Forwarded From: "Prosser, Mike" <Mike_Prosser@tds.com>
http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/ctc934.htm
E-mail can have dire consequences
WASHINGTON -- Think about that nasty e-mail message you fired off in anger
last week at the office, the one about your co-worker. Or your boss. Or
your company's rival.
Who else might read it?
Embraced for its convenience, e-mail has become for Internet users the
fast and cheap communications medium of the '90s. But its nature lends
itself to informal use, complete with misspellings, quirky abbreviations
and casual -- even unflattering -- references to friends, co-workers or
employers.
Trouble is, those casual messages sometimes get misdirected, or they can
have healthy lifespans, hibernating for years on a computer backup in the
company's basement. Sometimes, like old soldiers, old e-mail messages
never die.
''When you have a written memo, you rip it up and it's all gone,'' said
Terry Loscalzo, a Philadelphia lawyer who specializes in Internet issues.
''Many employees don't understand that when you hit the Delete button it
does not delete the e-mail for all eternity ... It can still be retrieved
very easily.''
Rosie McSweeney, a student at Arizona State University, thought she was
sending a personal message to a friend. The private note was innocuous,
but she hit a wrong key and inadvertently sent it to thousands of people
who participate in an Internet discussion group she uses.
''It was a horrible feeling,'' she said. ''It's like when you realize that
you've just locked your keys in your car. The dangling key chain seems to
taunt you.''
Even savvy computer executives can be confronted by their own e-mail
written years earlier, increasingly in lawsuits against companies, as the
medium becomes more widely used.
A report earlier this year by Forrester Research Inc. said 15% of the U.S.
adult population, or 30 million people, use e-mail. That number is
expected to grow to 135 million by 2001.
''There was sort of a gentlemen's rule that attorneys wouldn't look into
it because nobody understood how it worked,'' said David Sorkin, associate
director of the Chicago-based Center for Information Technology and
Privacy Law. ''That's disappearing in this age of litigation. It's almost
routine to investigate whether there are electronic documents.''
When the Justice Department and 20 states filed antitrust lawsuits against
Microsoft Corp., they used e-mail written by the company's top executives
-- from printouts that Microsoft handed over under civil subpoena -- to
bolster their claims that Microsoft was unfair in its fight against rival
Netscape Communications Corp.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates described in a July 1996 e-mail message how
he tried to persuade the chief executive officer at Intuit Inc. not to
distribute Netscape's Internet browser with Intuit's popular personal
finance software.
''I was quite frank with him that if he had a favor we could do for him
that would cost us something like ($1 million), to do that in return for
switching browsers in the next few months, I would be open to doing
that,'' Gates wrote.
Microsoft contends the e-mail messages, quoted liberally throughout the
government antitrust lawsuits, were taken out of context.
Microsoft benefited from an earlier e-mail message uncovered during the
government's investigation. When a judge appointed Harvard professor
Lawrence Lessig as a ''special master'' to look into important technical
issues over Microsoft's objections, the company uncovered an old e-mail in
which Lessig told Netscape he had ''sold my soul'' by installing
Microsoft's browser.
''There is nothing more powerful in litigation than having a handwritten
note that somebody stuck in a file or an e-mail,'' said Tyler Baker, an
antitrust lawyer in Dallas. ''People are much more conversational and less
guarded and more colorful. It comes across much more directly.''
Unlike paper documents, it can be difficult to verify authorship of an
e-mail, which carries no telltale pen-and-ink signature. Even if the mail
account is protected by a password, it could have been sent by someone
else with access.
''It's a fairly simple procedure,'' said Loscalzo, the Internet lawyer.
''Anybody with a fair amount of technical skill can create e-mail that
purports to be written by someone they're not.''
The Internet's discussion groups, including conversations on sex, religion
and drug use, frequently contain posted messages that appear to be from
President Clinton using his White House e-mail address.
A person faking an e-mail message can have more sinister motives, too.
After Oracle Corp. in 1992 fired employee Adelyn Lee, the one-time
girlfriend of Oracle's billionaire chairman, Larry Ellison, Ellison
received a message purportedly from one of his vice presidents saying:
''I have terminated Adelyn per your request.''
Ellison fired back: ''Are you out of your mind! I did not request that you
terminate Adelyn ... I did not want to get involved in the decision for
obvious reasons.''
Lee sued over her firing and settled with Oracle in 1993 for $100,000.
But she was sentenced in 1994 to one year in prison and ordered to repay
the money after prosecutors showed that she had sent the incriminating
e-mail to Ellison, forging the name of the Oracle vice president from his
own account.
By The Associated Press
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Received on Tue Jun 16 22:52:27 1998