Thank you Eliot Spitzer

Cheers could be heard from Wall Street when Eliot Spitzer fell from grace earlier this month after being exposed for his wrong doings and hypocrisy. Up until that point Wall Street had feared Spitzer, New York's 54th Governor, where he pushed for ethics and fair play within Wall Street. The financial world who have been fined heavily by Spitzer during the past decade for wrong doings have woken up to recognize that they have been funding his expensive wrong doing habits. Recent reports from my contacts on the East Coast have suggested it is now funding his therapy. On a serious note we (the archiving & compliance world) would like to thank Eliot Spitzer for his efforts for bringing to attention the importance of compliance with regulations and the law over the past decade. Notably, Spitzer supported the introduction of The US Patriot Act, brought in post the 9/11 attacks to aid law enforcement agencies to track down possible terrorist threats, as well as give powers to the US Treasury department to identify terrorist money laundering. It was this Act which helped the Feds to expose the ex-attorney general’s misdemeanors, after they were following some suspicious money transfers involving Spitzer’s bank account to 3rd party bank accounts. As ‘the 63rd Attorney General’ he was involved in exposing white collar crime, financial wrong doings and fining financial organizations heavily to the tune of over $1.5 billion dollars during his reign. These investigations conducted by the Attorney General’s team resulted in organizations implementing better compliance and record keeping procedures, including the implementations of forensic grade email archiving solutions, like Cryoserver, to aid compliance with the Patriot Act and Sarbanes-Oxley Act, to name a few… Eliot Spitzer, we look forward to reading your memoirs of your time as Attorney General and Governor, I am sure it will be an exciting read.

Email Scandals

Since returning from a well earned vacation, I have been welcomed back with yet more articles about deliberate data loss and other shocking email scandals in the press. Here are some of the highlights. The first story is headlined “Whitehouse "lost" email scandal gains traction”. The article refers to the data loss around the time the White House moved from one email system to another. And yet Federal Law dictates documents including email are handed over to the National Archives when relating to the Presidents official business, and losing a years worth of emails is not acceptable. Now the White House is facing a hefty $15 million dollar discovery project to find the lost data ! If only they had read / taken a leaf out of the experiences from one of our clients. Tayside Fire Brigade moved from one mail system to another and during the entire process they did not lose an email, as both mail systems were being seamlessly archived by Cryoserver, whilst the users were being migrated to the new mail system. Then there are the scandals happening in the UK, one titled “Ken aide quits after sexy emails fiasco". This article is about the Race adviser (Lee Jasper) to London Mayor (Ken Livingstone) where emails containing: “I want to honey glase (sic) you" and "I love you falling out of a bikini" being sent to a woman who Jasper had helped to receive over £100,000 in government grants. Jasper is currently involved in answering questions in the controversial £3.8million London Assembly investigations, undoubtedly emails will be investigated during this process. Jasper has subsequently been suspended from duties during the investigations by the Police and London Assembly. I suspect Jasper will resign, as in my next case in Houston, Texas where a soon to be retired top district attorney ( Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal ) has been disgraced in the article titled "E-mail scandal sinks Texas prosecutor". Rosenthal was exposed for misconduct with the destruction of thousands emails, incompetence for the email discussions he was having with a female employee along with drinking on the job. And these organisations / people are supposedly in power setting an example to the rest of us. I look forward to my next blog to discuss the rise and fall of Elliot Spitzer, who has been classified as a hypocrite.