Liabilities make e-mail more dispensable
Toolbox
By Greg Burns Chicago Tribune - Published: August 21, 2005
CHICAGO — Alberto Gonzales won't do it anymore, and President Bush hasn't done it in years.
It got Harry Stonecipher fired from the top post at Boeing Co., and it earned investment banker Frank Quattrone an 18-month prison sentence.
The culprit? E-mail.
Indispensable for uniting workplaces and private lives, e-mail has proven adept at bringing down highflying careers as well. Those billions of electronic messages lurking in cyberspace have provided the smoking gun in scandal after scandal.
Among top officials in government and business, balancing the benefits of e-mail with its potential pitfalls has become a difficult judgment call. With the number of messages skyrocketing, nearly every corporation and arm of government has imposed common-sense guidelines for e-mailing. Many use sophisticated software to actively monitor traffic for potential problems.
Nevertheless, some high-profile individuals have concluded the risks of e-mail outweigh the benefits. Their decisions may hold lessons for less prominent members of society who currently e-mail, send instant messages and blog with abandon. And they point to a continuing erosion of privacy as digital communications advances.
Attorney General Gonzales told the Chicago Tribune editorial board last week that he worries about "perfectly innocent" electronic communication being twisted by critics of the administration. With that in mind, he has gone cold turkey: "I don't get e-mail and I don't send e-mail," he said.
His boss, President Bush, has sworn off it as well. Once an avid e-mailer, Bush sent his last cyber-message in the days before his 2001 inauguration, telling friends and family that his correspondence would be considered a public record from the moment he took office.
In a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors this spring, Bush explained that he was forced to give up e-mail to prevent the disclosure of "personal stuff," such as correspondence with his daughters. "I've made an easy decision there," he said. "I just don't do it. Which is sad, really, when you think about it."
Top lawyers have been urging that kind of caution for years. E-mail is dangerously overused, said Robert Morvillo, the New York defense attorney who defended Martha Stewart in a criminal case involving a disputed e-mail. "They pop up in virtually every investigation. It's almost like a legal wiretap."
Awareness of the risks is spreading outward from corner offices in Manhattan and Washington, D.C. — the nation's epicenters of high-profile e-mail gaffes. Executives in California still hit the send button far too much for their own good, said Chicago corporate lawyer Robert Tarun. "E-mail traffic among high-level execs decreases from the West Coast to the East Coast, but the West is learning."
The high-level paranoia about the perils of e-mail comes amid booming usage. The number of active electronic mailboxes in the world has more than tripled over the past five years to 1.1 billion, according to the Radicati Group Inc., a California research firm. Messages exceed 20 billion a day.
For every prominent person who steers clear of e-mail, many others embrace it. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, now working for an investment bank, has rhapsodized about its globe-spanning qualities. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is said to prefer his Blackberry messaging device to a conversation, hands down.
At Andrew Corp., e-mail is "the lifeblood," said Ralph Faison, chief executive of the Orland Park, Ill.-based supplier of high-tech communications gear. "I can be in China and communicate with family and business colleagues almost instantaneously. I cannot imagine someone that doesn't use e-mail. If it does ferret out those who aren't practicing proper behavior, maybe that's a positive."
Defense lawyers say it's not so simple. A spontaneous e-mail involves imprecision, and a cryptic phrase or not-so-funny joke can unfairly support damning interpretations, they say.
For all the pious pronouncements people make about exercising care and caution, research suggests they reveal more on computer than they do on paper or in conversation.
And what e-mailer hasn't wanted one back immediately after sending it? Michael Pietsch, publisher at Little, Brown, said he has learned to pass along all criticism or bad news in person, because e-mail can carry a greater emotional wallop than intended. "If you have something negative to express, don't put it in an e-mail," he warned.
For Chicago attorney Michael B. Hyman, who represents plaintiffs in class actions, e-mails have become a "bonanza," because they invite an "informal lowering of the guard," he said. "It's so easy to push that button and regret it later on. Even if you try to make it disappear, there are ways to make it re-appear."
The same goes for other digital communications. On WayBackMachine (www.waybackmachine.org), for example, Web pages that were taken down can be recovered years later.
Around the time e-mail was becoming common in the 1980s, Oliver North thought incriminating messages had been safely deleted in the Iran-Contra scandal. As North later told Congress: "Wow, were we wrong."
These days, companies routinely store massive amounts of data, in some cases by decree. The Patriot Act and Sarbanes-Oxley securities law, among others, impose substantial storage and retrieval requirements.
Companies operate in a "fog of uncertainty," said Anik Ganguly, executive vice president at the Open Text Corp. software firm in Lincolnshire, Ill. "Many of these laws are only now being tested in the courts."
That uncertainty has created an opportunity for firms like Open Text, which helps its clients manage "all the documents and information scattered about" the typical company, Ganguly said.
Others specialize in sifting out incriminating messages for litigators. Still others concentrate on helping companies detect internal e-mail abuse.
TrueActive Corp. makes software that searches corporate e-mails for swear words, sex references and trade secrets such as new-product code names. Its most sophisticated programs flag suspicious anomalies in e-mail use, such as large files sent at odd hours between people who rarely communicate.
Still, office e-mailers typically expect privacy, and feel violated even when they are discovered running side businesses from work or exchanging pornography and hate literature, said TrueActive general manager Chuck Davis. "They become very possessive: 'It might be your program, computer and server, but that's my e-mail."'
No question, those who should know better fall prey to the convenience and seeming intimacy of the casual e-mail.
As Boeing's CEO, Stonecipher knew that the firm has an especially aggressive monitoring system, in part to guard its sensitive technology. Nevertheless, he exchanged sexually graphic e-mail with an underling, leading to his dismissal earlier this year.
For self-destructive candor, it's tough to beat Wall Street analyst Henry Blodgett, a cheerleader during the tech boom who in his e-mails described the companies he was pushing on the public as "horrible," "a disaster," and "a piece of junk."
Efforts to be less-than-candid have backfired, too. A seemingly innocuous suggestion to "clean up" files can amount to obstruction of justice when an investigation is pending, as investment banker Quattrone discovered. A similar e-mail prompted the downfall of Chicago's Andersen accounting firm.
With such high stakes, perhaps it's no wonder the White House is revamping its e-mail system, introducing the comment(AT)whitehouse.gov address to help tame a weekly flow of up to 300,000 messages that had swamped the older president(AT)whitehouse.gov mailbox.
Those requesting a personal response will get "a hard letter, a snail-mail letter" instead of an e-mail reply, said David Almacy, who manages the White House Web site. "It is a better way to track it, so it doesn't just exist electronically."
Caution reigns at the White House these days, in part because of the tussle over disclosure of certain legal memos written by Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. To date, no one knows if a wayward e-mail may yet be the star witness against him when confirmation hearings set to begin Sept. 6.
Meantime, digital technology keeps challenging notions of private communication, raising questions about the security of wireless phone calls, Internet use, credit histories, spending habits and other seemingly personal realms. As Open Text's Ganguly noted, "People are just beginning to culturally adapt. E-mail is the tip of the iceberg."
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