11 ms·

> Is there any reasonable term that's not likely to eventually end un in some personal, irrelevant conversation? "Anti-trust", I'll even give you " competition

> Is there any reasonable term that's not likely to eventually end un in some personal, irrelevant conversation? "Anti-trust", I'll even give you " competition", but "big picture" seems overly broad

laumars 6y ago
The following seems perfectly plausible: > > who fancies coming to the pub tonight > I need to be home soon. My so won his school competition today so want to take him out for ice cream I’ve got a doctors appointment, sorry
buran77 6y ago
"Competition" would probably show up in half of the HR related emails. So would any generic word. You're left with the "written confessions", the ultra-specifics if you will. Imagine if you would search an assassin's phone only for evidence that contains the word "assassinate" because "eliminate" may refer to medical issues. I'm not talking hypothetically here, I've actually seen such investigation from both sides of the fence. They're not a new thing. Between common sense, known investigative techniques, and legal teams providing coaching an executive has everything they need to avoid using very explicit wording. They use abbreviations, keywords, vague language, because they know some were caught with their pants down admitting in writing some very specific stuff. Whatever you search for they will comply and provide a lot of material, but none of the good one. After a while somehow they start producing a lot of irrelevant material that contains this. Eventually they will make this exact move where they use the previously provided stuff as evidence that the investigation is too broad. In the meantime that data retention policy set for a laughably short interval kicks in for both the data and the backups. Some companies delete emails, messenger logs, etc. officially under the guise of "cost savings for storage". Anything an employee wants to keep has to be exported locally to some workstation. So regular employees try to manage like this, while senior management or executives get to keep the important data while maintaining plausible deniability. After all you can't search every workstation and the person can't be expected to remember where every file they ever used was.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  you can't search every workstation I've seen a case where every employee who touched a certain project had to turn over their workstation's hard drive (just the drive) to a forensic company who would document and remove anything related to that project. They ended up failing to delete a bunch of stuff anyway.
  - buran77 6y ago
    This would happen in internal investigations (the worst kind, it means you can;t rely on the company's protection), and ones where there's already a warrant for the entire drive, meaning there's already strong evidence to justify this. You'll never see someone handing over the drive just for discovery. But if they have to provide something, executives are safe almost by default. Companies explicitly use data retention policies as an official means of destroying evidence on centralized systems (on the servers), and they're not shy when discussing this openly (just not in writing). Executives will not be happy about losing their email history so they store a copy elsewhere, on another workstation whose existence is simply not a matter of common knowledge, many times it's associated with a management assistant. Or they will use aliases [0] and investigators will never know there's anything relevant there. When cooperating with the authorities only the official device used by that person is presented, the one in the asset management. You can't ask for something unless you know and can prove it exists. These investigations could eventually cost a company billions so trust me, they invest billions worth in effort to make sure evidence stays buried. [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-tillerson-climatechange-idUSKBN16L06J https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-tillerson-climatechan...

> Is there any reasonable term that's not likely to eventually end un in some personal, irrelevant conversation? "Anti-trust", I'll even give you " competition", but "big picture" seems overly broad

laumars 6y ago

The following seems perfectly plausible: > > who fancies coming to the pub tonight > I need to be home soon. My so won his school competition today so want to take him out for ice cream I’ve got a doctors appointment, sorry

buran77 6y ago

"Competition" would probably show up in half of the HR related emails. So would any generic word. You're left with the "written confessions", the ultra-specifics if you will. Imagine if you would search an assassin's phone only for evidence that contains the word "assassinate" because "eliminate" may refer to medical issues. I'm not talking hypothetically here, I've actually seen such investigation from both sides of the fence. They're not a new thing. Between common sense, known investigative techniques, and legal teams providing coaching an executive has everything they need to avoid using very explicit wording. They use abbreviations, keywords, vague language, because they know some were caught with their pants down admitting in writing some very specific stuff. Whatever you search for they will comply and provide a lot of material, but none of the good one. After a while somehow they start producing a lot of irrelevant material that contains this. Eventually they will make this exact move where they use the previously provided stuff as evidence that the investigation is too broad. In the meantime that data retention policy set for a laughably short interval kicks in for both the data and the backups. Some companies delete emails, messenger logs, etc. officially under the guise of "cost savings for storage". Anything an employee wants to keep has to be exported locally to some workstation. So regular employees try to manage like this, while senior management or executives get to keep the important data while maintaining plausible deniability. After all you can't search every workstation and the person can't be expected to remember where every file they ever used was.

nitrogen 6y ago
you can't search every workstation I've seen a case where every employee who touched a certain project had to turn over their workstation's hard drive (just the drive) to a forensic company who would document and remove anything related to that project. They ended up failing to delete a bunch of stuff anyway.
- buran77 6y ago
  This would happen in internal investigations (the worst kind, it means you can;t rely on the company's protection), and ones where there's already a warrant for the entire drive, meaning there's already strong evidence to justify this. You'll never see someone handing over the drive just for discovery. But if they have to provide something, executives are safe almost by default. Companies explicitly use data retention policies as an official means of destroying evidence on centralized systems (on the servers), and they're not shy when discussing this openly (just not in writing). Executives will not be happy about losing their email history so they store a copy elsewhere, on another workstation whose existence is simply not a matter of common knowledge, many times it's associated with a management assistant. Or they will use aliases [0] and investigators will never know there's anything relevant there. When cooperating with the authorities only the official device used by that person is presented, the one in the asset management. You can't ask for something unless you know and can prove it exists. These investigations could eventually cost a company billions so trust me, they invest billions worth in effort to make sure evidence stays buried. [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-tillerson-climatechange-idUSKBN16L06J https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-tillerson-climatechan...