Is private email on a computer company not private?

The New York Times - When he was fired, Scott Sidell was angry enough. Then he found out that his former employer was reading his personal Yahoo e-mail messages, after he had left the company.

In a lawsuit that he filed in May against Structured Settlement Investments, the finance company he used to run, Mr. Sidell claims that executives at the company went so far as to read e-mail messages that he had sent to his lawyers discussing his strategy for winning an arbitration claim over his lost job.

“It’s kind of like the other side gets your playbook or they’re spying on your locker room,” said Russell Green, a lawyer representing Mr. Sidell. He said that his client was now using a new e-mail address.

The lawsuit filed by Mr. Sidell in federal court in Connecticut involves an unsettled area of the law, where changes in technology create tension between expectations of personal privacy and companies’ rights to monitor the equipment they provide to employees. The case’s unusual combination of facts, which are in dispute, paves the way for a decision that could help set a precedent for dealing with personal e-mail at work.

The law governing e-mail communications is still evolving. Generally, courts have found that employers can monitor employees’ e-mail communications on company computers. But courts have also recognized greater privacy protection for e-mail messages sent using personal, Web-based e-mail accounts. For example, this month a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in California ruled that personal text messages sent on two-way pagers provided to police officers in Ontario, Calif., were protected from the department. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/technology/27mail.html?ex=1372305600&en=caba5f9f9566399d&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Email That Investors Might Like To Read

The New York Times - E-mails attached to the Massachusetts complaint against UBS accusing it of defrauding investors support accusations in stunning black and white.

After receiving a flood of complaints from investors in his state, William F. Galvin, secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, subpoenaed documents from some major market participants. Thursday, he released materials produced by UBS and filed a civil suit against the firm, accusing it of defrauding investors.

MR. GALVIN’S complaint says UBS misled investors by peddling auction-rate securities as cash equivalents and ultrasafe. But the suit also asserts that UBS dumped these securities on individual investors to minimize its own exposure to the risks inherent in keeping them on its own books. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/business/29gret.html?ex=1372392000&en=2adbfb53a0307b8d&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Just Never Know Who is Going to Read Your Email

The New York Times -In the spring of 2007, as the mortgage market came unglued, two Bear Stearns executives shared their growing fears in a series of e-mail messages to each other about the perilous condition of the giant hedge funds they oversaw.

“I’m fearful of these markets,” one wrote.

The other said later, “Believe it or not — I’ve been able to convince people to add more money.” He concluded that “I think we should close the funds now.”

But three days later, the pair, Ralph R. Cioffi and Matthew M. Tannin, presented an upbeat picture to worried investors without disclosing that the two funds were plummeting in value and that Mr. Cioffi had already pulled some assets from one of them.

A little more than a month later, the funds, filled with some of the most explosive and high-risk securities available, imploded, evaporating $1.6 billion of investor assets and setting off a financial chain reaction that has rattled global markets, caused more than $350 billion in write-downs, cost a number of executives their jobs and culminated in the demise of Bear Stearns itself.

In an indictment made public Thursday, prosecutors relied heavily on e-mail exchanges between Mr. Cioffi and Mr. Tannin in trying to paint a picture of fear and desperation inside Bear Stearns as the firm grappled with a crisis that would eventually lead to its end.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/business/20bear.html?ex=1371700800&en=51a54a4e4568e5d0&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=774102483

The White House Has Got Mail — Um, It Had Mail

Should public officials be allowed to destroy public records? What are your thoughts on this issue? Here’s What the Editors at the New York Times said recently about the Bush Administration’s record on public records:

As the Bush administration fades into history, a federal lawsuit is establishing that astonishing chunks of this history have already gone missing.

The White House admitted in court this week that it has no back-up archives for missing email messages covering a crucial period in 2003.

The email gaps coincide with critical events like the run-up to the Iraq war that was driven by incorrect intelligence; the Machiavellian stratagem to leak the identity of the former C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame Wilson; and various unspecified activities involving Karl Rove, President Bush’s former political field general.

By law, the missing policy and political communications belong to the taxpayers and must be preserved by the government for posterity. But the White House claims a “primitive” preservation system caused the e-mails to slip away — not any deliberate, post-facto purging by officials worried about the judgment of history.

Initially, the White House admitted hundreds of days of emails were missing, according to reports from a closed congressional hearing. These included 12 work days with no e-mails at all for President Bush’s immediate office and 16 days for Vice President Dick Cheney. Since then, officials have sought to minimize the problem, relying on a search for backup archives. But the administration’s latest court statement raises the possibility that, in one vital three-month period, emails before and after the Iraq invasion may never be found.

A U.S. District Court judge has been demanding greater detail on how the records of hundreds of officials could have gone missing. The White House insisted that a court proposal to search its computer systems more deeply would “yield marginal benefits at best,” while burdening and disrupting government operations.

This hardly satisfied the lawsuit parties demanding that history and the law be served — the National Security Archive, a scholarly resource at George Washington University, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group.

It shouldn’t satisfy the American people, either.http://theboard.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/the-white-house-has-got-mail-um-it-had-mail/

Error Gave F.B.I Unauthorized Access to Email

WASHINGTON — A technical glitch gave the F.B.I. access to the e-mail messages from an entire computer network — perhaps hundreds of accounts or more — instead of simply the lone e-mail address that was approved by a secret intelligence court as part of a national security investigation, according to an internal report of the 2006 episode.F.B.I. officials blamed an “apparent miscommunication” with the unnamed Internet provider, which mistakenly turned over all the e-mail from a small e-mail domain for which it served as host. The records were ultimately destroyed, officials said. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/washington/17fisa.html?ex=1360990800&en=adb2c839abd93506&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink