Vogel Internet, Information Technology and e-Discovery Blog : Texas Internet, Information Technology, eCommerce & E-Discovery Lawyer & Attorney Peter S. Vogel : Gardere Wynne Sewell Law Firm : Dallas TX

As a frequent flier with millions of air miles I was as shocked as anyone to learn that a pilot and first officer were preoccupied with their laptops while flying to Minneapolis from San Diego last week. The crew apparently was so mentally invested in their laptops that they did not hear their radios for more than an hour and over flew their destination by 150 miles. Surely new rules will be instituted to protect the flying public.

Computers are Addictive!

In 1967 I took a course in statistics, but the first half of the course was FORTRAN programming, and I’ve been addicted to computers ever since. Many of you reading this blog know that one loses all sense of time and space when sitting at a computer, and with the advent of the flood of information on the Internet losing oneself into a computer has never been easier. Is it any wonder that this flight crew were deeply engrossed and lost all sense of time and space?

Wifi in the Air

Now that airlines are providing wifi services on aircraft one might wonder if wifi will be a good thing or bad. It’s impossible to be on a plane going anywhere today where passengers are not using laptops, netbooks, and cell phones, whether they are checking email, or preparing spreadsheets, powerpoints, documents, or just watching movies. So it seems the sky is full of computers and unlikely to ever be less, however the flying public should have better expectations of the pilots.

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GUEST BLOG FROM VICTORIA VANBUREN

Before Dave Grant joined Gardere as the Director of e-Discovery, he was responsible for e-Discovery at Enron in the last few years before its total melt down and was responsible for managing more than 1.25 million documents.   While at Enron, Dave responded to more than 100 subpoenas from various states and federal agencies. The Enron database has become a focal point of eDiscovery research.    This Guest Blog about the Enron database is part of a bigger picture regarding academic research for developing efficient tools to improve eDiscovery.

I welcome Victoria VanBuren as the first Guest Blogger with her blog concerning the Enron eMail database. Victoria runs the DISPUTING blog with Karl Bayer in Austin, and has a great knack for posting interesting blogs and finding blogs on important topics. She is also a co-founder and an active participant on theLinkedIn Commercial and Industry Arbitration and Mediation Group. In addition to being a lawyer, Victoria is working on a degree in computer science so and I’m sure we will see Guest Blogs from her in the future.     

GUEST POST: E-DISCOVERY AND THE ENRON E-MAIL DATASET RESEARCH

By Victoria VanBuren  

The U.S. Supreme Court granting of certiorari to former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling dominated the news headlines last week. Interestingly, the Federal Energy Commission (FERC), during its investigation into Enron’s involvement in the energy crisis of 2000-01, made available to the public a large database, called the “Enron Corpus.”  This dataset consists of about half a million e-mail communications from former Enron senior executives and energy traders.

Enron E-mail Dataset Research

Because of its size and public status, the Enron Corpus is a rare and valuable tool for experimenting on text classification methods. After FERC posted it to the web, this dataset has been the subject of research by computer science departments of several universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University. The summer of 2009, the team at TREC Legal Track, an organization co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense, started conducting research on the Enron Corpus with the purpose of improving large-scale search techniques.  

Our Research – Bayesian Text Classifier

The spring of 2009, computer science students at Texas State University David Villarreal, Thomas McMillen, Andrew Minnick, and I, under the supervision of computer forensic expert Wilbon Davis  utilized  the Enron Corpus to train a Bayes-based algorithm to classify the Enron e-mails into relevant and irrelevant to a given legal issue. This type of algorithm is commonly used by e-mail spam filters.

The Results

The team hoped that this mathematical approach would achieve better accuracy levels than the ~ 20% found using Boolean keyword searching, a method employed by many lawyers. Surprisingly, the Bayesian filter found e-mails to be known relevant at averages ranging between 43% and 66%. And as expected, the irrelevant accuracy results were even higher, averages ranging between 44% and 77%. Texas State University published the Technical Report last week and it can be downloaded for free here.           

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On the heels of Dell’s purchase of Perot Systems, Xerox announced that it was purchasing Affiliated Computer Systems (ACS) for $6.4B. Dell just agreed to buy Perot Systems for $3.9B. Now that 3 major hardware companies have purchased outsourcing vendors the outsourcing/sale of hardware market will get more interesting. ACS claims it is the “world's largest diversified business process outsourcing (BPO) firm, ACS is a $6.5 billion company with revenue growth of 6 percent and new business signings of $1 billion in annual recurring revenue during its fiscal 2009.”

Other Developments with Perot Systems

Apparently not everyone at Perot Systems thinks the purchase by Dell is so wonderful as some Perot Systems’ shareholders filed suit to stop the sale. In the meantime Perot Systems announced that it will acquire BearingPoint China Consulting and made the following statement:

BearingPoint China Consulting has earned numerous industry awards. In 2008, the China Software Association and ERP world.net ranked the firm among the "Top 10 IT Consulting Firms" in China, and named CEO Machan among the "Top 10 People of the Year in the IT Industry" in China. The firm also was chosen as "Most Trusted Consulting Firm" in 2007 by the China Enterprise Confederation.

Of course this acquisition is subject to U.S. Bankruptcy Court approval as well as that of the Chinese government. It seems that Perot Systems is not sitting idle while the Dell acquisition is taking place.

Where are We Going? Proprietary Systems?

What’s going on in the outsourcing world with these major acquisitions? One answer might be that outsourcing vendors will now try to tie their customers to them more closely by creating special hardware/software systems that make leaving more difficult and expensive. Remember a year ago that Oracle and HP announced that specialized hardware systems for Oracle databases. Sounds a lot like the old minicomputer days when every hardware manufacturer had a proprietary operating system and as a result customers found it cost prohibitive to change vendors…hard to image in today’s world of Windows Servers and Linux. Time will tell.
 

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Great news and I guess the FBI is following my blog! The day following my blog about large scale phishing attacks the FBI reported that “law enforcement authorities in California, Nevada and North Carolina arrested 33 people Wednesday as part of an international crackdown on "phishing," e-mail scams that trick people into giving personal and financial data to counterfeit Web sites.”

Phishing Scam Spooked FBI Director Off E-Banking

Really great to know that even the FBI Director Robert Mueller almost fell for a phishing scam. So clearly if Director Mueller is susceptible, isn’t everyone? Everyone needs to be careful.

Good Advice- Read the Phishing Emails

As I blogged that Paypal contacted me, but I didn’t fall for the scam…it was pretty obvious because the email I got was misspelled:.    (ending with a capital eye rather than a small l) so look closely at the email I received and decide if you would respond to an email like this:

If people read emails and see that PayPaI is misspelled or the content doesn’t add up…they should think twice before responding...and hopefully advoid falling for the latest phishing scam!
 

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Apparently large scale phishing attacks resulted in compromises to tens of thousands of webmail accounts, hardly a surprise. However it is pretty amazing that so many individuals fall for the phishing tricks. As a matter of fact this morning I got an email purportedly from PayPal indicating that my account had been hacked and if I would only provide personal information including credit card information, social security number, date of birth, well you get it. Of course it would be incredibly stupid for me, or thousands of these phishing victims to believe the emails that come to our inboxes. What can we do to protect ourselves?

OnGuard Online

Apparently few people take the time to review OnGuard Online before they get duped by phishing and spam attacks. However the OnGuard Online is a great website hosted by a number of federal agencies and non-profits including: Federal Trade Commission, Department of Commerce, Department of Homeland Security, Internal Revenue Service, Computing Technology Industry Association, National Crime Prevention Council, Better Business Bureau, and Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG). OnGuard Online provides cute videos and games to educate consumers about the risks associated with: phishing, computer security, email scams, spam, VOIP, among other topics. The OnGuard Online site also provides publications and allows consumers to file complaints.

Federal Government to the Rescue?

If the CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) Act of 2003 is any indication it’s probably unlikely that the US government can do much to protect citizens since there seems to be an increase in spam and phishing since 2003, not a reduction as was hoped when the 2003 law was passed. There are estimates that 80% of all email is unsolicited which should be reason enough for individuals to be more leery of suspicious phishing emails. Hotmail claims it has 400 million accounts so the number of compromised accounts could be huge and reports from the APWG estimate that phishing attacks will continue. Since the US government does not seem capable of managing cyber security and the White House cannot get anyone to be Cyber Czar is it any wonder that the webmail accounts are compromised by the thousand?
 

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My good friend Victoria VanBuren recently posted a blog on Karl Bayer’s Blog about Dispute Resolution concerning my article in Atlantic Coast In-House Article about experience as a Special Master. You may find this excerpt of interest:

Before I got into law, I had a career as a computer programmer, received a master’s degree in computer science, and taught graduate courses in computer and information systems. When I started my law practice in 1978, I was already deeply involved in electronic discovery in its infancy.

Although fortunate enough to be armed with my own technical background, I have concluded that most lawyers do not really understand computer systems, the Internet, and e-mail, except to how to use them. As a result, many lawyers turn to discovery consultants to help them recognize what they should look for and where during discovery.

Likewise, judges confronted with arguments concerning electronic discovery and electronic evidence will turn to special masters with expertise in this area for help in assessing the dispute.

With more than 90 percent of the information presently created in electronic form, discovery of e-mail and electronic records has completely transformed litigation. The need for special masters has never been greater.
…
A special master in electronic discovery cases usually:

• conducts interviews of IT employees;
• reviews software;
• examines data;
• searches websites;
• holds hearings on various disputes;
• assists judges by reviewing motions for summary judgment; and
• has private meetings with judges.

You are welcome to read the entire article.
 

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