E-Discovery and Fact Checking: A Primer for Litigators and ID Search

*Listen carefully, I will only say it once or million satirical times: Coder fired after 6 years for automating his job Boing Boing 

News from the Profession. Underwater Datacenters Might Make for Some Tricky Auditor Walkthroughs (Megan Lewczyk, Going Concern) 

THE VALEANT MELTDOWN AND WALL STREET’S MAJOR DRUG PROBLEM Vanity Fair. Richard Smith: “Cameo appearances by John Hempton of Bronte Capital fame and Roddy Boyd.” The hedge-fund manager John Hempton, another outspoken Valeant skeptic who had sparred with Ackman in the past from his home in Bronte Beach, Australia, sent Ackman a taunting e-mail. He wrote, “I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.” It was “Philidor.”

 A 2014 email sent by Mossack Fonseca's New Zealand representative lays out exactly how the company uses foreign trusts in this country.

Panama Papers: Mossack Fonseca email shows how it used foreign trusts in NZ: June 2016 AD


*Nota Bene: Poynter's News University and the American Press Institute launch an online course on accountability and fact-czeching (sic) journalism. We're proud to say it's the most comprehensive free e-learning course we've seen on this subject. Try it out and let us know what you think. You can access the course through NewsU or API

That fact-checking chyron
The Twittersphere went bananas over CNN's use of a two-word fact check in the lower third of a video interview with U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump. But was it a big deal?

Ukrainian officials said a Frenchman detained last month with a large cache of arms was planning the attack, the BBC reports. He was identified by French media as 25-year-old Gregoire Moutaux, and allegedly had amassed guns, detonators and 125 kilograms of explosives

Google has banned a Chrome extension called "Coincidence Detector," which automatically identified Jewish people online by placing a set of three parentheses around their names wherever they appeared on a webpage. The brackets, known as (((echoes))), are an anti-Semitic punctuation-based code that has been used increasingly online by the alt-right internet community to mark people for abuse, as reported recently by Mic.   Antisemitic-chrome-extension-highlighted-jews-for-attack-online

E-Discovery: A Primer for Litigators

I’ve been to a number of e-discovery CLEs where they say something like: “The iterative process of phased custodian production encourages efficiency and cooperation between counsel.” Half the room is frantically writing that down so they can go home and Google it and the other half already knows that and they’re just there to network. So, if you are in the half that would have written that down, if you would like to improve your knowledge of e-discovery, if you are afraid of ethics opinions regarding e-discovery and have been trying to avoid it, this article is for you E-Discovery: A Primer for Litigators

There are a couple of great guidelines for beginners of e-discovery. First, you’ll want to familiarize yourself with some of the basic concepts. Judges use a document called “Managing Discovery of Electronic Information: A Pocket Guide for Judges,” co-authored by Barbara Rothstein, Ronald Hedges, and Elizabeth Wiggins

In an age of massive disinformation campaigns, social media echo chambers and fact-challenged political candidates, high-quality fact-checking is indispensable.
More than 100 fact-checkers and academics from 41 countries will meet in Buenos Aires this week to discuss the growth of the fact-checking movement worldwide and its many challenges. The conference, on June 9 and 10, is a project of the International Fact-Checking Network at Poynter... Fact-checkers on television in Spain and Australia are producing entertaining and recognizable formats that reach wide audiences.
Fact-checkers from 41 countries meet in Buenos Aires this week

USNA to graduate first students with Cyber Operations major

The U.S. Naval Academy is graduating its first students with majors in cyber operations. The academy’s commissioning ceremony takes place Friday. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter will give the graduation speech. The school has been working for several years to create a top-notch learning environment for cybersecurity as the field has grown in importance to national security. In 2011, the academy changed its core curriculum to add two cybersecurity courses for all students.

 

Now That You Know What’s What, How to Meet and Confer
The Northern District of California has a terrific set of guidelines for walking through e-discovery disputes on their page here

Kelly Twigger from ESI Attorneys has developed an online legal research tool that is something like the Westlaw for e-discovery called EDiscovery Assistant. It has links to case law that you can search by category and filter by jurisdiction. So, with a few clicks, you can review all of the cases in your district that address the issue of proportionality or sanctions. There are links to rules, guides, checklists, and everything else you need to research and engage in best practices.

Via Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project – “The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a non-profit network of investigative journalism centers in Europe and Eurasia, has launched a new data platform to enable journalists and researchers to sift more than 2 million documents and use the findings in their investigations. People using the new data platform, called ID Search, will be able to set up email alerts notifying them when new results appear for their searches or for persons tracked on official watchlists. They can also create their own private watchlists. Using the new tool, journalists and researchers will be able to access data including gazettes of commerce, company records, leaks, court cases and more. One of the most comprehensive open source lists of Politically Exposed Persons is also at users’ disposal. Starting today, most sources on ID Search will be updated every 24 hours. Documents and databases are also cross-referenced with watchlists and international sanctions lists so that persons of interest involved in organized crime or corruption can be identified. In the past few weeks, OCCRP has added documents from five additional offshore jurisdictions, reflecting growing public awareness of the shadowy structures that drive the criminal economy in the wake of the Panama Papers investigation. The new tool is part of OCCRP’s Investigative Dashboard (ID), a ground-breaking platform bringing together data search, visualizations and researcher expertise. It is currently used by more than 4,400 journalists including those from OCCRP’s 24 partner centers. Users can access the search engine at https://data.occrp.org.”

• Note – please see also Investigative Dashboard Search lets you search across data and documents from previous investigations, official sources, and scraped databases

How will voice recognition technology change radio?

"Search of old computer files allowed by U.S. appeals court": Jonathan Stempel of Reuters has this report.
Courthouse News Service reports that "En Banc Second Circuit Endorses Long-Term Data Retention by Feds."
And at WSJ.com's "Law Blog," Joe Palazzolo has a post titled "Hard Drives Seized Years Ago Can Be Searched, Court Says."
You can access today's en banc ruling of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit at this link

This is the lawyer standing between hackers and prison, and yes, he is a Deadhead. [Buzzfeed]

Eric Lipton & Julie Creswell, Panama Papers Reveal How Wealthy Americans Hid Millions Overseas
The article opens with an explanation of the relationship between a wealthy U.S. person and the Panama law firm, Mossack Fonseca, at the center of the Panama Papers phenomenon.

Thus began a relationship that would last at least through 2015 as Mossack Fonseca managed eight shell companies and a foundation on the family’s behalf, moving at least $134 million through seven banks in six countries — little of which could be traced directly to Mr. Ponsoldt or his children. 

The article has a link to a graphic page titled How Mossack Fonseca Helped Clients Skirt Or Break U.S. Tax Laws With Offshore Accounts How Mossack Fonseca Helped Clients Skirt Or Break U.S. Tax Laws With Offshore Accounts authored by Guilbert Gates.  This page is highly recommended.

The Times’s examination of the files found that Mossack Fonseca also had at least 2,400 United States-based clients over the past decade, and set up at least 2,800 companies on their behalf in the British Virgin Islands, Panama, the Seychelles and other jurisdictions that specialize in helping hide wealth. 

New York Times, “There are several lessons to be learned from a data breach in which hackers gained access to Mark Zuckerberg’s social media accounts, but chief among them is probably this: Quit using the same password for multiple websites.”

"Hiri is the latest startup trying to fix email. Specifically, the Dublin-based company is targeting workplace email with an array of features that aim to nudge users to change their email behaviour for the better. For it isn’t email that is necessarily broken but the way we all use and abuse it." (TechCrunch) It starts with the premise "that thoughtless and un-targeted emails fill a very high percentage of your work email inbox, Hiri’s headline feature is the ability for recipients to rate each email they receive, which serves as the basis for your own email score or email analytics."

Former NSW Labor minister Eddie Obeid targeted a “brand new” senior executive of a state agency administering Sydney’s harbour precincts — just days into his job — to secretly and crimin­ally push his business interests,  a jury has heard. Opening the first day in the trial against Mr Obeid in NSW Supreme Court, Sydney, yesterday, crown prosecutor Peter Neil SC said the former politician had ­abused his position to commit misconduct and should face “criminal punishment”. Mr Obeid, who sat looking towards the ground for much of yesterday’s hearing, told the court he was “not guilty”. An earlier trial began in February but was aborted after new evidence emerged Obeid  ... Eddie Obeid's silk urges jury to keep an 'open mind'

Carol Kando-Pineda – Counsel, FTC’s Division of Consumer & Business Education: …we have developed resources to address…needs for: people with challenges reading English, older patrons, Spanish-speakers, identity theft victims, new arrivals, and families looking to start a conversation with kids about digital literacy and living life online. Coming soon are tips and tools to address the particular consumer challenges military families face. We’ve gathered these resources in one convenient spot, FTC.gov/Libraries…”

In the last five years, Ahmed Mansoor, a human rights activist in the United Arab Emirates, has been jailed and fired from his job, along with having his passport confiscated, his car stolen, his email hacked, his location tracked and his bank account robbed of $140,000. He has also been beaten, twice, in the same week. Mr. Mansoor’s experience has become a cautionary tale for dissidents, journalists and human rights activists.
In June 2016 the State Department is issuing the Country Reports on Terrorism, which describes the counterterrorism landscape during the last calendar year and fulfills an important congressional mandate. The report allows us to regularly assess our effectiveness and make informed assessments about policies and priorities and where to place resources.



You are advised to change your social media passwords following a series of reports about data leaks, including email addresses and passwords from social networking sites Reddit, Tumblr and Myspace.

Reddit has advised it is enforcing the reset of 100,000 user accounts following LinkedIn’s data breach announcement where more than 117,000 email addresses and passwords were stolen. Reddit has also reported an increase in its own user accounts being accessed illegally by malicious individuals and spam-based third parties. You are advised to change your password and check your activity page to identify any suspicious account activity.

Reddit advises that its security measures have not been compromised, however it has taken action due to the risk of account takeover by malicious individuals using password information from other breaches. The social media’s blog cites weak password choice and reusing the same account credentials for different sites as contributing to this risk.

Tumblr has advised that more than 65 million passwords were recently stolen. Tumblr sent a password reset request to affected customers in early May 2016. You are advised to change your password as a precaution.

You should be aware that the passwords are protected, however the stolen information also includes email addresses. This allows malicious individuals to send phishing emails that look like they come from Tumblr and may contain specific personal information about you to make these emails appear legitimate. You are advised to be cautious when clicking links in emails from Tumblr. Visit Tumblr’s Account Security page to learn more about protecting your account.
The login details of more than 360 million Myspace accounts have reportedly been leaked on the web. Myspace has advised that email addresses, usernames and passwords for the affected Myspace accounts created prior to June 11, 2013 on the old Myspace platform are at risk. Myspace has invalidated all user passwords for the affected accounts. You are advised to change your password even if you have not accessed your account recently. 


“Alcoa of Australia” started using Victor Dahdaleh’s services, the court claim says, “at the request of Members of the Royal Family of Bahrain.”
Panama Papers: British-Canadian billionaire mysterious middleman in ‘corruption scheme’

Oil man Malcolm Bendall’s company named in Panama Papers

A Trump presidency will threaten the rule of law, according to legal scholars. [New York Times]

Most trading in bitcoin takes place in China: Huobi and OKCoin, two Chinese exchanges, are thought to account for more than 90% of transactions. The currency seems to have become an outlet for Chinese savers frustrated with their limited investment options and searching for high-yielding assets. The Chinese authorities are worried enough to have banned banks from dealing in bitcoin, but individuals are still free to speculate and have been doing so with gusto.

That is from The Economist.  It is consistent with my view that Bitcoin is a largely mature technology, used mostly for evading Chinese capital controls.

On uber satirical E-Discovery note, "New Uber Update Allows Users To File Lawsuit Against Company Directly In App”

* via The Onion