Tampa Attorney on Text and Email Messages at Work

Up until this week a Florida Attorney would tell you that your employer can probably read your emails and text messages on company provided devices. That may change based on a recent development in an appeals court's decision. In that case, the court found your boss shouldn't read your text or e-mail messages.

Text messages were obtained from a wireless carrier and reviewed by an employer without the employee's permission. The federal appeals court sharply limited the ability of employers to obtain e-mails and text messages sent by employees on company accounts.

A Tampa Internet lawyer observes that Access to e-mail could be barred if the employer contracts out its e-mail service rather than maintaining an internal server to handle it.

One report found that about 28% of Microsoft Outlook users have their e-mail handled by an outside vendor, according to research firm Radicati Group. The ruling also gave government workers Fourth 4th Amendment protection against searches of text and e-mail communications by their bosses.

The privacy case was a unanimous ruling and the first federal appellate decision to provide 4th Amendment protection to electronic messages. Arguably, police may now need to obtain a warrant before they could access someone's e-mail or text messages.

The court found that the wireless service provider violated the federal Stored Communications Act. That law prohibits providers from providing the contents of any communication that is maintained on the service without a search warrant.

Employees had an expectation of privacy that was protected by the Constitution. Feel free to contact Board Certified Trial Lawyer, W.F. ''Casey'' Ebsary Jr. Toll Free at 1-877-793-9290 to discuss how this may affect you.

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Sex Offender Registry Hacked

One of the rules of computer coding is to check your input. Especially when your input comes from users. The Oklahoma Department of Corrections missed that day in computer class. DOC trusted anonymous user input on their public-facing Sex Offender Registry website and they blindly executed it and displayed whatever came back.

The result of this bad coding had some rather serious consequences: the names, addresses, and social security numbers of tens of thousands of Oklahoma residents were made available to the general public for a period of at least three years.

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eDiscovery Tampa - 2008 Super Lawyer

Tampa eDiscovery Attorney, W.F. Casey Ebsary Jr., was selected as a Super Lawyer for the second time. That adds to his credentials - Board Certified by the Florida Bar and his AV rating by Martindale Hubbell. The Super Lawyer selection process allows a credible, comprehensive and diverse listing of outstanding attorneys that can be used as a resource to assist in the search for legal counsel.

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RIAA Refuses to Pay Defense Costs Fees

The RIAA is only willing to pay one tenth of what a victorious victim of a malicious RIAA prosecution is seeking. The RIAA called the $298,995 figure "excessive" and said that it should be drastically slashed to something along the lines of $30,000. The defendant argued "As the court has previously found, the proceedings were complicated, prolonged, and made more expensive by the plaintiffs' unreasonable tactics throughout the case."

The RIAA is accused of racketeering, fraud, deceptive business practices, and a host of underhanded tactics such as seeking to directly contact the defendant's then-eight-year-old daughter under false pretenses. The trial judge has previusly ruled: "[w]hatever plaintiffs' reasons for the manner in which they have prosecuted this case, it does not appear to be justified as a reasonable exploration of the boundaries of copyright law." Source: ARS Tecnica

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eDiscovery Florida Mobile Devices

Mobile devices, cell phones and Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) are now an everyday part of how organizations do business. The devices transmit and receive data, log activity, and these mobile offices are as useful in discovery as traditional desktops and laptops.

The information that can be gathered from mobile devices can be forensically retrieved. Forensic data includes corporate e-mail, personal e-mail, Short Message Service (SMS) text messages, personal notes, calendar entries, photographs, address books, and inbound and outbound call logs. When placed into a timeline of events, this type of information can be invaluable to prove certain facts for a case. An expert can preserve the chain of custody and this data can be useful in litigation.

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eDiscovery Florida - First Birthday for New Federal Rules of Civil Procedure

eDiscovery - For Florida and the Federal Courts, this marks the first anniversary of an overhaul of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), which mandated the quick and accurate recovery of electronically stored information. Soon e-discovery will explode in the wake of the the subprime mortgage crisis.

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Feds Claim No Privacy in Emails

On October 8, 2007, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit granted the USA's request for a full-panel hearing in US v. Warshak. The case centers on the right of privacy for stored electronic communications. Can the Government merely subpoena mail and skip judicial review of a search warrant? The case presents the Government's position on Constitutional email and electronic privacy - that there isn't any.

Get your encryption keys ready for this one.

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Sanctions and eDiscovery

The ABA has recommended that processes and procedures be put in place to avoid sanctions for violation of Discovery rules and the harsh sanctions for violation thereof.

Use Meta-Tagging -- Meta-tagging enables a user to tag files as being an active part of an investigation. This produces a document set where parties can isolate matching files into a working result set. You must have the ability to review files in their native format without destroying file content integrity. An accurate list of files ensures that no document outside the confines of the E-Discovery scope are exposed and thus submitted as evidence. Frozen Redacted PDF files are then used for case evidence. Redacted PDFs are protected against spoilage.

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