Technology, business and the law
科技、商业和法律

The big data dump
巨大的数据转储

Aug 28th 2008 | SAN FRANCISCO
From The Economist print edition

A deluge of electronic information may overwhelm American civil justice
排山倒海的电子信息也许会压倒美国的司法公正

DAWN BEYE’S teenage daughter suffers from anorexia nervosa and had to be treated in hospital at a cost of about $1,000 a day. Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey, the Beyes’ insurance company, covered one month of the bills but then balked, demanding evidence that the affliction was “biologically based” rather than psychological. So Ms Beye got together with parents of other anorexic and bulimic teenagers and sued. Horizon immediately asked to see practically everything the teenagers had said on their Facebook and MySpace profiles, in instant-messaging threads, text messages, e-mails, blog posts and whatever else the girls might have done online.
DAWN BEYE未成年的小女儿患有神经性厌食症，在医院接受治疗时每天的开销接近1000美元。位于新泽西的Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield是Beye的保险公司，在给付了一个月的医疗费用后突然中止了保险责任，并且要求Beye举证说明病痛具有”生物学基础”而不是心理学问题。于是Beye女士联合了其他厌食症和食欲过剩症患儿的家长进行起诉。保险公司则要求审阅这些女孩全部的在线叙述记录，包括在Facebook和 MySpace上的简介，即时信息记录，收集短信，电子邮件以及博克。

The Beyes’ lawyer, David Mazie at Mazie, Slater, Katz & Freeman, objected on the grounds that Horizon’s demands violated the girls’ privacy. He lost. So hard disks and web pages are being scoured in order for the case to proceed. Gathering and then sifting through all the electronic information that a few teenage girls have generated is excessive and daunting, says Mr Mazie.
Beye的律师Mazie则以保险公司的要求侵犯了客户隐私为理由提出了反对，但是没有成功。于是根据案件进程，硬盘以及相关网页都被详细搜索。通过收集和详审，Mazie律师表示由这几个小女孩所引发的相关电子信息多得令人畏惧。

And yet almost all information today is electronic, and there is ever more of it. “Things that we would never have put in writing are now in electronic form,” says Rebecca Love Kourlis, formerly a justice on Colorado’s Supreme Court and now the director of an institute at the University of Denver dedicated to rescuing America’s civil-justice system.
目前几乎所有的信息都已经电子化，而且还有日益增多的趋势。科罗拉多最高法院前法官Rebecca Love Kourlis表示”那些我们从来没有想过写下来的东西现在都有了电子版”，她现在是丹佛大学某学院院长，致力于拯救美国民事司法体系的工作。

This system, she says, was already a “sick patient”-with crowded dockets and understaffed courts-but electronic discovery now threatens a lethal “spike in fever”. She has seen ordinary landlord-tenant disputes take three years, and divorce cases that might have been merely bitter, but are now digital wars of attrition. She sees cases that are settled only because one party cannot afford the costs of e-discovery: whereas in the past 5% of cases went to trial, now only 2% do. She knows plaintiffs who cannot afford to sue at all, for fear of the e-discovery costs.
她表示该体系已经因为案子太多、人手太少而已经变得”病入膏肓”了，但是电子探索却预示着致命一击。她目睹了太多的普通普通房屋租赁官司却耗费了3年时间，离婚案子让人苦不堪言，现在都演变成了数码消耗战。不少案件的了结仅仅是因为一方无法负担电子搜索的费用，所以以前5%的案子会上法庭，现在就只有 2%了；很多的原告因为惧怕高昂的电子搜索费用而选择了根本就不起诉。

For large companies, these costs now run into many millions. Patrick Oot, a lawyer for Verizon, an American telecoms giant that gets sued a lot, says that at the beginning of this decade e-discovery presented “a one-big-case, once-a-year problem”. In most cases information was still on paper, and its volume thus limited. In the rare event that electronic evidence was requested, 100 gigabytes (GB) was considered a large amount. Today, says Mr Oot, almost every case involves e-discovery and spits out “terabytes” of information-the equivalent of millions of pages. In an ordinary case, 200 lawyers can easily review electronic documents for four months, at a cost of millions of dollars, he says.
对大公司来说，该费用现今已经发展到了数百万。Patrick Oot是美国电信巨头Verizon的律师，在他的公司被起诉后他表示，在数码搜索这十年历史的初期，表现出来的是”一年一个大案子的问题”。过去大多数的案子中，信息还是记载在纸介质上，容量非常有限；很少的情况下需要提供电子证据，100G被认为是一个巨大的量。现在几乎每一个案子都需要电子搜索，而且产生了数千G的信息，这需要上百万张纸介质才可以记录下来。一个普通的案子中，200个律师用4个月的时间才可以完成电子文件的审阅，而费用则高达数百万美元。

This has led to a new boom industry of specialised e-discovery service providers which merrily charge $125-600 an hour. George Socha, a consultant, estimates that their annual revenues have grown from $40m in 1999 to about $2 billion in 2006 and may hit $4 billion next year.
这引领了一个新兴繁荣产业的诞生-专业的电子搜索服务供应商，收费差不多是每小时125-600美元不等。George Socha 估计他们的咨询收入从1999年的4000万美元增加到2006的20亿美元，并且有望在明年达到40亿美元。

The process of e-discovery starts when the adversaries in a lawsuit demand to see all sorts of information in their search for relevant nuggets. Each side then has to identify all the laptops, smart-phones, memory sticks, network servers and back-up tapes that might store data created by the people in question. It probably also has to request logs from online-service providers, if those people used web-mail or similar services. The results then have to be indexed and reviewed by humans. This usually falls to the junior staff at law firms, some of whom are so fed up with the drudgery that they have quit the profession altogether.
诉讼案件中的抗辩方需要在所有种类的信息中搜寻相关证据，于是电子搜索的进程便开始了。控辩双方必须甄别所有的笔记本电脑、智能手机、记忆棒、网络服务器以及备份磁带，在所有信息中寻找受质疑人所留下的数据；如果这些人使用了网络邮箱或者类似的服务，也许还需要网络服务商提供相关日志；其结果会被排序并且人工审阅。这些工作通常由律所中的初级员工完成，很多人实在受够了这种简单重复劳动，于是选择了其他的职业。

For firms that find themselves in court a lot, it makes increasing sense to bring this entire process in-house, rather than farming it out. Verizon, for instance, has been using outside firms such as Kroll, but found them “really expensive”, says Mr Oot. So Verizon has established a dedicated internal e-discovery group which Mr Oot oversees and which will gradually take over all e-discovery using its own software and staff. Mr Oot reckons this will save Verizon $11m in costs over three years.
对于经常要上庭的公司来说，他们越来越觉得应该自己完成这项工作，而不是外包出去。Verizon 的 Oot 表示雇佣类似于Kroll这样的外部公司实在是太昂贵了；于是他建立了直接隶属于自己的内部电子搜索团队，它将使用自己的软