Indelible Digital Disgrace

Integrity is what you do when no one is looking, or so the saying goes. And if character is destiny, the indelible digital impact of email has given that truism new teeth.

From criminal court cases to the court of public opinion, e-mails are delivering inadvertent self-incrimination to unwitting culprits. These off the cuff comments have a way of revealing the writer's true character, providing rare insight as well as a cautionary tale for the digital age.

For example, the Jack Abramoff scandals gained traction in large part because of the difficult-to-defend sensationalism of e-mails in which Abramoff described his multi-million dollar Indian Casino clients as "idiots," "troglodytes" and "monkeys" - as in "I have to meet with the monkeys from the Choctaw tribal council" or "we need to get some money from those monkeys."

Abramoff's partner, Mike Scanlon - a former Tom Delay spokesman turned twenty-something Gordon Gecko acolyte with a $17,000 a month apartment at the Ritz Carlton - showed his frat boy Mafioso instincts for all the world to see when he fired off an e-mail during the Clinton impeachment hearings that dismissed "this whole thing about not kicking someone when they're down...You kick him until he passes out, then beat him over the head with a baseball bat, then roll him up in an old rug and throw him off a cliff into the pound surf below!!!!"

Six days after Hurricane Katrina hit, with the levees broken, the FEMA press secretary Sharon Worthy found time to fire off this piece of fashion advice to her boss, Director Michael Brown. "Please roll up the sleeves of your shirt ... all shirts. Even the President rolled his sleeves to just below the elbow.... You just need to look more hard-working. ROLL UP THE SLEEVES" This was surely one time when the politics was not a matter perception. And still the spin-meister couldn't resist offering up her fashion advice, while people were dying all over the Big Easy.

But perhaps the all-time champ for insensitive spin-e-mails in the face of disaster comes from British government press aide Jo Moore, whose thoughtful response on September 11th was to write "It is now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury." That's "bury" as in "bad news" not any of the thousands of people she was watching perish on television at 2:55 p.m. British time that day.

Of course, one positive aspect of the indelible record that e-mails provide is that they can democratize the investigation process, throwing back the veil on corporate secrecy and piercing claims of plausible deniability.

With the Enron trials underway, people get to see the internal play by play of what the Justice Department has called "a criminal conspiracy to commit one of the largest corporate frauds in American history." The volumes of seized Enron e-mails have been made public and reprinted in a Web site - www.enronemail.com - that allows viewers to search through the volumes by emails that are firing offenses, "Enron's funniest jokes" and a miscellaneous category called "what were they thinking?"

In an even larger scandal than Enron, an email provided a powerful smoking gun in the U.N. oil-for-food scandal, when the vice-president of Swiss contactor Cotecna - which employed the Secretary General's son Kojo Anan - was found to have sent an e-mail to corporate colleagues claiming "we had brief discussions with the SG [an acronym for Secretary General] and his entourage," and concluded that their advice was that Cotecna "could count on their support." It sounds like a slick geo-political version of "Glengarry Glen Ross."

In cyber-space, humor that might seem briefly funny among friends can be decidedly less so when made public. Last month, Eric Govan of the Golden State Warriors press relations staff found that out the hard way when he inadvertently sent a mocking, racially obnoxious photo essay called "Ghetto Prom" to the team's entire press distribution list. Mr. Govan lost his job, and presumably the chance of ever working in the NBA again.

There are countless other examples, and no doubt the ranks will grow until people start wising up to the new rules. An e-mail may be quick, but it lasts longer than a phone call ever could, haunting its sender as an irrefutable example of their character for better or worse. Like many viewers, I appreciate the humor and insights. But one piece of good advice: when you're tempted to fire off a flippant e-mail - take a deep breath before pressing send and ask "How will I explain this at the inquest?"