Death By Email Blog

South Carolina Gov. Sanford's Extensive Email Romance

Once again, intimate emails are at the heart of a scandal and become the centerpiece of another public official Caught By Email. 

Copies of messages between South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and his Argentine love interest dating back to July 2008, were printed in The State newspaper of South Carolina.  While the newspaper said they could not confirm the authenticity of the messages, the Governor's office did not deny that they were accurate.

If you look at the messages, the Governor did not appear to be nervous about whether his messages would one day leak.  Instead, you get a picture of a man who appears to have been swept away in emotions and did continued despite the possible risks to his future.  The emails to his love interest, recently identified as Maria Belen Chapur (Post and Courier), were quite romantic and tender:

• You have a level of sophistication that so fitting with your beauty. I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificent gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curve of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of the night’s light - but hey, that would be going into sexual details   (From the Governor)
• ... at the same time we are in a hopelessly — or as you put it impossible — or how about combine and simply say hopelessly impossible situation of love. How in the world this lightening strike snuck up on us I am still not quite sure. As I have said to you before I certainly had a special feeling about you from the first time we met, but these feelings were contained and I genuinely enjoyed our special friendship and the comparing of all too many personal notes (and yes this is true even if you did occasionally tantalize me with sexual details over the years!) — but it was all safe. Where we are is not. I have thought about it and in some ways feel I let you down in letting these complications come into a friendship that I hope will last till death. In all my life I have lived by a code of honor and at a variety of levels know I have crossed lines I would have never imagined. I wish I could wish it away, but this soul-mate feel I alluded too is real and in that regard I sure don’t want to be the person complicating your life.

It is sad to read this content, and the rest of the messages, and realize that the intensely private matter is going to become tabloid fodder for some time to come.  But, because he is a Governor, a one-time potential presidential candidate and the mysterious way he went to visit his love interest, the private matter will become very public.

Be careful what you put in email.

NSA Analysts Spied on Wives, Girlfriends and President Clinton

During an interview on MSNBC, James Risen, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his New York Times investigative reporting on the Bush administration's domestic spying program, stated "it was fairly routine according to (his source, an NASA analyst,) for people to access the emails of girlfriends or wives or other people that they might know."  (Transcript from MSNBC)

Watch the video.

Email Smoking Gun Backfires in Face of Australian Leadership

Australian opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull is under pressure to resign after an email smoking gun used in the "Utegate" scandal against Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Treasurer Wayne Swan has proven to be a fake, according to Australian federal police.

The email, supposedly from the prime minister's office, asked for special financial assistance for the PM's friend and neighbor, Queensland car dealer John Grant.  The name "Utegate" was coined because the car dealer supposedly lent Rudd a utility vehicle -- or 'ute' in Australian slang -- for use in his constituency.

The opposition used this smoking gun email and put "unprecedented pressure" on the Prime Minister to explain his role in the fiasco and Trumball demanded Rudd's resignation.  (AFP)  The sessions in Parliament were described as extremely noisy and rowdy. 

Godwin Grech, a Treasury official, implicated Mr. Rudd at an inquiry into the planned government-backed auto credit program on Friday.  He told lawmakers that he had been emailed by the prime minister's office asking if John Grant's dealership would be able to access the credit facility.  (Wall Street Journal)

Calls came from the opposition for the PM to resign.

But, things took an unusual turn yesterday. ---- The police searched the home and work computers of Godwin Grech.

“Preliminary results of those forensic examinations indicate that the email referred to at the centre of this investigation has been created by a person or persons other than the purported author of the email,” the AFP said in a statement.  In other words, the email was a fake.

Did Trumball know the email was a fake?  Now, the tables are turned.

“This email is a fraud, it is a fake, it is a fabrication. Therefore my own judgment is that Mr Turnbull’s got no option . . . but to do the honorable thing, apologize and resign. He does not have the character to occupy the highest office in the land,” said Mr Rudd said on Channel 9 in Australia.

Trumball responded:

"It was not created or composed by us," Turnbull told public radio. "If it is a fake, as is apparently the case, it was a fake that was created in the Treasury ... "Now how on earth can I be responsible for a fake that is created in (Treasurer Wayne) Swan's department?"

The investigations are scheduled to continue.  I can't wait to find out how the email was forged.

More on Twitter and Tehran

I just received a request to tell everyone how you can help the protesters in Iran.

Security forces there are hunting down people using Twitter with a location of Tehran and a time zone of GMT +3.30. You can make it harder for them and show solidarity by making your location and time zone on Twitter be the same. The idea is that if tens of millions of people do it, then the real people in Iran will be harder to find.

You can change your Twitter settings on your PC or even on your iPhone.

If you agree, please forward this posting to everyone you know.I

The Revolution May Not Be Televised, But It May Be Tweeted

I doubt that the business plan for Twitter said anything about being a news channel during a political upheaval, but Twitter is clearly becoming a major source of information about what is happening in Iran.  I was stunned by how quickly email and social media have taken over due to Iranian government controls.  (This image was found at Time.com)  I am also amazed at how quickly Iranians use twitter to get around the controls.

First, a recap.  Reports are that cell phone text messaging has been turned off nation-wide.  Journalists who had visas to cover the elections have been told to leave the country. Journalists with permanent press cards have been told NOT to film in the streets.  One report said that plain clothes police are instantly arresting anyone seen with a camera, even a cell phone camera, in the streets.

OpenNet Initiative--a research project on Internet censorship conducted jointly by Harvard, Toronto, Oxford, and Cambridge universities--reported that YouTube, Twitter, DailyMotion and Facebook, along with several Web sites aligned with opposition candidates, have been blocked in Iran in recent days. (Nieuws in the Netherlands.)

Yet, people on the street are defying the ban, finding work arounds, and are getting the word out.

"We are receiving videos, we are receiving emails, phone calls and text messages, not only from Tehran from other cities around the country. So we get a picture of what is happening outside of Tehran," said senior analyst at BBC Persian, Sadeq Saba, according to AFP.  Yesterday, CNN's Situation Room coverage of Tehran was predominantly done in the studio by CNN's Internet correspondent Abbi Tatton.  She has clearly been thrown into the limelight: CNN Coverage.

But, most interesting to me is Time Magazine's coverage that explains how Twitter works for this coverage and how email is less effective:

"Twitter (is) practically ideal for a mass protest movement, both very easy for the average citizen to use and very hard for any central authority to control. The same might be true of email and Facebook, but those media aren't public. They don't broadcast, as Twitter does," Time says.   The article includes some examples of Tweets from Iran:

• Woman says ppl knocking on her door 2 AM saying they were intelligence agents, took her daughter
• Ashora platoons now moving from valiasr toward National Tv staion. mousavi's supporters are already there. my father is out there!

So, how come Twitter isn't blocked as so many Iranian sites are?  Time explains:

"Sympathetic observers outside Iran have set up "proxies," servers that relay Twitter content into Iran through network addresses that haven't been blocked yet. When the Iranian authorities discover such a proxy, they block it too. It's an arms race crossed with whack-a-mole. Protesters are also organizing denial-of-service attacks against government websites — coordinated efforts to shut down their servers by flooding them with traffic."

I recommend the Time coverage entitled, "Iran Protests: Twitter, the Medium of the Movement".  The revolution may have found its match.

How Will Email and Social Networking Work Out for Republicans?

Ken, the author of an entry in the PopeHat Blog, a conservative leaning forum, sent me an email to tell me about an email-related post he wrote.  It states:  "I’m just not sure how email and social networking are going to work out for the Republicans." 

Using language that is a little stronger than I typically use on-line, he argues that Republicans are vulnerable to comments by extremists.  "If you are a dipshit, and you are willing to commit your dipshittery to writing (especially when that writing is easily forwarded, copied, and linked to), then many, many more people are going to learn that you are a dipshit," he writes.

Ken gets it.  While I think both parties have their share of people who say dumb things in email, he believes that the Republicans have a number of racist and/or dumb people in public places that are easily quoted.  He, explained himself by adding, "Republicans have been having a little spate of trouble with officials and staffers — usually but not always on the state level — getting caught sending around racist jokes at President Obama’s expense."

His examples show why Republicans need to be careful:

• "Sherri Goforth, staffer to Tennessee Republican state senator Diane Black, sent around a picture showing miniature portraits of the nation’s presidents, with the last spot occupied by two big eyes peering out of the dark. Ha ha! Because black people don’t show up on camera because they are so black! ... 
• Trey Walker, aide to Republican South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster, talking about how Michelle Obama is a gorilla’s descendant; or 
• Diann Jones, a Republican Party vice-chair from Dallas, sending an email about the “black house” to judges and then getting shirty about it when they forwarded it to the press;
• Southern California Republican (ex)-mayor Dean Grosse, who sent around the popular-amongst-idjits watermellon-growing-on-the-White-House-lawn email;
• and so on and so on, ad nauseum and ad moronum (more collected here.)."

(bullets added to make it easier to read)

Neither party is beyond its share of stupid people who send out inappropriate things that just are not funny. I believe that there are simple rules about posting on-line or sending an email that we should all follow to protect ourselves:

• Would you be upset if your mother saw it?
• Would you be upset if the most nefarious person you ever heard about saw it?
• Would you be upset if it was on the front page of USA TODAY?

If your message fails any one of the above tests, DO NOT SEND IT!  That goes for people of all political points of view.

Happy Anniversary, Natalie

Today is my 25th wedding anniversary and I am writing to wish my wife, Natalie, a happy anniversary.  You have made the past 25 years of marriage easy and I love you very much.  I am looking forward to our next 25 years.

Lose Weight The Email Way

It seems that everyone thinks they have a few pounds to lose.  Kaiser Permanente, a leading health care provider, performed a controlled study of nearly 800 individuals and found that an email a week can help you shed the pounds!

ALIVE (A Lifestyle Intervention Via Email) sent weekly emails were sent 351 individuals.  The short  messages sent over 16 weeks suggested small, practical, individually tailored goals, such as eating fruit for a snack three times a week, walking for 10 minutes a day at lunch time, or walking to the store instead of driving.  The messages were tailored for each recipient's needs and life situation (for example, whether they had small children at home or busy schedules that posed barriers to exercise and diet improvement.)

"By the trial's end, participants were more physically active, eating more fruits and vegetables, and reducing their intake of saturated fats and transfats; the changes continued at least four months after the intervention ended," Kaiser Permanente reported.

“The beauty of this kind of email system is it’s like email house calls once a week, in other words a message goes out in a very tailored specific message for you on how you can become physically more active,“ noted researcher Dr. David Sobel.

Who knew that an email a week could keep the doctor away.

Does IT Read Your Email?

Watch what you say in your email.  Thirty-threepercent of IT staff used their IT administration rights to snoop around networks to access privileged, corporate information such as HR records, layoff lists, customer databases and M&A plans, according to a new survey released by Cyber-Ark.  Its "Trust, Security & Passwords" is a global survey of more than 400 senior IT professionals both in the US and UK.

One of the most revealing aspects of the survey was found in the types and quantity of information employees would take with them if they were fired. 47% of them said that they would take information from the email system.

InBoxer was made aware of this problem early on.  We thought it was serious enough to create an audit trail feature in our email archiving product.  The InBoxer Anti-Risk Appliance keeps a detailed log of every email search conducted and every email read.

Emails Show That US Government Pressured B of A

By now, you would think that people would have learned that their private email thoughts could easily become public -- and printed on the front page of the New York Times.  Well, that is exactly what happened today.  The news is that these emails had to do with the deepest secrets at the heart of the financial crisis.

A series of emails released today detail the pressure that the Federal Reserve put on Bank of America to merge with Merrill Lynch.  It isn't pretty.   The results came because the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has forced the release of emails by means of a subpoena.  Since then, copies have leaked in the media and across the Internet.

"Just had a long talk with (Federal Reserve Chairman) Ben Bernanke," said Richmond Fed President Jeffrey Lacker.  "(He) says they (will) to make it even more clear that if they play that card (to get out of the deal) and they need assistance, management is gone."

Management is gone.  It is hard to be more direct than that.  And, it is hard to see that that is how our government works.