When Congressional investigators come calling, or hostile lawyers begin trawling in electronic discovery, guilty and not-so-guilty alike can be caught in the net:
It’s the folks who are just chattering and venting to colleagues about normal business tensions who are most at risk. The computer doesn’t capture the wink or head nod. It doesn’t say “this is my first reaction…when I have considered everything in detail, I’ll give you my final opinion.” Etc.
(h/t Pete Warden, from whom more).
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Stories like this reinforce some of my workplace undeniable truths: crack no jokes of any kind whatsoever at work: Someone-somewhere doesn’t like you and you don’t know who it is. That joke will re-appear at the worst of possible times. Another: send no email which you would not also send to the CEO, to your spouse, to your parents, and to an enemy. Next: Just the facts ma’am and written as delicately as possible; don’t say “something is bad.” Say “something is not as good as it can be.”
I’m conflicted: on one hand, people have long had no expectation of privacy in e-mail at work. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised – though I would be disgusted – to find Henry Waxman going through my trash at 2 in the morning.
He is just trying to excuse criminal behavior by saying “it was just a joke.” He was guilty, and some of the guys in the subprime mess are guilty.
He does start off the article noting that people up to no good deserve to be hung by their emails. The more interesting part is when you’re making a joke in email or IM. I would bet that most people have written something that was either obviously exaggerated or ironic in their private communications, and those sort of exchanges are pretty essential in building close business relationships.
The legal answer is ‘don’t put anything in writing!’, and confine everything open to misinterpretation to a phone call. Call me a dreamer, but I think it would be a better world if there was less of an incentive to find easy-to-digest ‘gotchas’, and more weight given to the context they were written in.
I watched hearings chaired by Henry Waxman this week. He had a couple of smoking gun emails. One was particularly damning showing that rating firms would rate anything, even deals designed by cows. When the full context of the email was set out, there was nothing there.
I believe that Mr. Waxman is a hard working legislator with a good heart. But he isn’t all that bright. If you have to sift through two million emails to find a couple of nuggets, then you should be suspicious of the nuggets. Mr. Waxman wasn’t, and shame on him.
One congressman said that the bankers in his community told him that they were pressured to make unsound loans by the regulators. What those bankers did not know is that loans were not the problem. The fly-by-night mortgage originators, who were not properly regulated, were responsible for the vast majority of the unsound mortgages. Government regulation is to protect institutions such as conservative banks from predation by “on-the-edge” outfits.
There has been tremendous world wide gains in productivity over the past twenty years. Foreign investors needed to park some of the funds generated by these gains, and they wanted safe investments that paid more than Treasury bills. They set aside the economic truism that higher yields have higher risks and put too much confidence in the fairness and soundness of American markets. According to Mr. Greenspan, the flood of bad loans were generated by world-wide demand.
I hate it when Congress people used their privilege (slander laws do not apply to them) position to brow-beat people. The eruptions of outrage play to the worst in Americans.