Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google told: If you could cough up a decade of your internal emails, that'd be great The US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee has written to the big four tech giants – Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google – demanding comprehensive information on its financial structures and 10 years' worth of emails between top executives. The bi-partisan committee is harvesting the data as part of its investigation …
What if they argue they don't have e-mails from that long ago? Tech companies are not the military, they don't have rules about saving every information forever, even if ordered to destroy it.
Just joking, of course they saved their own e-mails that long!
I suppose if they argue that they haven't, the investigation quite possibly could treat that as spoilation, i.e. destruction of evidence. Should those emails no longer exist, I would hope they would not treat the matter lightly.
What worries me is that they argue they don't have those emails any more, and then the investigators just say "oh well, no harm done then, nothing to see here, move along everyone"
Seriously, what law is there obliging them to keep every email for that long?
I know if someone asked me to produce my business emails from ten years ago, I'd laugh in their face. I'm reasonably sure that information no longer exists, unless maybe in the NSA's database of course.
Well HMRC investigations in the UK can go back 20 years if they think there is any kind of fraud or money laundering, for a start. I imagine if you laughed in HMRC's face if they asked for your business emails from ten years ago, they might not take it too kindly.
the investigation quite possibly could treat that as spoilation, i.e. destruction of evidence.
This isn't a criminal - or civil - investigation. Therefore there is no evidence to spoil.
This is a legislative inquiry. That is, the legislature is looking into current issues to help them determine future legislative requirements, what legislation they should be looking at passing.
The problem with not being able to produce the emails is that in an antitrust court case the judge can assume himself or tell the jury to assume that the missing emails would corraberate the plaintiff's accusations, and render a judgment according to that assumption.
(Which could still be better than having to produce actual incriminating emails, but it is still a significant penalty.)
The problem with not being able to produce the emails is that in an antitrust court case the judge can assume himself or tell the jury to assume that the missing emails would corraberate the plaintiff's accusations, and render a judgment according to that assumption.
That only applies in cases where there has been deliberate destruction of evidence that one could reasonably assume would require to be kept.
Deleting old emails once a legal action has been started? Yep, good case for spoliation.
Deleting old emails in the normal course of business? Nope, perfectly fine.
In addition, there is no judge, there is no court case. This is the legislature seeking to inform themselves of current and past business practices to guide their legislation actions - what laws they should be passing in the future. This is not the DoJ making requests about an anti-trust investigation.
Well technically you can do that and it is sort of legal if you get away with it. The challenge is that if a mail turns up somewhere else which would be categorised as 'containing information which guided a financial decision' and you didn't have a copy of it in your list you need to get your waders on.
Amazing how despite some very simple rules after the Enron issue (Oh how I enjoyed having to read and understand Sarbanes-Oxley and all it's offspring), people seem unable to decide what needs keeping and what doesn't. It's not rocket science
If it is so simple perhaps you could explain for the rest of us how long they would have been required to keep emails, and if the time limit is different for different subjects? If they can legally delete after 7 years, I think it is highly likely they will have. If it turns out someone has a copy of a 10 year old email I don't see why that would be a problem for them. It is only if they delete emails they were legally obligated to keep that they will get burned when such an email inevitably shows up.
"Amazing how despite some very simple rules after the Enron issue (Oh how I enjoyed having to read and understand Sarbanes-Oxley and all it's offspring), people seem unable to decide what needs keeping and what doesn't. It's not rocket science"
That is not correct - there are dozens of regulations on the topic.
I'd guess that all these companies are very conscious of anti-trust legislation and its role providing endless amounts of good eating for lawyers, legislators and anyone else who can get their snout suitably positioned over the trough so I'd very very surprised if anyone gets caught 'red handed'.
These companies grew to be the behemoths that they are for the same reason as we allowed competing nations to get too powerful -- the majority of our corporate governance is both lazy and greedy, they'll always take the cheap option rather than make the investment needed to be independent. The provided the opportunity companies that are well placed and do put in the work. (So, no, there's absolutely no reason to tie yourself into a Microsoft / Google software ecosystem except that the companies make it easy for you .... the trap is baited.....)
"Wanna bet that they all only store emails for one year, precisely to avoid getting caught red-handed?"
Want to bet that they don't?
The 10 year request wasn't by accident. IIRC that's the retention period that they are required to store those records.
And because these companies store and track everything, you can bet that they will also keep their email around for that long too.
Alphabet (Google) spent $20 million on lobbying last year, enough to put it in the top 10 contributors.
If they all have to pony up $100 million, that would be extortionate. (Yes, I know what you're thinking. But let's try to keep the orders of magnitude within the bounds of plausibility.)
"For this kind of crap, dead the edition with toner saver on would be my preferred delivery method.
All continuous text, no formatting, divider between mails or any such frippery. Maybe add in the headers to be certain there no nursing info."
Yes, because deliberately pissing off people who write the laws you have to obey is definitely a winning strategy.
The requests will be stonewalled.
Congress will huff and puff for as long as it takes for the inquiry to completely fade from the 24/7 news cycle. The 0.01% of the population who will pay attention will give up hope for any meaningful action before the story fades.
Some Senators and Congress Critters will be ridiculously enriched for looking away and my tax dollars will be wasted even more.
"The 24/7 news cycle" will have forgotten about this story by the end of today. That's what it's for. If you think the action happens "before the story fades", then I'm not surprised you're disappointed.
If you want to achieve - anything, you need to keep your attention focused on it after everyone else has moved on. That's how you achieve anything.
Alright, it might take a while to get the full result and transmit it to them, but this is surely nothing worse than an SQL query where the from or to contain one of a given set of names, and the dates are within the bounds.
If it wasn't for the fact that the network I'm on is only 6 years old, I could do that for you for any subset of my users, and I'm just an IT guy with an Exchange server. Gimme a day, but it wouldn't take even a tiny portion of that to get the results.
Google might well have a lot more email per person, and a lot more people in the notice, and maybe they don't have a nice SQL interface (but they should!) but it shouldn't be unduly burdensome to them to return such results.
The *bigger* problem is - who's going to sit and redact / check them all to make sure they are correct, complete and relevant? The lawyers presumably, at great expense.
Alright, it might take a while to get the full result and transmit it to them, but this is surely nothing worse than an SQL query where the from or to contain one of a given set of names, and the dates are within the bounds.
Are n't you making assumptions about their internal systems? These are the grown-ups.
The *bigger* problem is - who's going to sit and redact / check them all to make sure they are correct, complete and relevant? The lawyers presumably, at great expense.
Interns, and Junior partners - this is not an uncommon exercise.
...of the executives of Facebook, Amazon, et al. It is assuming that everything said execs ever wrote can and therefore should be scrutinized and the information used in decisions which will, inevitably, impact their livelihoods and lives!
Oh wait. That's what those corporations do to the rest of us already.
Well, carry on, then. Pitchforks and hot tar at the ready, I hope.
...
Sir Humphrey: "This file contains the complete set of papers, except for a number of secret documents, a few others which are part of still active files, some correspondence lost in the floods of 1967..."
Jim Hacker: Was 1967 a particularly bad winter?
Sir Humphrey: No, a marvelous winter. We lost no end of embarrassing files
Wouldn't SOP be to make the e-mails sanitary, and have the real policy discussions at a cocktail party or by the water cooler? Or just a wink and a handshake? Politicians ought to be thoroughly conversant with such safety measures. Surely only the 99% put anything interesting and true in writing. This goes back to letters on paper. I remember paper. And watermarked paper. HPE - Autonomy case notwithstanding.
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