Death By Email Blog

Jews Fight Boycott With Emails

When an Ontario group which opposes Israel's Palestinian policies tried to organize a boycott of Israeli kosher wines and an exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), the Jewish community fought back with email.  Instead of fighting with counter-arguments or organizing a counter protest, the email campaign instead directed recipients to buy the products and go to the events that were being boycotted.

This new strategy worked quickly and brilliantly. 

The entire sequence of events started when the Jewish group, Not In Our Name, which opposes Israel's Palestinian policies, organized a boycott of Israeli kosher wines in the lead-up to Passover. A protest was organized for outside a specific liquor store in the Summerhill section of Toronto on the afternoon of April 5th, according to The Toronto Star.

Members of the Jewish community responded with an email campaign that suggested that recipients go to that very liquor store to buy their wine.  Canadian Jewish News publisher Donald Carr and his wife, Judy Feld Carr, an Order of Canada member for her work to rescue more than 3,200 Jews from Syria, were among the earliest recipients of the emails, which they forwarded to all of their contacts.  And then, the UJA, United Jewish Appeal, sent emails to 25,000 of its supporters calling on them to go to the store at the time of the protest specifically to buy Israeli kosher wine.  (Toronto Star)

About 600 protesters came to buy wine at the exact time of the protest, according to the Canadian Jewish News. 1,455 bottles of Israeli kosher wine and spirits were sold at the Summerhill store that day.

When the Summerhill location sold out, staff encouraged consumers to visit other locations that carry a large selection of Israeli kosher products. A staff member said that a store in nearby Thornhill also sold out of all their Israeli wines, according to the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO).

A few says later,members of the Palestine House and the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid picketed outside the ROM to encourage people to boycott the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit.

Once again, the Jewish community responded by email.  About 500 tickets to the exhibit were sold that day to UJA supporters.

Will this mark a new way to fight back without putting protesters on the street?  As we have seen with the use of Twitter to rally protesters in Tehran, we can now see how organized email campaigns can be used to organize positive responses to boycotts. 

Tagged Stole Identities of 60 Million, Cuomo Says

Social networking site Tagged.com stole the identities of 60 million people and may have spammed even more, according to New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.  He announced that he plans to sue the site that claims to be the third largest social networking site in the country.

This is how the email and identity theft allegedly worked, as described in the Christian Science Monitor:

Tagged sent 60 million emails to people saying they’d been tagged on the site in a photo. In many cases, no such photos existed, but users were apparently tricked into providing the company with access to their personal email contacts. Cuomo says Tagged then reached out to those contacts, asking if they’d like to join the site.

Tagged made their invitational emails appear to have been sent directly from members’ personal email accounts, instead of from Tagged.com. The emails falsely stated that “[name] sent you photos on Tagged.” If a member had added a personal image to the website, Tagged also included that picture in these fraudulent email solicitations. Many consumers were unaware that Tagged accessed their email contact lists, stated blog Pogo Was Right. 

It was also reported that in order to see the photos, Tagged required you to create a Tagged account, which would grow its membership list.  Under the right circumstances, Tagged could then access the new member's address book and repeat the cycle.

"Consumers had their privacy invaded and were forced into the embarrassing position of having to apologize to all their email contacts for Tagged’s unethical – and illegal – behavior. This very virulent form of spam is the online equivalent of breaking into a home, stealing address books, and sending phony mail to all of an individual’s personal contacts. We would never accept this behavior in the real world, and we cannot accept it online,” stated the Attorney General's office.

Tagged offered an apology on its blog site and stated:

"When our company tested a new registration process, we discovered that our “invite your friends” language was confusing. The registration drive generated some complaints and as a business that succeeds or fails based on word of mouth, we took every complaint very seriously. We immediately stopped using this registration process, before being contacted by the Attorney General’s office. In no instance did Tagged access a person’s personal address book without their consent and no emails were sent without the person giving us permission. We realize that some were confused and accidentally agreed to invite their friends. We are truly sorry for any inconvenience or frustration that these people experienced.”

Dell Makes "Mockery" of Court System

In one of the strongest rebukes I have read in an eDiscovery case involving email, Louisiana State Court Judge Rosemary Ledet did the following to Dell Computer:

1. Found Dell in contempt of court.
2. Stated that Dell made a "mockery" of the court system.
3. Fined the company $25,000 in sanctions.
4. Called Dell's actions "unconscionable"

The ruling needs to be seen as a warning to companies who do not respond quickly and effectively to court-ordered discovery requests.

In full disclosure, I need to state that InBoxer uses Dell to supply hardware.  InBoxer also competes with a division of Dell for email archiving and electronic discovery.  So, I am in an interesting place when it comes to commenting on Dell's apparent inability to use their own email archiving software to produce what the court demanded.  That being said, let's get some facts:

Southern Electronics Supply Inc. and Active Solutions LLC sued in 2007, claiming the crime surveillance system they developed for New Orleans was misappropriated by people within and with ties to the New Orleans' technology department. They also allege a conspiracy with Dell to sell the system.  Dell has disputed the allegations, as have other defendants, including Mayor Ray Nagin. (Associated Press)

A significant point in the case revolved around whether Michael Dell personally knew about the deal.  There was also a question about a supposed Dell had a meeting with New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin in June 2004.  A Dell employee stated in an affidavit that the meeting took place.  Both Dell and Nagin do not recall the meeting.

This set up a discovery request to find messages and other documents.  Yet, Dell's "piecemeal" disclosure of documents did not even include a search for the word "camera" in Michael Dell's email.

Plaintiffs' attorney Gladstone Jones said he "wasted my time" in Texas last week for Michael Dell's deposition because of the quality of the records' search. (AP)   Ledet called the company's conduct "unconscionable."  (Dell, of course, refutes this stating that they acted in good faith and produced 180,000 documents.)

"If anything, this is an indictment of Dell's own email archiving and management software that it purchased and has owned for some time," stated Howard Haile in DCIG.   "But, what is more surprising is Dell's lack of keyword search capabilities and inability to present relevant information in a timely manage, especially given that they own a software that allegedly can perform these tasks,"

I personally find it hard to believe that Dell's email archiving software does not have simple keyword search capabilities.  But, it will be interesting to see whether the product has problems or whether the attorneys failed to deliver what the courts need.

As I have said many times:  Anyone can copy a message into an email archive.  The challenge is to retrieve the message when you need it. 

Emails About Michael Jackson's Children's Custody Revealed

You knew that it would not take long.  ExtraTV reports today that it has obtained emails from Rebecca White, a close friend of Debbie Rowe.  White, they say, "is opening up exclusively to "Extra" about emails written by Rowe to White regarding the custody of Michael Jackson's children, sent just days after Jackson's death."

I am not really interested in what happens to celebrity children.  So, I am not going to go further into this.  But, if you want to read them yourself, see ExtraTV.