Alice Marshall's email

If you are trying to reach me, be sure to address it to:

marshall AT prestovivace.biz

or

prestovivace AT prestovivace.biz

Great moments in damage control

It seems that Merck has been having problems with the Vioxx brand after some doctors became critical. A lawsuit in Australia has revealed some very damaging emails:

The first fun thing to emerge in the Australian case is email documentation showing staff at Merck made a "hit list" of doctors who were critical of the company, or of the drug. This list contained words such as "neutralise", "neutralised" and "discredit" next to the names of various doctors.

"We may need to seek them out and destroy them where they live," said one email, from a Merck employee. Staff are also alleged to have used other tactics, such as trying to interfere with academic appointments, and dropping hints about how funding to institutions might dry up. Institutions might think about whether they wish to receive money from a company like that in future. Worse still, is the revelation that Merck paid the publisher Elsevier to produce a publication.

At some point corporations should entertain the possibility that their critics have a point and fix the problem.

The fine art of writing email

John Monroe alerts us to this piece by David Silverman.

I would offer two modest dissents. Not every email needs a call to action, some email may be For Your Information, on those occasions when no specific action is required, but he recipient has an interest in being informed. Like CC, this sort of email should be used sparingly, only when the sender has good reason to believe the recipient actually wants to be kept current. There are also many times when, for reasons of office politics, you might want to forward something with the non-committal what are your thoughts.

Use and abuse of email marketing

Law Technology News: Is Your E-Communication Being Read?

But one of the greatest benefits of using these services over your own in-house e-mail program is that you are able to follow your readers. The tracking reports show you specifically who (the actual e-mail address) opened the e-mail, which e-mail bounced (bad address), who forwarded the e-mail (although you won't get to see to whom the e-mail was forwarded -- that technology does not exist yet), and if you provided links to information on your Web site or other Web links, you will see who clicked on those links. In addition to tracking the recipients of your e-newsletter, using an e-mail marketing service will give you piece of mind that your e-communication complies with antispam laws.

I realize that these technologies are well established; but I think this is an intrusive approach to marketing. It is perilously close to spying on newsletter subscribers. Of course this sort of feedback is extremely useful, but it is not worth the risk to the breakdown in trust, especially with a law firm. Just because a thing can be done, does not mean it should be done.

Presidential Records Act in the digital age

Ezra Klein

If the Presidential Records Act makes IM and Blackberries impossible because it means even the most casual and speculative conversations will be included in future records, then the thing to do is not rip instant messaging -- and all its rapid efficiencies -- out of the White House, but to try and modernize the Presidential Records Act. The PRA, after all, was passed in 1978. There was no IM. No e-mail. No blackberries or text messaging.

I think this is correct, the law will have to be modified. Ezra is just talking about Text and email, but the rules regarding social media will also have to be revisited. Civil servants, not just White House personnel, need to be on Twitter and similar platforms, but the records management implications of social media need to be taken into account. There is a way of dealing with all this, but it needs to be reviewed.

Great moments in records management policies

FOX 5 Reporter Snags McCain Campaign Blackberry Loaded with Info

Thompson reports that one Blackberry she purchased from the campaign for $20 "contained more than 50 phone numbers for people connected with the McCain-Palin campaign, as well as hundreds of emails from early September until a few days after election night."

Just another little reminder that email is not private.

Someone is spoofing the FDIC

This morning's mail brought a missive allegedly from the FDIC asking me to use a link to check my account. Obviously I realized the FDIC does not send email about such matters.

I contacted the FDIC by phone and was assured that they were aware of the scam and were in the process of shutting it down.

The Federal government takes an extremely dim view of this sort of fraud. I predict the perpetrators will be brought to justice.

Edit -
FDIC Consumer Alerts

Email, it always comes back to email

MORTGAGE MELTDOWN

And, to be sure, fraud is everywhere. It's in the loan application documents, and it's in the appraisals. There are e-mails and memos floating around showing that many people in banks, investment banks and appraisal companies - all the way up to senior management - knew about it.

It's a great time to be in e-discovery and litigation support.

SEC begins to investigate hedge funds

SEC demands records from hedge funds

The Securities and Exchange Commission has ordered more than two dozen hedge funds to turn over trading records and e-mail communications made between Sept. 1-19, The Wall Street Journal reported today

The object is to determine whether traders spread rumors to manipulate shares.

Sock puppets are not just immoral, in the case of hedge funds they are illegal.

Cloud computing and chain of custody

Cloud Computing Reality Check

There are a range of IT governance issues, not the least of which is e-discovery. Some questions that came up: How do you run e-discovery against hosted e-mail? And what privacy protections are in place so that your company's legal experts can access what's needed, but not the cloud service provider? Another way of looking at this is the "chain of custody" of your corporate data in the cloud.

The problem with Gmail

I just received an email from a spammer using a Gmail account. Perusing Gmail support, I was unable to work out how to report spam. I have no desire to join a discussion group, I simply want a way to inform Google that 5zigen.com, a spammer who lists their contact address as whoisdatashield[@]gmail[.]com, is using Gmai. If I were Google, I would want to know about things like that.

The cardinal rule of rumor-debunking

When you're fighting a lie, don't repeat it.

Great moments in rank hypocrisy

Bush Looks to His (Secret) Legacy

George W. Bush, who has expanded his power to access the e-mails and other electronic communications of Americans, is resisting congressional demands that White House e-mails be saved for later research by historians.

Hosted email and the fourth amendment

It seems that email hosted by a third party is considered private, even if the business pays for the service.

Something to think about before outsourcing your business communications.

Calling all Windows IT Pros: what would you do about the White House email?

Windows IT Pro has an excellent overview of the controversy surrounding the White House email system, filled with links for those who have only just joined the story. They conclude the article with an appeal to their readers:

At Windows IT Pro, we publish articles and information about products regularly for systems administrators concerned about staying compliant with a myriad of laws concerning email retention. Exchange administrators: What are your thoughts on the White House's archiving process? Do you have any advice for how they could do better? We want to hear from you!

I will be interested to see what they get. I am not persuaded that we are dealing with a technical problem, but I look forward to reading about the technical solutions.

Edit -
CatabBlog has some thoughts about the case.

Electronic Communications Preservation Act

Bill targets messy e-records

A bill introduced by House Democrats would preserve e-mail messages whose loss could create gaps in the country’s historical record and leave agencies vulnerable to legal actions, some policy observers say.

The legislation introduced last month would require federal agencies to preserve electronic communications in an electronic format and put the National Archives and Records Administration in charge of overseeing compliance.

Putting NARA in charge of records administration is the key to preventing the fox from guarding the hen house.

Business you should never bid on

FBI raids special counsel's office

Investigators say Bloch is suspected of hiring an outside company to scrub his computer amid a federal investigation of alleged misconduct in his office.

He hired an outside company because there isn't a civil servant in the entire federal government dumb enough to go to jail for Bloch. The private company which did this has a name, I have no doubt we will be learning its name in the near future.

This is a great time to be in e-discovery and records management, because the investigations into this maladministration will produce business for years to come.

It is also a good time to be a government IT reporter, because one else will have the unique combination of knowledge or politics, the civil service, and technology that will make it possible to tell these stories. Entire careers are going to be made out of this.

Edit -

The Legal Times and Project on Government Oversight comment.

Edit ii
FireDogLake: The Bloch Raid: A Mafia Turf War?

Security Outlook

In 2006 the Dept. of Defense banned the use of Outlook Web Access and HTML email. This is why.

White House email follies

The White House email controversy: hearings spotlight disturbing IT practices

Some of that technical detail, though, confirmed my worst fears: IT operations at the White House are terrible. The archiving system currently in use is a bad joke. In a big PR problem for IBM Lotus, Congress is also badly miscategorizing Lotus Notes as an obsolete technology, providing a misleading justification for an unfounded migration during a time of war. The cost to manage data recovery is being misrepresented by at least an order of magnitude. And Congress behaves like an old married couple, constantly bickering. That last, at least, is no surprise to anyone.

Like Gilligan's ill-fated three hour tour, this three hour hearing ended badly, with no real resolution. A good hour of the hearing was wasted on a debate between the members about whether an "Interrogatory" of one Steven McDevitt was acceptable to the members.

McDevitt, it turns out, is one of us. He was the IT guy in the White House Office of the Chief Information Officer who was responsible for setting up the new archiving system -- and he was pissed. Apparently, all of his best practices recommendations were ignored.

If the White House PR plan is to stone wall this and hope everyone loses interest, then they are going about it the right way. But I don't think this will work. I think that we are going to be hearing much more about this.

Via Pensieri di un lunatico minore.

Great moments in records management

Hired through WorkforceLogic USA, he claims to have come up with the idea and presented it on an internal Google Groups e-mail discussion group.

In a lawsuit filed on Wednesday in Atlanta's Northern District Court of Georgia, a former Google (NSDQ: GOOG) contract worker claims that Google stole his idea for Google Sky.

Google Sky is a feature that was added to the Google Earth application last August that lets users navigate through stars and galaxies.

Plaintiff Jonathan Cobb claims that starting in 2006, as a contractor hired through WorkforceLogic USA, he convened an internal Google Groups e-mail discussion group wherein he "presented, advanced, and refined the Google Sky concept and idea."

Obviously I have no opinion on the merits of the case; it depends on the terms of his contract. Clearly we will see more of this sort of litigation until the legal status of contract workers is better defined. I would just note the crucial role email will clearly play in this case.