The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/116777
Philip Weldon is a Senior Litigation Support Specialist for Fox Rothschild, LLP. He has directed the configuration of trial war rooms all over the country, where he often sat "hot seat." He has been active in the legal technology profession since 2001. Phil can be contacted via Twitter @PhilWeldon or by email at pweldon@foxrothschild.com. "I pledge allegiance to the United States of convenience," Bruce Schneier recently opined for "Wired Magazine" in the article "When It Comes to Security, We're Back to Feudalism." On discussing data management and making it easily accessible, I believe he was making a valid point. Advances in electronics have progressed so quickly that where time-tested defense practices were once in place to protect our data, now convenience rules. Firms today are dealing with exponentially growing databases and a staggering amount of ways to open, view and review that data. You can work from home, from your phone, from your tablet in a coffee shop or from a public computer in a café. But has the security of our data grown in parallel with our access to it? On June 13, 1971, "The New York Times" began publishing a series of articles based on leaked documents classified as "top secret" by the federal government. Daniel Ellsberg, later dubbed "the most dangerous man in America" by Henry Kissinger, had spent months smuggling documents out of his office. A few hundred pages a day in a briefcase were later copied page-by-page at home. He was only able to subvert the traditional physical security of the office because he was an employee. Once home, he still had to painstakingly copy the data. This was a tedious process, to say the least. The famously dubbed "Pentagon Papers" would go on to expose the deliberate expansion of bombing in Cambodia and military raids in North Vietnam. Street protests, riots and lawsuits followed. Emotions over the war aside, today Ellsberg's pirated data could have just as easily fit on a chip the size of a fingernail purchased at any local convenience store. Peer to Peer 67