Forwarded From: "Prosser, Mike" <Mike_Prosserat_private> 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 -o- Subscribe: mail majordomoat_private with "subscribe isn". Today's ISN Sponsor: Repent Security Incorporated [www.repsec.com]
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