Legal News

Circumventing evidence via Blackberry, but for how long?

By Richard Binder

Here's yet another episode in the ongoing saga of Public vs. Private in the Electronic Age:

San Bernardino County officials hired counsel John Hueston of Irell & Manella to investigate allegations of time-card fraud and other problems in the county assessor's office.  Hueston's report alleged that former assessor Bill Postmus and his aides used the office to run a political machine at taxpayer expense, but there was little information of value in the county's computer system. "Mr. Postmus and others utilized the Blackberry messenger process, where they could communicate and bypass the county servers," said the Hueston report, released last Tuesday.

San Bernardino County officials said they have no record of the instant messages sent by Postmus and his fellow executives via the Blackberry PIN system. But Vern Weitzman, a Silicon Valley technology expert whose company develops communication systems for large organizations, said it's likely the data could have been captured, provided the Blackberries were county-issue.

County attorneys will try to determine if such communication, because it is written in text form, would fall under the provisions of the California Public Records Act.

Click here for an analysis of this burgeoning issue.

Full post as published by Legal Pad | LA on May 18, 2009 (boomark / email).