Category: Regulations

According to IDC analyst Sue Feldman, the field of electronic document search and retrieval has “gone from practically zilch three years ago” to achieving 30 percent growth over the past year, in large part thanks to the changes to the FRCP. No wonder that established enterprise search application vendors like Autonomy, Recommind and Exalead have introduced new products or tweaked existing software to meet demand for the efficient storage and retrieval of electronic communications. For instance, Exalead CEO Alain Heurtebise told me that his Paris-based company closed a deal with EDS’s Italian subsidiary in 2006, and is being considered by IBM as an OEM partner for a storage and e-discovery application.

Paris-based business intelligence vendor Business Objects (Quote) picked Attensity to be its search partner in November, while Nstein has recently signed deals with Cognos (Quote) and Computer Sciences Corp. (Quote).

E-discovery application vendors promote their own special sauce for allowing corporate lawyers to sift through reams of data while de-duping and otherwise reducing irrelevant search results.

“If you’re ignorant about what you’re looking for, you’re obliged to go by serendipity,” he said.

http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/print.php/3651836

It’s the start of an Interpol for the Internet. President Bush signed a bill that gives the commission broader authority to pursue e-crooks in other countries. The FTC had pushed for more than three years for the new powers, which will help it shut down scammers such as the polite Nigerians who e-mail thousands of people a day with tales of woe and promises of riches to those kind enough to help.

Increasingly, people operating e-mail scams or launching attacks with secretive programs that can steal personal information operate from Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, Africa and other foreign locations. Sometimes they simply route their efforts through computer servers in multiple countries to make it more difficult for authorities to track them down.

“Commerce has gone global and so fraud follows.”

But the FTC said it had been hindered in such probes by legal barriers preventing it from sharing information with foreign countries or assisting them in their own investigations.

The legislation gives the FTC abilities similar to those granted in the 1990s to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to share information with foreign counterparts. Specifically, the US SAFE WEB Act — which stands for Undertaking Spam, Spyware, And Fraud Enforcement With Enforcers beyond Borders — gives the FTC the legal authority to share confidential information from its own investigations with foreign law enforcement authorities and assist them in their cases.

“These purveyors of bad applications can live in one country and affect people in 200 other countries,” said John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. The center originally had some concerns with Smith’s legislation, particularly if the U.S. assisted investigations in other countries that have more restrictions on freedom of speech, said Ari Schwartz, the center’s deputy director. “It’s one thing to say that you want to be able to cooperate, but actually cooperating with foreign governments on these types of issues is more difficult,” said Schwartz, who recently attended a meeting in Brussels of the London Action Plan, a group promoting international cooperation on Internet fraud.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-foreignspam26dec26,1,741752.story?track=rss&ctrack=1&cset=true

Visa’s new Visa PCI Compliance Acceleration Program is designed to spur entities that are covered by PCI rules to comply in a speedy fashion, said Jennifer Fischer, a director at Visa U.S.A. “This program is part of our larger strategy for protecting cardholder data and to ensure that we are doing everything we can to protect it from compromise,” she said.

It targets the financial institutions responsible for the largest 1,200 merchants — known in PCI-speak as Level 1 and Level 2 merchants — which together account for about two-thirds of Visa’s total transaction volumes, she said.

Though nearly 18 months have passed since PCI rules went into full effect, only 36% of Tier 1 merchants and 15% of Tier 2 merchants are currently compliant with the requirements, according to Visa.

As part of the compliance validation process, merchants will need to show that they have purged all magnetic stripe data, Card Verification Value data and PIN data from their point-of-sale (POS) and other systems, Fischer said.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9006100&source=NLT_AM&nlid=1

E-mail has been used as evidence in court cases for years; the amended rules also cover electronic documents, spreadsheets, image and sound files, and database info.

The amended rules explicitly state that requested information must be turned over within 120 days after a complaint has been served on a defendant. If this deadline isn’t met, it’s possible that electronic evidence could be ruled inadmissible. Or in the instance of a defendant sitting on potentially damaging evidence, courts can levy fines and other penalties.

The amended rules are to CIOs what Sarbanes-Oxley was to CFOs, says Riki Fujitani, a former attorney who’s now president of IT service provider Hoike.

The courts are showing their understanding that information is much easier to retrieve from modern storage technologies, while at the same time acknowledging that finding the right information on obsolete media could be just as difficult as digging up a paper document in a warehouse of filing cabinets.

In a survey by Enterprise Strategy Group, 91% of 568 e-mail, database, and compliance pros at companies with more than 20,000 employees said their organizations had been issued a discovery request for e-mail last year.

One thing that’s anything but ambiguous is the legal system’s disdain for companies that intentionally destroy electronically stored information. Morgan Stanley in May paid $15 million to settle Securities and Exchange Commission charges that it destroyed more than 200,000 e-mails and failed to cooperate with SEC investigators looking into Wall Street business practices.

Courts have over the past six years or so changed their views on the credibility of electronic documents, says Diego Maldonado, senior VP of the government technology group within consulting firm The Newberry Group.

Despite the amendments, there are still gray areas related to e-discovery.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=TEDZYBQNAAK00QSNDLPCKH0CJUNN2JVN?articleID=196600853

The office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) has frequently criticized Russia for not effectively protecting or enforcing intellectual property rights (IPR).

“We have an agreement in principle and are finalizing the details,” U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab said in a statement.

The agreement calls for Russia to take specific actions and to enact laws by specific dates to combat Internet piracy and optical disk piracy. Under the terms of the agreement, Russia will permit a one-time notification for multiple products and set specific ground rules for granting licenses for products that require an import license.

The bilateral deal is critical to Russia’s admission to the World Trade Organization (WTO).

According to the USTR, the Bush administration has consulted closely with Congress, particularly with members and staff of the House Ways and Means Committee, the Senate Finance Committee and the House and Senate Agriculture Committees and the IPR Caucus.

http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3643351

Among the provisions of the Police and Justice Bill 2006, which gained Royal Assent on Wednesday, is a clause that makes it an offense to impair the operation of any computer system.

http://sympatico-msn-ca.com.com/UK+outlaws+denial-of-service+attacks/2100-7348_3-6134472.html?part=sympatico-msn-ca&tag=feed_2570&subj=ns_6134472