Attacks on Corporate America
In what seems like a game of cat and mouse, Hunton & Williams and several security companies (in a partnership called Team Themis) attempted to capitalize on the anti-corporate movement to expose corporate wrongdoing. The same movement has spawned sites like WikiLeaks and spurred groups like Anonymous into action. One of Team Themis’s supposed methods for discrediting the anti-corporate critics was to leak forged documents; Wikileaks and the like could then be shown to be untrustworthy after they published the forged data.
However, Team Themis seems to have forgotten that the same people who originally surreptitiously obtained information (usually through hacking) from corporate America could deploy the same methods to obtain Team Themis’s information as well. The result was that the emails involved in Team Themis’s proposal only seem to support the rationale behind the critics’ anger toward corporate America. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce summed up the suggestion as “abhorrent.”
So who can – or better yet who should – businesses trust? The costs of those “trustworthy” entities who claim to be rescuing big business appear to be torts committed in the name of the corporations themselves. A case of liability creating more liability. Could corporate America be stuck between a rock and a hard place?
One solution might be for businesses to manage the risks their data produces through their own records management, compliance and legal departments. To be clear, this is not a novel idea, even if it hasn’t been the easiest thing for large (and small) corporations to implement. But, being able to review your employees’ data and curb improper conduct before it becomes a huge risk will help with corporate governance and risk management.
Alternatively, maybe we could put Julian Assange in a boxing ring with Team Themis to finally settle things. Of course, we anticipate the match to be leaked and posted on YouTube within a few hours.