NYT Discovers Privacy!

J.A. Terranson measl at mfn.org
Mon May 30 17:06:36 PDT 2011


http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/the-trouble-with-e-mail/?ref=opinion

May 29, 2011, 5:30 pm
The Trouble With E-Mail
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

Among Internet users with secrets, including bankers, lawyers, hackers and 
people who visit porn sites or confide in friends . so that would be all 
of us . there.s a widespread apprehension that the Web is no longer a safe 
place to spill them.

You can see that wariness in e-mail, which for years has been considered a 
spontaneous and freewheeling form, better known for gaffes and rants than 
anxiety and circumspection. As recently as 2008, Will Schwalbe and David 
Shipley described e-mailers as inveterate hotheads in their manual .Send..

.On e-mail, people aren.t quite themselves,. they wrote. .They are 
angrier, less sympathetic, less aware, more easily wounded, even more 
gossipy and duplicitous..

Oh, how times have changed. The idea that e-mail is chiefly a conduit for 
anger and lies seems almost quaint. After too may careers ruined and 
personal lives upended by online indiscretions, it should now be crystal 
clear that there are some things one must never, ever commit to e-mail.

And that.s why some bankers developed .LDL.. .LDL. . which means .let.s 
discuss live. . is an acronym that surfaced during the S.E.C..s 
investigation of Goldman Sachs for its role in the nation.s financial 
shame spiral. How do the pros use it? Goldman.s Jonathan Egol is the first 
known master. When a trader named Fabrice Tourre described a mortgage 
investment in e-mail as .a way to distribute junk that nobody was dumb 
enough to take first time around,. Egol shot back: .LDL..

See how that works? Wanna talk about junky mortgages? Let.s get off the 
%#^ Internet.

It works with other topics, too. Problems at home? LDL. State secrets 
about Egypt? LDL. How much you paid for your house? LDL.

.LDL. and its equivalents . tonal inversions of the carefree LOLs of 
e-mail past . are the most succinct ways Internet-users now express the 
desire to ditch the Web and seek analog pastures. And as much as the 
banker chat that was revealed in e-mail seems galling, it.s the rare 
Web-user who.d willingly submit his own e-mail archive to prosecutorial 
scrutiny. LDL, for those who have the option, is an extremely good idea. 
Nearly everyone needs some form of communication that.s not searchable, 
archivable, forwardable, discoverable and permanent. Of course, the 
longing for more in-person exchange is also part of the broader nostalgia 
a time before the Internet, when copyright and privacy seemed enforceable, 
and traditional business models obtained.

These grander sentiments were on theatrical display scale last week at 
eG8, the Internet-themed prelude to the G8 conference in France. Both 
conferences, like other jetset global conferences, are the very definition 
of LDL, existing solely to facilitate actual, physical elbow-rubbing among 
human beings like Jimmy Wales, Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg.

At eG8, McKinsey submitted eye-popping research that showed that 
Internet-related consumption and expenditure in the G8 nations is now 
bigger than agriculture or energy. As if freshly aware of this economic 
monster, scores of high-profile global lawmakers, including Nicolas 
Sarkozy, the president of France, then spoke of the Internet as wilderness 
that they intended to colonize with official government overseers.

But it.s not just French rhetoricians, using the language of the 19th 
century, to whom the Internet of today seems dangerously anarchic. 
Bloggers and others now chronicle their breaks from the Internet, periods 
of withdrawal from electronic communication. They also tighten privacy 
settings; they close Facebook pages. Their e-mails, texts and IMs become 
more pro forma and less expressive.

It.s been a year since the arrest of Bradley Manning, the army 
intelligence analyst who is believed to have yanked thousands of documents 
off the government.s Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, or SIPRNet. 
Manning passed those documents on to WikiLeaks using Tor Hidden Services, 
a secure network that protects users from surveillance and traffic 
analysis. WikiLeaks started to publish them. And then Manning appears to 
have described his feat in an online chat with a hacker named Adrian Lamo, 
who turned him in.

To many observers, the lesson of WikiLeaks was not about Turkey or Saudi 
Arabia or national security. It.s that no one.s online communication . not 
the government.s Secret Internet Protocol, not Bradley Manning.s hacker 
chatroom . is secure. WikiLeaks has become a kind of Ruby Ridge for some 
Web users: an event that crystallized the perception that the Internet is 
embattled and that spies are everywhere.

Suddenly it seems, as they used to say in Tintin comics, these walls have 
ears.

I see how this happened, but I can.t help but remember the day I became 
73773.143 at compuserve.com. It was 1993, and I.d clearly lucked into a good 
address . highly memorable with all those 7s and 3s. (That same year, 
President Clinton became 75300.3115 at compuserve.com.)

With e-mail, my inhibitions about traditional conversation fell away: 
there was no blushing or lisping or stuttering on e-mail. If 
traditionalists who disdained typing or excelled at office banter felt 
left out by electronic communication, millions of other personalities were 
brought to life by it. In the early 1990s there were some 15 million 
e-mail accounts worldwide. By the end of 1999 there were 569 million. 
Today there are more than 3 billion.

E-mail, then, c.est nous. But we can.t say no one warned us. We.ve all 
seen too many crises, personal and public, not to know that e-mail is not 
a place for secrets.

Note: The reference to Bradley Manning has been adjusted to indicate that 
he is only under suspicion of having disclosed diplomatic cables and 
intelligence reports.





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