. The new e-discovery rules do not require everyone to keep copies of everything forever.
Note that the full 332 p
Whitehouse email... (Score:2)
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Here's [lp.org] one. The problem is, they've been around for decades, and have yet to make any inroads into government. We know whose fault that is... as George Bernard Shaw said, "Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve."
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?
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Yeah, its not like the Executive has any role in selecting who is in the judiciary or anything like that.
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Anything and everything wrong in the United States is in some way tied to President George W. Bush. The President is the root of all conspiracies in the world, including, but not limited to, all technical conspiracies. From this date forward, there shall be NO Slashdot article related to a conspiracy theory without mention of The President.
In addition, those posting about said conspiracies are required to mention The President's "apparent lack of I.Q.", but may in no way tie this to the paradox created by assuming that someone with such an "apparent lack of I.Q." is smart enough to be the root of all conspiracies.
I hope that clears things up for you.
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Why, yes, I did miss the memo.
So they DID elect him the official scapegoat:
- If invaders try to conquer Iraq, it's Bush's fault.
- If the Democrats raise taxes, it's Bush's fault.
- If the Supreme Court changes the rules of procedure, it's Bush's fault.
- If there's a hurricane in Timbuktu, it's Bush's fault.
Of course Bush wasn't there when they elected him scapegoat. But that's Bush's fault.
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.
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