the govt request them and through an outside law firm GS produces them after a privilege review conducted by the outside firm. a court order is only needed if the firm refuses to turn over the documents requested. in most cases this is done voluntarily.
Who knows. They could have been handed over willingly, or through seizure of computer equipment. It blows my mind that these people still don't know how to properly delete a sensitive document.
That i can help with you with. "Eraser" http://eraser.heidi.ie/ This program will allow you to erase any document at DoD standards or better. I recommend the 35 pass Gutmann process. No technology is known that can recover a document erased with that process. And it's a free program.
Unless you are only sending emails to yourself, good luck with that. In a corporate environment like MS Exchange, simply deleting your copy of an email doesn't delete the email from the server.
Yes, financial companies are required by law to hold onto that data. Since for their own recovery purposes they have redundancy and off-site backup, getting a copy should not be a problem for the government.
This will result in legislation prohibiting a bank to trade for their own account. They will be forced back to the days of Whitehead/Weinberg, when the bank refused to trade its own book to avoid any conflict of interests.
....and then selectively leaking the ones they want. So, GS sells an investment and then hedges their exposure....shocking!
....e-mail has replaced the memo and to a great extent even the telephone for business communications. That means e-mail is the communication medium of record. If federal authorities, like the SEC and the FDA, want to monitor or be able to audit communications, they're going to be looking at e-mail. When a company is sued, lawyers will go straight to the e-mail. "The importance is that e-mail has become the primary business record," says Via. "All internal correspondence is done via e-mail so it comes under the authority of all of these regulations... You have a telephone conversation and it goes away. But e-mail leaves a trail. If you destroy e-mail after 90 days, you've destroyed evidence that could be incriminating but also information that could prove your innocence." cont. on link http://www.intranetjournal.com/articles/200401/ij_01_22_04a.html