Re: DISCUSSION: archiving of NOMCOM information

[Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Fri, Mar 29, 2002 at 04:38:48PM -0800, Matt Holdrege wrote:
> Fine. I was advocating common sense in this thread and I get back amateur 
> legal advice. Never mind. Perhaps since this thread has steered away from 
> common sense, it should be killed and left up to the real lawyers.

We definitely need to get some legal advice/review here.  I'm not sure
how to accomplish this, since this is going to require allocating real
money.

Before we get the lawyers, though, we need to be clear on exactly what
are our goals surrounding this whole area.  I've listed two:

1)  Preservation of information in case the nomcom needs to be
activated to deal with a mid-term vacancy.

2)  Avoid (or at least make more difficult) confidential information
from being forcibly made public via someone sueing a nomcom member who
can't afford the legal fees to protect themselves from turning over
that information during a discovery process.

If these are the goals, then there are a couple of things which fall
out of this.  

(1) The current prolicy of advising nomcom members to destroy their
own personal copies may not be sufficient, since if they decide to
disregard the advice, it is not necessarily the nomcom member who
suffers --- after all, they could simply roll over and voluntarily
turn over all of the data to the lawyers on the mere threat of being
thrown into jail --- but rather, it is entire process's promise of
confidentiality of input from the community which is at risk.  Hence,
it may make sense to REQUIRE that all local copies be destroyed except
for the archival copy which is encrypted and whose key is then
secret-shared.

(2) There may be other ways of achieving this.  For example, if we
have legal insurance to pay whatever legal fees are necessary to
defend the nomcom members decision to keep said information
confidentiality and not turn it over to the legal system upon receipt
of a supeana.  On the other hand, it may be that it is cheaper to only
have to pay legal insurance for one entity, and have that entity be
the only holder of the archive.  

Once we have agreed on the goals, then we can ask a lawyer for some
advice about better ways that we can achieve the goals.  But for the
most part, we have to decide on the goals before we set the lawyers on
the problem....

						- Ted