On January 6, 2021, Secretary of the Judicial Conference of the U.S., James C. Duff, released a statement authorizing U.S. district courts to design policies that will be used to manage and properly secure “highly sensitive court documents (HSDs)” filed within the U.S. court system.
This announcement comes in the wake of the March 2020 SolarWinds Orion data breach that compromised several government agencies, critical infrastructure entities, and private sector establishments. The new filing procedures will involve federal courts accepting HSDs “in paper form or via a secure electronic device, such as a thumb drive, and stored in a secure stand-alone computer system,” which will then be sealed and no longer uploaded to the Judiciary’s Case Management/Electronic Case Files system (CM/ECF).
