On Wed, 5 Jul 2006 17:37:14 -0500, Winship <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Please expand on HIPPA, SOX, etc.

Wikipedia has this to say:

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was enacted by
the U.S. Congress in 1996.

According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' (CMS) website,
Title I of HIPAA protects health insurance coverage for workers and their
families when they change or lose their jobs.

Title II of HIPAA, the Administrative Simplification provisions, requires the
establishment of national standards for electronic health care transactions
and national identifiers for providers, health insurance plans, and employers.

The AS provisions also address the security and privacy of health data. The
standards are meant to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the
nation's health care system by encouraging the widespread use of electronic
data interchange in the US health care system

----------------------
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (Pub. L. No. 107-204, 116 Stat. 745, also known
as the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act of 2002
and commonly called SOX or SarbOx; July 30, 2002) is a United States federal
law passed in response to a number of major corporate and accounting scandals
involving prominent companies in the United States. These scandals resulted in
a decline of public trust in accounting and reporting practices. The
legislation is wide ranging and establishes new or enhanced standards for all
US public company Boards, Management, and public accounting firms. The Act
contains 11 titles, or sections, ranging from additional Corporate Board
responsibilities to criminal penalties, and requires the Securities and
Exchange Commission (SEC) to implement rulings on requirements to comply with
the new law. 

----------------------

Both of the above acts and various other laws, securities regulations, etc.
can have a serious impact on what kinds of information may/may not be exchnged
between business and/or government entities and/or "customers" and the
interested public by any/all means of communication, including email list
messages, public or private.

All I was trying to point out is that there are many users of LISTSERV who use
LISTSERV in environments where the "stone tablet" model of never,ever editing
list message archives simply does not and can not apply.  When such users come
to this list to ask the question of how to do it, I suggest that we should not
begin by lecturing them on the fine philosophical points of why they should
not even think about doing this.  LISTSERV may have begun in Academia and
still serves that market (with all its traditions) well, but it is now also
very widely used in government, military, business, and religious
institutional environments where the rules and traditions are very different.