Saskatoon Crime Stoppers are poking around for criminal-catching tips in a new way.

The volunteer-based organization, which specializes in acquiring crime tips, has started a Facebook group to help gain information from social networkers in the Saskatoon community.

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The province of Newfoundland couldn’t have handled a recent data breach any better, according to security expert, Rian Wroblewski.

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In 1987, there was one business dedicated solely to providing electronic data discovery (EDD) services. In 1992, there were about five more. In 2000, there were about 40. Today, there are over 600 offerings, or purporting to offer, these services. They range in size from very large enterprises, to one or two people.

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Some businesses are unclear about what they have to do to comply with new rules on electronic documents

Six months after new federal e-discovery rules took effect in the U.S., some businesses are still unclear on what they have to do to comply.

Under the Federal Rules for Civil Procedure (FRCP), which took effect Dec. 1, 2006, businesses need to have policies in place on how they will produce electronic documents they hold in the event of a federal court lawsuit.

But an analyst with the research firm Gartner says it may take “many more years” for companies to come fully into compliance.

RenewData, a start-up in Austin, Texas, launched a new service last week aimed at helping companies migrate their historical e-mail systems to new systems.

The company, which does e-discovery of e-mails and other unstructured data for compliance and litigation purposes, is rolling out its Data Migration Services.

When CEOs and the lawyers sit down these days to talk pending litigation, there had better be a third party at the table: the IT person.

The litigation discovery process used to mean figuring out which documents each side in the lawsuit had to provide to each other. Now, it means sifting through e-mails, PDF files and the electronic background data that tags when files were created and who has seen them.

This tip is part of SearchSecurity.com’s Data Protection Security School lesson on enterprise strategies for protecting data at rest. Visit the Enterprise strategies for protecting data at rest lesson page for additional learning resources.

Chances are that you’ve recently been hearing quite a lot of buzz about e-discovery. That’s because amendments to sections of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure took effect as of Dec. 1, 2006. Sections of these amendments set forth rules governing how companies prepare for litigation in regard to the collection of electronic evidence/information.

The rule changes are intended to recognize that companies manage and maintain electronically stored information (ESI) in fundamentally different ways than physical documents. The new e-discovery rules formally codify much of the preexisting case law related to e-discovery.

It’s not difficult establishing the benefit of proper records management, when a company such Microsoft Corp. spends an average of US$20 million for e-discovery per litigation, said a company executive.

“When someone says they can’t find the return on investment (on a records management process), I so disagree,” said Rachael Heade, Microsoft’s records management analysis manager, at a CA World 2007 panel discussion in Las Vegas, Nevada.

And there currently exists a backlog of cases to be handled, she added.

Recent amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure relating to electronically stored information raise the bar for what will be expected of e-discovery in terms of employers’ monitoring and policies. Employers will ultimately feel the brunt of these sweeping changes, with dramatic changes to the way discovery will be conducted in federal court, where most discrimination suits are filed.

With more than 80 percent of electronic documents never printed and 60 billion plus e-mail messages sent every day, e-discovery has been an important issue for some time.

However, the new amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure relating to electronically stored information (ESI)—which went into effect December 1, 2006—raise the bar for what will be expected of e-discovery in terms of employers’ monitoring and policies. Employers will ultimately feel the brunt of these sweeping changes, with dramatic changes to the way discovery will be conducted in federal court, where most discrimination suits are filed.

When Intel acknowledged two weeks ago that it may have lost months worth of e-mails involving about 100 employees, including top executives, the legendary Silicon Valley company seemed caught off-guard. Experts wondered how a $35 billion corporation. The answer may be surprising: Outside of heavily regulated industries like financial services and health care, most companies do a poor job of managing their e-mail.

Unless a business buys software to archive and categorize messages ahead of time, executives run the risk of being ill-prepared when their firm gets hauled into court or receives a government subpoena. At that point it may be too late - firms are often forced to retrieve and turn over thousands of e-mails from disparate backup disk and tape systems, sometimes at a cost of millions of dollars.

“Right now, the majority of companies are aware of the problem and that they need [this software]. But the majority haven’t deployed it yet,” said Masha Khmartseva, an analyst at the Radicati Group in Palo Alto. She estimates that as many as one-quarter of public companies in Silicon Valley lack any kind of e-mail archiving system.

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