EU interior ministers have gone to the mats to protect you from terrorists. They’ve declared war on Europe’s parliament.

It seems the parliament has a few qualms about forcing ISP’s to archive your email for later snooping… Some nonsense about civil liberties. Interior ministers are untroubled by the privacy silliness. They’re simply hung-up on whether they should force you to archive mail six months, twelve months or longer.

Think the EU is getting a bit too big for its britches? Actually, it’s a bit late to the party. Several EU members already have a hodgepodge of tougher statutes on the books. For example, Italy requires Internet cafes to run monitoring software, along with archiving customer passports.

But the US leads ‘em all.

In The Impact of Regulations on Email Archiving Requirements, Oesterman Research concludes that nearly everyone who powers up an email server is required to archive mail to satisfy some government agency.

  • Finance types answer to the Securities and Exchange Commission, New York Stock Exchange, National Association of Security Dealers (SEC/NYSE/NASD), etc.
  • Hospitals, insurance companies, data processing centers and assorted medicos face the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
  • Government agencies must deal with their own regs, in addition to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

As if that’s not enough to make you shut down your mailserver, check out Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and the mountain of state requirements (like the Child Protection acts of Michigan and Utah). So far, courts have been doling out non-compliance judgements at US$10,000 and up, up, up.

Canadians are similarly strapped down.

Those whose baby-kissers have thus far missed the bandwagon have no room for smugness. Every message they send to the outside world is dutifully stored for later retrieval by somebody somewhere.

Your archiving options mirror those for spam and virus filtering. You can archive email at the network border, the mail server, the desktop, or you can outsource it. Just make sure that whatever option you choose meets the regulations for your industry, today and tomorrow.

Now that government has discovered email, your job’s only going to get tougher. And until this moment, you thought you were a law-abiding citizen. Silly you.