I'm a fan of InternetWeekNY - now 45,000+ New Yorkers mingling to teach, pitch, and network all manner of things web. So, this year, I'm the proud sponsor of an event. On Thursday, May 23, from 4pm to 6pm, I'll be hosting DISRUPT LAW!! SPARK-ATHON in Soho.
The event will include speed-networking and collaborative brainstorming among 25 innovation-oriented lawyers and 25 venture-seeking hackers/developers. The goal is to spark new legaltech ventures in disruptive legal technology. For those not in the startup scene, that's "disruptive" as in "ground-breaking innovativion" NOT as in "breaking someone else's technology.'"
Motivating descriptions of successful ventures will be provided by Matt Hall, co-founder of Docracy; Tom Chernaik, CEO of CMP.LY; and one more surprise. Docracy was the winner of the TechCrunch Disrupt NY Hackathon in 2011; it offers an open collection of legal contracts and a mechanism to negotiate and sign documents online. CMP.LY provides a full and creative suite of tools for compliance and risk management for social media. And, of course, there'll be a little something to eat and drink.
I haven't been this excited since I created the LinkedData Lab, which launched new careers and companies. Can't wait to see what Disrupt Law!! brings!
Follow this event on twitter - #DisruptLawIWNY
Article has 0 comments. Click To Read/Write Comments
This blog has been dormant for quite a while due to a contractual agreement that included a publications clause. Stay tuned for both new blogs and a few that will cover the past.
Article has 0 comments. Click To Read/Write Comments
Tags: privacy, digital rights, eDiscovery, knowledge discovery for litigation, technology for lawyers, access control, technology for business managers, technology implementing law, global outsourcing, privacy technology, information management, data protection, information security, accountability, digital evidence, forensics
Cross-border eDiscovery is a hot topic this year. The decreased cost of storage has resulted in nearly everyone retaining massively greater quantities of information. Email and the Web have driven a shift in data to less formal, less structured records and files. And, globalization of business has caused the relevant information for an increasing number of lawsuits to be spread among multiple countries. Courts have instituted new rules for how parites will engage in discovery related to this digital evidence. And, these new rules are putting some lawyers in the cross-hairs of other governmental digital control activities. Lawyers, by and large, are not technologists and the challenges arising from handling this mass of distributed data are proving daunting. Technology vendors are offering significant assistance but still more is required.
Discovery, at its simplest, is the concept that one party to a lawsuit can learn what the opposing party knows that is relevant to the resolution of the case. In the US, this had long been accomplished through gamesmanship and strategy (think, hide-and-seek meets go-fish) while, for example, the UK had moved on to affirmative disclosure, the idea that each side needs to identify the truly relevant and provide it. In either case, the parties have needed to decide what data to preserve and how to search it. For a variety of reasons, corporations are adding and deleting data all the time -- doing things like updating client or supplier addresses, changing prices, adding sales, marking deliveries. So, typically, one needs to select a moment in time that's relevant to the issues in a lawsuit and look at all data from that time or up until that time. This is no easy task, as the challenges of selecting the moment, deciding how to save the data, and which tools will provide the best search result are all subject to debate.
Handling a case that involves data in multiple countries compounds the challenge. The EU has had detailed and tightly controlling rules about the handling of information about people by commercial entities for nearly thirty years. By comparison, the US historically has had a comparatively limited concern about the privacy of people whose identities appear in commercial files. For example, in many cases EU rules prohibit making the sort of "moment in time" copy of entire systems described in the last paragraph and have rules that as a practical matter prohibit sending data about people out of the country. Recently, these rules have come into head-on conflict with courts in the US requiring that certain information be turned over in discovery. The decision not to violate the EU rules has resulted in some significant financial penalties being imposed by US judges, while the decision to violate the EU rules and provide the data in the US has resulted in some equally significant financial penalties being imposed by European judges, leaving litigators between a rock and a hard place.
Much discussion is ongoing about ways to resolve this problem. For example, governmental, public policy, and commercial bodies are discussing possible changes to their rules. New forms of insurance may be offered to indemnify parties caught in the current situation. At the same time, there is a quiet march forward of new technologies which may resolve some of the issues. For example, systems that track each data transaction at a very granular level and account for their compliance with rules, called "accountable systems", are in development. Such systems would make it possible to understand the data in the system at a particular moment in time without requiring a "copy" to be made. And, they would be able to recognize competing data rules and apply the correct ones, wherever the resolution of a rules conflict is possible. In theory, this technology might also make it possible to transfer the substantive portions of the information without the personal information, so that the parties could define very small subsets that are relevant and actually required to be disclosed, thus limiting the release of personal information to subsets so small that requirements, like notice to the individuals in the data, could reasonably be met.
While this new type of technology offers promise for resolving some of the cross-border eDiscovery challenges without requiring any jurisdiction to change its rules, it has drawn relatively little attention in this context to date. Perhaps this is because the technology needs to be refined and then implemented in the day-to-day digital business practices of organizations before it can be capitalized upon to address this issue. How long it will be before this occurs will be driven by how quickly people recognize the problems this technology can solve.
Article has 0 comments. Click To Read/Write Comments
It's not news that our society is divided into technological haves and have-nots. Much has been written about the advantages lost or gained - education, professional, and social - based upon the primacy and recency of one's technology. Recently, I've become increasingly attuned to another place where technological caste matters -- legal standards.
It's been clear to me for quite some time that the lawyer who resonates with technology can do more successful and faster legal research; propound vastly superior discovery requests; and produce substantially more incisive disclosures. It's now becoming increasingly clear to me that the law itself is being skewed by those of us who live to keep up with the next big thing in technology. Debates among lawyers rage in my email inbox about the differences in things like encryption technologies and metadata standards, with lots of cool techie references to things like ISO, NIST, Diffie, OASIS, and XACML.
In the meantime, I was on the the Social Security Administration website the other day and they wanted me to use an eight digit alphanumeric password (case insensitive, no special characters) to upload W2 and other sensitive tax information. My bank's brokerage affiliate is using the same outdated and readily hackable password technology I still see commercial and bar association websites seeking personal and financial information without indicating that they're using SSL or some other baseline method of securing the information. I still get requests from security professionals to email my Social Security Number. If you're not particularly technical, trust me, none of these are good things.
The distance between these two realities has got me thinking about all the places that these two technological castes will be competing to set legal standards. For example, does a "time is of the essence clause" apply the perception of time of a blackberry owner or a person without a laptop?
As the new administration provides the first coordinated national focus on technology, I'd like to add this to the list. Perhaps the new national CTO (yet to be appointed) could work with the American Bar Association and other leaders to identify a rational strategy for standards setting in such a technologically bifurcated society.
Article has 0 comments. Click To Read/Write Comments
Computer hacks were the topic of tech news on the day after Senator Obama's historic election. On Wednesday, Newsweek reported that the Obama and McCain campaigns were the subject of computer hacks during the campaign. The Obama campaign reported a possible email phishing attack this past summer. They were ultimately told by federal authorities that both the Obama and McCain campaign computers had been compromised. Reports are circulating that the attacks came from a "foreign entity" and lifted significant amounts of data from both campaigns.
Also on Wednesday, malware creators took advantage of the tremendous interest in the election and began sending emails with "Obama" somewhere in the subject line. The most common subject lines promised video of a speech, additional election coverage, or new interviews. One security company alone reported that it had filtered more than 10 million emails in less than 6 hours on Wednesday morning. Apparently, hundreds of thousands of people sought to open them and were instead infecting their computers with malware.
These two events highlight the importance of email security. This is the first major election heavily conducted, financed, covered, and influenced on the web. It reflects the transition to technology for ever-increasing numbers of the population. And, it reflects our ready acceptance of the transition.
Too many people assume that their spam filter, anti-virus software, etc will protect them. Yet, any technology professional will tell you that firewalls and software alone are not enough to protect a computer from data theft or destruction. They'll also tell you that emails are the easiest means of attacking computers because people still act before they think. A huge percentage of hacks rely on "social engineering" - convincing a person to do something that works to the hacker's benefit.
Education is still a significant tool in the computer security arsenal. Users must learn to stop and ask themselves whether the email is likely to be what it seems. First the easy questions: How likely is it that some stranger will really send you millions of dollars? Is your US bank really going to send you any request from an email address that doesn't contain the company name? And, if your friend really did lose a wallet on a spur-of-the-moment vacation how likely is it that she'd email you for a credit card number instead of calling her husband, the consulate, or American Express for help?
Is it possible to go the next step and teach users a little technology? They should always check to see if the attachment they're about to open like a present on Christmas morning ends with ".exe" (a file that will execute some program). If it does, they should beware and seek tech support. Or can we teach them to look at the "properties" of the link they're about to click, see the web address ("URL") and recognize that the source is the wrong country? A quick look at the domain registry will make it pretty obvious that something that purports to come from around the corner has a two letter code that means it's really coming from a country around the the world.
With so much hacking going on, the problem is no longer just a technical one. More laws are creating responsibility to take reasonable care to protect other people's information and liability for failing to do so. It is important to remember that with these changes, the standard of care is expected to improve, and what was reasonable yesterday may be unreasonable today.
Article has 0 comments. Click To Read/Write Comments
Train wreck caused by text messaging? Multiple news reports have raised the possibility that the conductor of a Los Angeles train was sending text messages just before the train crashed and many were killed. The questions under investigation are whether this is true and whether the conductor was distracted by it when he should have seen red light signals indicating the hazard ahead. This is the saddest outcome of an issue I, and others, have been raising for years. The use of technology for non-work activities has pervaded the work environment to the extent that it is impacting work performance. The obvious problem is lost revenue and reduced profits to the employer, but sometimes it correlates to increased liability. If true in this case, it means lost lives. If the shopclerk with an mp3 player or cellphone in the ear is too distracted to answer questions accurately or make correct change, what makes me think my car mechanic, stock broker, or doctor's lab technician isn't? In 2006, eDiscovery companies were estimating that one quarter to one third of all emails flowing through a corporation were personal email. At the time, I wrote about the thousands of football and fantasy football gambling emails that had passed through Enron. I also wrote about the dirty jokes, hook ups, and other sex emails there. It's getting technically easier to discover that people aren't really working when they claim to be. This summer before lecturing at a state bar convenion, I stood in the back of the large hall and observed what people were doing. I explained the ways I could prove that they had been using their laptops, blackberries, and iphones to shop on the web, play video poker, and text friends and family. I explained how, In the not-to-distant-future, these activities will probably void the professional certification credit they thought they were earning by being present but not paying attention. This week's train wreck brings more attention to the debate about just how much people's attention is diverted and what the consequences can be. At a New York panel discussion last fall, a group of senior financial industry compliance managers uniformly said they weren't concerned about personal web, email, and phone use at work. Perhaps they ought to be.
Article has 0 comments. Click To Read/Write Comments
"If I'd wanted to be a CIO, I wouldn't have gone to law school" is the subtitle of the talk I'm giving today at the Arizona State Bar Convention about the ethical trouble lawyers can get into using current technology. Today's presentation is posted on the papers and presentations page or you can
click here to see the presentation.
Article has 0 comments. Click To Read/Write Comments
(WARNING: Adult content) On Tuesday, Alex Kozinski, Chief Judge of the federal Ninth Circuit was caught by the LA Times with a website full of sexually explicit material accessible to the public. Pardon the pun, but perhaps the old expression about "closing the barn door after the animals are gone" has never been more appropriate. The LA Times says the site included photos of "naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal." There is so much wrong with this picture that it's hard to decide where to start. Next week, I'll be giving a talk at the Arizona State Bar Convention about legal ethics and technology. One of the most important points is that lawyers need to understand how big a data footprint they and their clients are leaving behind. Kozinski is reported to have said that he thought the site was for his private storage and that he was not aware the images could be seen by the public. That's a problem for many lawyers, who are unaware how easy it is to find things they or their clients have posted on the web. In the Judge's case, that's doubtful if he's really the author of the letter to 'Article III Groupie" posted on undertheirrobes.com. There, in a plea to be included as a contender for "judicial hottie" were multiple links to http://alex.kozinski.com. The links included the reportedly offensive subdirectory /stuff (see the properties for "bungee jump"). If he didn't think people could get to the subdirectory, why did he include a link to it? Kozinski is reported to have said he didn't know if any of the material on the site is obscene. The site is now offline and apparently unavailable through some of the easiest means of access. But, Cryptome has posted a list of all of the files and subdirectories in the judge's /stuff subdirectory and it contains a subdirectory called "/fucking" which has been around since November 2006. The LA Times described part of the Kozinski site as containing "images of masturbation, public sex and contortionist sex." In researching this story, I accidentally came across the women-as-cows photo (be very careful which Google hits you choose if you search this story); the women's posteriors are facing the camera and their genitalia are in full view. In the first LA Times story, the Judge said that he had uploaded sexually explicit content to the site. The next day, the Judge is reported to have suggested that some of the items were posted by his adult son and that he was unaware of them. If this becomes a question of sufficient concern, there are technical methods to determine whether this is likely true or false. The website appears to have been registered by the Judge's son, hosted on a joke server and registered using an obviously false address (including both homage to hackers with references to FOO and to lawyers with the fictitious town "Barsville"). Even so, with pc logs, server logs, emails, and web postings, it won't be that hard to figure out most of who did what. The story broke because Judge Kozinski was hearing a trial level case, a criminal prosecution for for the distribuion of pornographic materials (containing bestiality). In response to the news stories about his own website, Judge Kozinski suspended trial at least until Monday. Besides the immediate question of possible conflict of interest, it is likely that someone will look more closely at how the case came to be assigned to Judge Kozinski. It is not impermissible for an appeals court judge to hear a trial case, but it is not common. It won't be long before people are reassessing everything the Judge has said or done. And, quite a lot of that history is readily available in digital form. For example, people are already reassesssing Judge Kozinski's 2001 battle with the Court's administrators over pornography filters on the government's computers. I've yet to see any discussion of his opinion (in US v Poehlman) finding that the government entrapped a man it accused of crossing state lines to have sex with minors. The LA Times reports that the Judge "defended some of the adult content as "funny"" and "he had shared some material on the site with friends." Considering that the site contains the aforementioned photos of naked women as cows, and is reported to have included at least one photo of women exposing their pubic hair, we will now wait to see whether former female employees or colleagues come forward to say that they were the recipients of such "sharing" and found it offensive or harassing. And, it's only a matter of time before someone takes a new look at his writing on sexual harassment (Foreword in Sexual Harassment in Employment Law (Barbara Lindemann & David D. Kadue, BNA 1992), reprinted as Locking Women Workers in a Gilded Cage in Legal Times of Washington, May 25, 1992, at 26.) Also discovered on Judge Kozinski's website were "more than a dozen" copyrighted songs and it has been asserted that they were readily copy-able by the public. While that's a pretty small number relative to the civil copyright infringement actions typically reported, it could still be a copyright violation if others did copy the files. Perhaps more interesting, someone may want to reread the Judge's participation in the July 28, 2000 decision to stay an injunction against Napster. All in all, it looks like it's going to be a tough week for Judge Kozinski, until now considered one of America's brightest and most influential conservative judges.
Article has 3 comments. Click To Read/Write Comments
Google's mantra is "organizing the world's information." If you're organizing information in your corporation or organization, that might not be a viable option. URIs present the opportunity for everyone in a web environment to make a step in that direction. One of the major challenges for large organizations is that different people, departments, etc. use the same words to mean different things. Every business and subset of business has "terms of art", often common words or phrases that mean something special to that group. To a programmer, the word "beta" means the test of software before it's released for general use. To a stock broker "beta" is a number that shows whether a stock is more or less volatile than the market. They're in diffferent industries so, talking face-to-face, it's pretty easy to tell that they're talking about different things. There are plenty of examples, though, where the same word in the same industry means different things. In the financial industry, "wealth" is used to define the threshold for accepting clients for certain services. Every institution picks its own number and they can be the same or different (e.g., over $1 million in net worth; over $1 miillion in liquid funds invested; over $1 million in assets other than personally-used real estate). When those institutions merge, the inconsistent definitions become an impediment to merging their data.
In computer systems, there historically weren't good ways to know which meaning someone had in mind when they put a particular word in a file or database. The problem was the same for the names of fields or columns. Now, we have metadata...data that let's us provide information about data. So, we can stick tags on data in a file that tells us things like where it came from, what day it was collected, or what size it's supposed to be. A URI (uniform reference identifier) can store the definition you have in mind. So Citi/define/wealth can have a different meaning from UBS/define/wealth. And, your system can point to the appropriate one whenever "wealth" appears in your data. This makes it possible to merge data and retain different meanings or to compute across disparate meanings.
Article has 0 comments. Click To Read/Write Comments
Recently, I was invited to facilitate a workshop to learn about customer data uses, flows, and needs. It was an interesting idea, so I agreed.
"Know your customer" has become a hackneyed phrase in fairly short order. One of the post-9/11 bundle of laws, intended to gain anti-terrorism assistance from the public, was a "know your customer" mandate requiring financial institutions to better understand who their customers are and where their money comes from. Like many things we do in this automated life, it seems to have quickly lost its meaning in favor of a single massive data collection effort...like when my bank of many years -- which has seen my entire transition from debt to net worth through both my business acounts and the deposit of every paycheck -- asks me for id. The workshop was intended to provide an opportunity for a fairly large group of data architects to hear a group of customers talk about their business day and tasks; how they interact with each other; and what they want. It was my job to draw them out over the course of two days, to find slices of life to talk about and elicit tremendous detail. It was expected that we would have an accelerated opportunity to gather needed data elements and identify system access requirements. With facilitation, the customers opened up about their work lives. They described a tremendous amount of human interaction to obtain information. They described phoning folks in other parts of the organization to find out information they wanted. We, the folks with strong information technology orientation, thought we were making a break-through, identifying systems to which these customers could or should get access. What happened next was unexpected. Wen we sought to validate these system access requirements, the customers repeatedly and politely told us we misunderstood. They repeatedly explained that they liked to get information in this unautomated fashion. They liked the opportunity conversation gave them to get context -- group meaning of terms, background for the way information is gathered, information that's inappropriate for permanent records, and other related information. Since then, I've been thinking about what it really means to know your customer. As the provider of services, it's not enough to learn your customer's business. And, it's not enough to spend time in their space and observe them at work. You need to do those things but, in the end, if you really want to give them what they want, sometimes you just need to ask.
Article has 0 comments. Click To Read/Write Comments
Previous Page | All Posts | Next Page
Error sending email
Email sent successfully
|