Responding to msg by bdavis@dg.thepoint.net (Brian Davis) on Tue, 10 Oct 10:47 AM

FYI the Justice Department requires degaussing a hard drive before it can be declared surplus ...

----- The Washington Post, Oct 9, 1995. E-Mail That Comes Back And Bites. Even Deleted Messages Can Be Recovered for Court [excerpts] Computer sleuth John Jessen dredges computer files for electronic embarrassments that their authors thought were long gone. "Deleted" e-mail messages can pile up like little time bombs until someone such as Jessen arrives, carrying a court order and a stack of blank memory cartridges. "Can you really delete e-mail? Sure," Jessen said. "Does it happen as a common practice? No." Jessen is the founder of Electronic Evidence Discovery Inc., a Seattle company that since 1987 has been going after computer evidence in civil lawsuits. The nation's 25 million to 40 million users of e-mail are growing more comfortable with the medium. And more attorneys are recognizing e-mail's potential as a source of unguarded information about the companies they're suing. "People are very candid talking around the coffee machine." attorney Michael Patrick of Palo Alto, Calif., said. "They seem to behave the same way on the computer system. "They think they're speaking confidentially, so they're off the cuff," he said. "They're very often insulting. What they don't realize is it's all being recorded, and often those recordings are stored for a very long time. When you send a message, you lose control over where it goes." Many workers think their e-mail is private. It's not. Federal law allows employers to monitor employees' e-mail, and even if they don't, e-mail is fair game in lawsuits. When someone sues a company, the rules of discovery demand that the company produce all relevant business records. "The fact that they live in a computer rather than a file cabinet doesn't make any difference to the court," said Joan Feldman at Computer Forensics, another Seattle firm that specializes in this work. Often files retrieved include e-mail thought to have been erased long ago. It survives because the diligent computer system manager makes backup tapes of everything on the system every night, then stores those tapes for years. And so the files persist and multiply, aided by technological advances that continually add more storage capacity, more automatic backups and more redundancies to safeguard data from accidental erasure. "The computer is like a file cabinet tbat can open its own drawer, put a file on the copy machine and then slip the copy into another cabinet," Jessen said. "Sometimes I think it's alive." Jessen and Feldman augment their high-tech detective work by advising companies how to become less vulnerable to computer snoops like themselves: They recommend regular purges of old data, and they offer tips for avoiding e-mail blunders in the first place. Rule No. 1: Don't put anything on e-mail that you wouldn't want a jury to see. -----