Hello from New York City, where there are just too many gerbils in the cage. Simply navigating through the crowds on the sidewalk can turn into a military maneuver. I don’t trust any city where you have to look straight up at noon to see the sun!

However, it was a terrific day at ARMA’s E-Discovery and Beyond conference. The crowds were very engaged and we were pleased to be presenting with a very distinguished faculty, including old friends Jody Westby and Tina Ayiotis, and new friends Galina Datskovsky, former judge Ron Hedges, Chris Olsen, Rick Wolf, Jamie Brigman and Kathleen Edmond.

Rick brought with him a terrific video, showing a corporation digging an ED hole for itself in one ethical nightmare after another. Using the video as a base, the audience and fellow presenters chimed in to identify one disastrous element after another. A great way to teach corporate ethics.

My favorite part of Jody’s presentation was her cautionary advice about outsourcing electronic evidence review to China, India and the Philippines (the big three offering this service). These countries do not have privacy laws or breach notification laws. I couldn’t agree more that it is a HUGE risk outsourcing ED review to these counties, when the only controls are contractual. And we all know how easy it is to corral the horse once it is out of the barn.

Ron and Chris had a terrifically engaging session on proving that electronic records are trustworthy.  My favorite line of the day went to Ron, who pointed out, “In the electronic world, there is no “original” anymore – there goes the Best Evidence rule.”

Ron also got the best tip of the day: noting the recent publication of The Sedona Conference® Commentary on ESI Evidence & Admissibility, which can be downloaded at http://www.thesedonaconference.org/dltForm?did=ESI_Commentary_0308.pdf

Thanks to ARMA for a great conference!

E-mail:       Phone:          703-359-0700       

Ah, the phrasing of the inimitable Frank Sinatra. Good of him (and Mr. Sondheim of course) to give me the perfect blog posting title.

It refers to the idiots that the White House keeps relying on to explain why they have missing e-mails and why the recovery of those e-mails would be either impossible or way too expensive. It is truly silly season in Washington.

At a February Congressional hearing, Theresa Payton, the chief information office at the White Office of administration testified that a lot of e-mails sent and received from 2003-2005 had been lost when the office transitioned from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange. It’s really hard to imagine anyone keeping a straight face. Funny Theresa, we’ve done that migration many times and, I know you’ll find this hard to believe, but we’ve never lost a single e-mail. Let me put it simply – if this is the extent of your technology knowledge, you really need to look at career alternatives.

Congressman Darrell Issa, clearly wearing his clown paint that day, was delighted to have such a great explanation. A Bush apologist, he went so far as to say that the missing e-mails, given Payton’s explanation, showed no malfeasance by the White House or negligence on the part of the administration’s IT staff, but just a computer glitch that happened when the White House phased out an archaic program. He even characterized Lotus Notes as “wagon wheel” technology. IBM went, understandably, ballistic and secured an “amendment” to the record from Issa.

The EOP’s assertions that massive amounts of time and money would be required to recover the data flatly defy belief. This has become the order of the day. Play fast and loose with facts and then jack the recovery price into the stratosphere to evade having to comply with federal law. The National Security Archive has entered the fray, stating (correctly) that “the costs associated with copying or imaging . . . sources of missing e-mails is not only quantifiable, but is also nominal.” Amen.

Send the clowns back to the circus. No one with even a dim mental wattage believes the White House. Send in a real forensics team and put an end to the nonsense.

E-mail:       Phone: 703-359-0700

You may recall a February post about British services where attractive females test the fidelity of husbands and the resulting videotapes appear in court as electronic evidence in divorce proceedings. Apparently, that concept is on our side of the pond as well, at least in fiction. The Fidelity Files is a book that will be published by St. Martin’s Press in June of 2008. The author, Jessica Brody, wrote me after reading my earlier blog post: http://ridethelightning.senseient.com/2008/02/brits-hire-hott.html

Check out her book site at http://www.thefidelityfiles.com/. There’s a great video promoting the book. If interested, you can pre-order it on Amazon. Or just wait for the movie to come out on DVD. This seems right up Hollywood’s alley.

For extra fun after watching the video, call 1-866-348-0430. If you were making the call “for real,” at the end of what might have seemed like a great night, this call could certainly ruin your day.

E-mail:      Phone: 703-359-0700

Good grief. The White House, which has always looked dumb in its explanation for its many missing e-mails has inexplicably chosen to look dumber than ever. In its filing with the court on March 21st, the essence of the White House’s argument seems to be that, having failed to comply with the law in the first place, it is now too expensive to go back and try to salvage what e-mails it can find. Disingenuously, the filing also suggests that all the reports of missing e-mail are somehow “conjectural.”

Interesting argument, given the fact that an internal White House investigation said that computer experts could not locate a single e-mail from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney between September 30, 2003 and October 6, 2003 – the week when the Department of Justice launched an investigation into the Plame Wilson leak and set a deadline for administration officials to turn over documents and e-mails to federal investigators that contained any reference to Plame Wilson or her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Even more interesting given that the White House admitted that there were at least 400 other days between March 2003 and October 2005 where e-mails could not be located in either Cheney’s office or the Executive Office of the President.

As the noxious cherry on this odorous sundae, the White House has admitted the physical destruction of some of its hard drives, as part of established policy of course. The amazing thing is that this office finds it so difficult to comply with the Presidential Records Act and yet so easy to comply with its policy of tape recycling and hard drive destruction.

And yet the White House has the audacity to bleat about the hundreds of hours and potential monies it will take to conduct a full investigation and restoration effort. The White House has zero credibility in all this – if the court wants the truth here, it may have to order the employment of independent experts to assess the situation and report directly to the court. The White House is apparently much better at losing things than keeping them, especially during controversial time frames. In a world where information management is such a necessity, the White House seems to be specializing in information mis-management.

Don’t change that dial . . . more is sure to come . . . hopefully from an angry court.

E-mail:     Phone: 703-359-0700