Unless you’ve been living in an eggnog-induced haze for the last three weeks, you’ve probably heard something about the Sony data hack. The company was the victim of a cyber attack and large amounts of corporate and personal data was stolen, likely in “retaliation” for what is surely a terrible Seth Rogen movie, “The Interview,” about a plot to assassinate North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un (now the only Kim Jong-un in North Korea).
Since the November 24 data breach, the public has been treated to a back stage look at working at Sony. The personality issues, the corporate culture, the wheeling and dealing. There’s also been a glut of truly personal information revealed, data completely irrelevant to Sony business. And that’s teaching everyone a lesson document reviewers have known for a long time.
Brian Barrett at Gizmodo, correctly, brings attention to the most sympathetic victims of the attack — the average working Joes that have had their lives laid bare.
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But the real reason the Sony hack should keep you up at night isn’t because some marketing exec’s presentation made you giggle. It isn’t because the hackers wanted to kill a Seth Rogen movie. The scariest part of what happened is the collateral damage, the Sony civilians whose entire digital lives have been exposed to the world.
The most painful stuff in the Sony cache is a doctor shopping for Ritalin. It’s an email about trying to get pregnant. It’s shit-talking coworkers behind their backs, and people’s credit card log-ins. It’s literally thousands of Social Security numbers laid bare. It’s even the harmless, mundane, trivial stuff that makes up any day’s email load that suddenly feels ugly and raw out in the open, a digital Babadook brought to life by a scorched earth cyberattack.
This reality, that anything written — particularly from a corporate email account — may one day be read by someone outside of the addressees, is a cornerstone of modern litigation. Everyone that has spent any time reviewing documents in the last 10 years will gladly tell you their own war story of the most ridiculous or embarrassing email chain they’ve had to read.
I know I’ve seen a lot in my years as a reviewer. The affairs, off-color jokes, the child care issues. All documented in corporate emails I got paid to read. Perhaps I took a moment’s voyeuristic pleasure in reading some of the juicer tidbits, but it also instilled a deep knowledge that nothing written is truly private. Though it is now pretty standard to use search terms or other technology tools to remove from the review population the most irrelevant documents, there are still a lot of non-responsive documents pulled into every review. And even when there’s nothing untoward in the documents, there is still something creepy about “getting to know” a custodian by reviewing their documents. Forget the weirdness involved when an email sender or custodian is an acquaintance you happen to know in real life, an experience that has happened to me on more than one occasion.
In this way the Sony leak hasn’t revealed something new about privacy, but has taken it to a new level. In this case it isn’t just a dingy room of 100 underemployed attorneys leering over your family discord just because your in-laws happen to share a last name with the plaintiffs, but rather the whole of the internet that has access to this information. But fundamentally, the lesson (summed up by Barrett) is the same.
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If there’s any positive outcome from all of this, it’s the brute-force reminder that we’re all vulnerable in ways we don’t even realize. The best we can do—the deeply imperfect solution we’re left with—is to be aware of what we say at all times. To assume no private moments, at least not on any screen.
Perhaps this is an unpleasant or even scary realization, but it’s the world we all now live in. As any document reviewer could have told you all along.
The Sony Hacks Are Goddamn Terrifying
Sony Hack: A Timeline, So Far [Deadline Hollywood]
N Korea bans sharing of leader Kim Jong-un’s name
Sony Hack Reveals 25-Page List of Reasons It Sucks To Work at Sony [Gawker]
Snapchat Plans Music Feature, Acquired QR Scan.me For $50M And Vergence Eyeglass Cam For $15M [Tech Crunch]
Earlier: The Road Not Taken: Hacked Silence
Alex Rich is a T14 grad and Biglaw refugee who has worked as a contract attorney for the last 7 years… and counting. If you have a story about the underbelly of the legal world known as contract work, email Alex at [email protected] and be sure to follow Alex on Twitter @AlexRichEsq