1.3.07: Defunct high-tech law firm's records saved for posterity - a cause for worry?
By Richard Koman - January 3, 2007
When a law firm that handled tons of sensitive legal matters for Valley startups and VC firms and then goes belly up, what happens to all that information? News.com's Anne Broache notes that now-defunct Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison LLP notified clients that their digital files would be placed in a "closed archive" managed by the Library of Congress.
That didn't set well with Tom Fragala, CEO of Truston, a company that monitors for ID theft. He blogged that, "There wasn't much in (the letter) to make me feel good about the privacy implications. "My social security number, and that of all my former investors and officers is in those documents."
After Brobeck went belly up in 2003, a federal bankruptcy court last August went on to authorize creation of a "secure digital repository" for its abandoned records. The idea behind the project, its organizers, say, is to capture a moment in history. As a Web site devoted to the preservation project explains, "these digital records document one of the most extraordinary episodes in the history of capitalism, the explosion of internet technology companies in the 1990s."
David Kirsch, a University of Maryland professor, is overseeing the project. He says the fears are unfounded. Only a limited pool of scholars and archivists would be granted access to the archived documents at a single secure, monitored location, he says.
But EFF's David Sobel is uneasy.
"A law firm's clients don't expect that their sensitive files will be made available to third-parties in this way, so they should not be given the burden of protecting their interests," he said in an e-mail interview.
Deleting should not be the default behavior here, says Kirsch. Preservationists who can't track down an individual shouldn't have to destroy "their historic traces."
The Closed Archive allows the records to survive with confidentiality intact, their fate to be resolved at some later date.
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