DNA Rention Limits – More of the Same

The Home Office is due to formally  state that their plan is to maintain the DNA data, of innocent people, for 6 years.

This is, of course, a lot longer than the zero time of many other countries and the UK less than a decade ago, but still a lot less than the previous policy of “forever”.

This statement now follows on from the previous statement in May 2009 by the government of the intention to retain the data fro 12 and 6 years, depending on the offense.

For those not acquainted with the reasons behind this change in the law this is due to the S and Marper V United Kingdom test cases in the ECHR, where they challenged, successfully the UK law on detaining, indefinitely the DNA samples of innocent.

 

 

PunterNet, PR, and Bad Driving

Harriet Harman is not having a good time. She is accused of failing to stop at road traffic accident, she was embroiled in the  expenses claims fiasco, and she is the deputy leader of a party that just got dropped by the biggest selling paper in the UK. But, this is not why she is on this site.

She is mentioned here because of her statements about the website Punter Net. As the name of the site implies PunterNet is a website, for “punters”, or more precisely clients of prostitutes. It could be described as being similar to a Which? forum for users of prostitutes (not that Which? would like that analogy). PunterNet provides a surprisingly large amount of information about the prostitutes that are reviewed, for everything from costs and location, right down to wheel chair access.

Harriet Harman called for the website to be banned. And, as the site is hosted in California, she address the comment directly to the Californian governor, Arnold Swartzenager

Ms Harman’s exact statement was:

Surely it can’t be too difficult for the Terminator to terminate PunterNet…..If he doesn’t I’ve got a message for Arnie – I’ll be back!

British politicians don’t really pull off the James Bond style quips very well; Ms even Harman less so. Particularly, because it doesn’t make any sense.

Assuming that the Governor chooses to push forward a law to ban this site, and then California legislates against the site, both of which are a huge assumptions, then the site will simply be moved elsewhere. It could move to a neighboring state, or a different country, there will be no difference whatsoever.

What is frightening is that Harriet Harman doesn’t seem to know this. Presumably she is not aware that there are many sites in the world that contain material that the UK government doesn’t like, but can still be viewed from the UK. Everything from Al Qaeda promotional websites to child abuse images and extreme pornography. If she is not aware of this she is remarkably ill informed.

Even more strange is the fact that UK government effectively  operate a firewall that allows them to block almost anything and everything they want to. This has happened for quite some time, but hit the mainstream press recently when a page from Wikipedia was blocked.

How can the deputy prime minster not know this?

More accurately, either she, her advisors and script writers didn’t know any of this, or they did know this and still decided to push the idea of closing down a website, operating legally in a different country, as it fits in with their personal agenda.

The net effect?

The statements by Harriet Harman were in fact so ridiculous that the owners of PunterNet, stated that the recent press had produced lots of new traffic for the site:

I would like to thank you for the huge influx of traffic to my website which your actions have caused….I am sure that the ladies who are a part of the PunterNet community thank you as well, as they will no doubt benefit financially from the many new clients who might otherwise never have found them.

The Law

Historically, the UK has allowed prostitution. Rather choosing to legislate against those who exploit women, banning (in theory) brothels and pimps, put allowing individual women, working for themselves, to make their own choices; the morals for this are not commented on here. Therefore its strange that the UK Government wants to ban  a site, in a different country, which advertises something which can be legal both in the country it resides and the UK. Has she not seen all the adverts in UK magazines, and phone boxes, advertising “escorts”?

Police experience in the UK has learnt that providing safe environments for women to sell sex is the lesser of the two evils, when compared to the problems of “street walkers”. As a result, in many areas the police have decriminalized prostitution, by allowing the practice to continue unhindered.

The government states that they are concerned that about a spike in the sex industry during the Olympics and want to take action to stop this: This is laudable and may be accurate, with previous major sporting events showing a huge increase in the use of prostitutes. This demand for sex for cash leads to the demand for more prostitutes which, in turn, can lead to sex trafficking; and all of the human horrors that brings with it.

If it’s the governments intent is to stop the eastern European gangs kidnapping and moving young women around Europe, then perhaps the best place to start is not shutting down a website that operates in California, and has been since  1999 (according to the WHOIS database)

Electronic Discovery: MS and Autonomy

If the rummors are true, this would be big news in the ED world,

Full Article

If Microsoft, as rumored, were to buy Autonomy, there would be a seismic ripple felt through eDiscovery-related markets.  First, Microsoft would own two of the leading search products in the market (Autonomy and FAST).  Second, Microsoft would have applications to provide value on top of a SharePoint infrastructure:

- iManage document management – which has a huge law firm and corporate legal installed base
- Meridio records management – which just so happened to be developed to provide RM functionality for SharePoint environment
- Cardiff BPM – which would give Microsoft advanced process management capabilities (all the better to build out more eDiscovery workflow, for say, legal holds?? )
- ZANTAZ archiving – which will enhance the archiving that will be native to Exchange 2010; the on-premise EAS will give Microsoft its own offering for the first time and the hosted Digital Safe will add to the Frontbridge offering Microsoft already has

And – scarily enough – that is just a smattering of the value that Autonomy would bring to Microsoft.  Not hard to see why the rumor mill has Microsoft paying a 75% premium for the Cambridge, UK-based company.

To any eDiscovery vendors out there I say, “be afraid…be very afraid.”  If Microsoft moves into the market, the following players have a lot to lose:

Electronic Discovery: Using Keywords to Cull?

The previous article, on concept searching and keywords, ended with the following paragraph:

The use of keywords will not only depend on the case, but the tools and the service being used.  Some companies will apply keywords, and then only those documents responsive to the keyword search will ever be available for review. Other companies/services will apply the keyword search, after the data was loaded into a review platform. These two different service offerings can make a huge difference to the legal strategy, the results, and the costs.

Why such a big difference?

The problems are immediately obvious, once the marketing spiel is stripped away.

Option 1;  This is one option to review data

• Data is collected “Collected Set“
• Collected data is culled to create a “Review Set“. Culling could involve keyword searching, dates filtering, etc
• The Review Set is reviewed, this will then produce the “Disclose Set“. Methods to search the data, during the review, include  concept searching, keywords, dates, etc.

This method has a couple of problems, and one benefit. The problems are that key documents could be missed.  No matter how well thought out the keywords are used to create the review set, data will be culled, therefore its possible (and probable) that documents that are of interest are culled out in the huge mass of documents. Keywords change,  date ranges shift, as the undersanding of the case develops. Returning to the example of football (used in the previous two articles),  if a keyword “football” is used, but it later turns out that the key custodians uses the term “footie” rather than football, what will be done then? Re-searching and processing of all of the documents that are not in review?

The benefits of this method (initiall culling with keyword) is simply cost, and nothing else.

Most professional vendors will allow data to be moved between the Collection Set into the review set as the case change, but there will often be an additional cost to this, possibly a significant one. There will be time delays, processing and loading fees, etc, these costs and time delays, can discourage the movement of data into the review set.

Option 2 – A subtle difference.

The idea is simple:  Load all of the data into the review platform, everything except for the files that would never be reviewed in that case (e.g. Movie files, MP3s, etc). All of the culling can then be done within the review platform. This was a decision is not made on what is relevant early on, or what keywords are to be used. All that is removed is the absolute junk.

Data for review can then be moved into an appropriate folder/bucket/location for review, using whatever means required. This “review set” can then be searched, filtered, concept searched, near de-duped etc, by the reviewers as normal. I.e the reviewers will see only the data they need to see, but everything is in the review platform. If/when new terms are identified by the reviewers (dates, words, file types, etc) this can be applied to the entire data set, and the new documents almost instantly made available for review. This is quick to do, as the data is already in the review platform.  If its quick its easy, and therefore should be cheap.

Vendors can’t process that much data!

The obvious statement against Option 2, is that “Vendor can’t process all of the data for a case, hence the initial cull“. But this is not entirely true – depending on the nature of the cull. For example, if the data is to be culled by a keyword then the data must be processed in the first place. The file must be opened, the text extracted, and then the document searched.  Therefore much/all of the processing  work has already been done.

There are reasons that this has not been done, historically. One of these is TIFFing. Data was often needed to be TIFFed prior to loading into a review platform, this is very time consuming and resource intensive. Thankfully, this is no longer required with many review platforms taking away many of the problems that have been seen previously.  Another reason is data space: High quality data storage space was not cheap. So storing 100 GB of data in a data centre was expensive, simply because of the hardware involved, but hardware prices have come down (in line with Moore’s law). This may still be a problem for the giant, multi-terrabyte cases, but for the 10s or 100s of GB this is less likely to be an issue.

There will be occasions when Option 1 will be a better method, or neither Option 1 or 2 are suitbale and an entirely differnet approach is required. But,generally, it’s worth considering all options and not letting the legal stratergy for review being lead by a rigid processing/conveyor belt pricing structure.

Really the question is not if you cull data with keywords, but at what stage should that happen?

Bloggers, Lawyers, Twitters and Court Orders

Today a right wing blogger (by his own definition), called Donal Blaney, served a court order against an individual, who was using his name. The aim of the court order is to reveal the identify of the person in charge of the twitter account.

So why is this in the news?

Donald Blaney won the order against somebody using a Twitter account, with his name blaneysblarney.

Looking at the twitter account  now (on the evening of 1st October), there are just 10 tweets, not saying much at all. In fact David Blaney only described it as “mildly offensive”, and even stated that he could have the Twitter account shut off by contacting Twitter directly.

So, why is this in the news?

Donald Blaney arranged for the court order to be served via Twitter, a first of its kind apparently (no wonder!); but it’s just a method of serving a court order. Therefore we have a minor  blogger serving a court order against an unknown person, who has written around 1400 characters (not words) that are described as mildly offensive, and could have been stopped via other cheaper, aka free, methods.

In a week where the Sun has pulled its support from Labour, the Prime Minister has had a major speech, BAe is looking at a 1 billion pound fine, a thousand dead due to earth quakes, and most critically Peter Andre is planning a trip to the West Country…. sometime next year, how did David Blaney get prime time news slots?

So, for the third time, why is this in the news?

The law firm which ran the case was, not Herbet Smith, Clifford Chance, or any other law firm giant which naturally attracts and deals with the press. The firm was Griffin Law. Griffin law is owned by …. Mr Blaney.  So on the same day that a minor blogger, won a minor court order, for an even more minor incident, Mr Blaney was all over the news.

Bravo to his PR company, they did their job well. Nearly as well as the Pigeon people