Sounds like things are going as planned for Wikileaks[1]:
> RS: One of the unintended consequences is the opposite effect, which is what we've seen with the Department of Defense, and even the State Department, here in the U.S., of trying to make secrets more impenetrable rather than less and trying to take precautions against what has happened from happening again in the future. How do you regard that?
> JA: Well, I think that's very positive. Since 2006, we have been working along this philosophy that organizations which are abusive and need to be [in] the public eye. If their behavior is revealed to the public, they have one of two choices: one is to reform in such a way that they can be proud of their endeavors, and proud to display them to the public. Or the other is to lock down internally and to balkanize, and as a result, of course, cease to be as efficient as they were. To me, that is a very good outcome, because organizations can either be efficient, open and honest, or they can be closed, conspiratorial and inefficient.
At risk of taking bait, they explicitly don't believe in full transparency.
They've backed and associated with various privacy groups and suggested that individuals and groups not in the public interest deserve privacy. Assange has complicated that a little by releasing personal, unredacted emails, but it's been their stated intent at least.
Give that transcript another read: "organizations which are abusive and need to be [in] the public eye". That's not decrying privacy, its decrying use of privacy to hide abusive behaviors. I haven't seen Wikileaks accused of that; the usual accusation is that their public behaviors are politically motivated, which is very different than alleging internal corruption.
Wikileaks claims they use leaks to serve the public's interest. That makes them a public interest organization.
Being politically motivated can very much be a form of abuse. When you have the ability to significantly hinder or tear down public organizations through leaking, I think the public deserves to know how Wikileaks decided what to leak, how they are funded, and what interests they represent.
Simple hypothetical scenario: Wikileaks gets compromising information about a left-leaning and a right-leaning organization, but they only decide to make public one of those leaks because they're biased. Or they receive some damaging info, and use it to trade for political or personal favors in return for suppressing the leak.
Given that there are so many ways that Wikileaks could abuse the public's trust, their 'transparency' rhetoric very much should apply to themselves.
One reason why Wikileaks should not wish full public transparency is that they don't want to create any barrier for would-be leakers to start talking to them. Because then they won't get as many leaks.
This is exactly the rationale behind why reporters frequently wish to keep their own sources private, even while they are busy publishing things that other organizations wish they wouldn't.
Quite honestly, when wikileaks releases material such as the Podesta emails, undoctored (most Podesta emails are verifiable by checking google's DKIM signatures), it does not matter what wikileaks objectives and motives are and if they are ethically clean.
Corruption is still corruption, no matter if it is made public by a "good" organization or another corrupt organization.
The corrupt organization does not get a free pass just because their competitors might be even more corrupt (and wikileaks might know that and hold back that information).
The question is not whether we should give corrupt organizations a pass (we shouldn't), it's whether we should try to keep Wikileaks honest, given that its position gives it strong incentives to do shady things without any transparency.
Wikileaks' core activity forces it to walk a very very thin moral and ethical line. I think we the public have obligation to make sure they don't cross it, especially if we benefit from the leaks.
I'll note that in another context, it was for a long time not alright for prosecutors to use illegally obtained evidence, in order to discourage prosecutors and police from breaking the law, even at the cost of potentially letting criminals go free. Why doesn't that logic apply here?
Being politically motivated can very much be a form of abuse.
When you have the ability to significantly hinder or tear down public organizations through leaking [...]
If there is no (major) wrongdoing, you cannot just tear them down. The organization needs to be corrupt in the first place.
it's whether we should inspect Wikileaks itself,
given that its position gives it strong incentives to do shady things
without any transparency.
I don't see anything suggesting strong incentives to do shady things, can you elaborate please?
I see the opposite, however, they got strong incentives NOT to do shady things, because if they are caught even once doing shady things, their reputation is in the gutter and nobody will ever listen to them again.
That is not to say that they got no political bias and even political bias. When the emails you obtained contained Hillary asking why they cannout just "drone him" (aka Assange), you might take that a bit personally too. But political bias and personal bias is in no way evidence for "shady things" and wrongdoing.
But yes, wikileaks too should be scrutinized, and I think it is, by pretty much everybody, the government, it's agencies, the media.
Still, so far, after a decade of operation, there is no proof wikileaks did anything sinister, and the best attempts so far to discredit wikileaks was coming for their leader with rape charges instead of discrediting what the organization is doing.
And yes again, we the public should not stop to be vigilant and continue to scrutinize wikileaks.
> I see the opposite, however, they got strong incentives NOT to do shady things, because if they are caught even once doing shady things, their reputation is in the gutter and nobody will ever listen to them again
Quite the opposite happens even in this thread. Are you aware of [1] and [2] and [3]? Do you think that incident sent their reputation to the gutter?
> If there is no (major) wrongdoing, you cannot just tear them down. The organization needs to be corrupt in the first place.
I'm not so sure that's true. As the size of an organization grows, the probability that someone in it will write an e-mail that looks incredibly damning when leaked approaches 1. That's true regardless of whether there is any actual corrupt behavior, but the political damage is done regardless. IMO, the public is generally not great at teasing apart real misconduct from stupid private e-mails, because the public either lacks or chooses to ignore context.
I know in this day and age it's not very popular to say that things should be kept from the public, but I'd like to point out the example of the legal system. Judge often decide that evidence should not be shown to juries because the evidence is inflammatory and will cause bias. Sometimes showing more evidence leads to less truth, not more. Obviously, Wikileaks is not a court, but it does choose who gets to see what, and they have some idea of how the public will react to what is revealed. But we have no real idea how they internally make that decision.
> I don't see anything suggesting strong incentives to do shady things, can you elaborate please?
Sure -- this is an organization that often gets illegally obtained information from perhaps anonymous sources. Because the sources are by definition secret or inaccessible, and yet the information can be very damaging, there's always the temptation for illicit dealings. Here are some possibilities:
- Someone in Wikileaks uses the information to blackmail the target of a leak
- The target of a leak gets wind of it and tries to buy off Wikileaks
- Outside actors (e.g. the Russian government) effectively use Wikileaks as a 'neutral' channel to cloak their interference in the political affairs of another country. This may in fact be what is happening today, but we can't be sure because again -- Wikileaks is not transparent.
- A Wikileaks staffer is arrested or otherwise threatened by a government to do their bidding
Contrast this how major news organizations handle sources and leaks: journalists form a professional body with their own journalistic code of ethics and conduct. Leaks are evaluated for their newsworthiness and sources are scrutinized.
Obviously, traditional media organizations aren't perfect either, but they are far more open and transparent than Wikileaks is, because there are institutional norms developed over decades that constrain their behavior.
In a perfect world, Wikileaks would be open and transparent in their process of how they evaluate and pass on leaks, so we can be sure that they're not being unduly influenced or using it to advance a hidden agenda.
You talked about incentives to do shady things, but only provided examples of theoretical abuse (there is no indication any of which ever happened).
Of course there is a danger of abuse, but I fail to see how shadiness is being incentivized by the structure of wikileaks and the work they do.
All your examples apply to traditional journalists as well, by the way.
Wikileaks has their own code of conduct and ethics. I fail to see how their self-imposed code is any less valid than the self-imposed code of traditional journalists.
wikileaks claims it evaluates and scrutinizes their sources. So far it seems they actually did that, and did not fall for any hoax.
Traditional journalists also claim they evaluate their sources, and most of them did not fall for any hoax.
Both don't do so transparently, in fact journalists went to jail for not being transparent and disclosing their sources, so I fail to see how traditional journalists are any better or worse than wikileaks. The lack of transparency when it comes to sources is a feature and not a failure, protecting said sources, for both wikileaks and traditional journalism.
It's a bold claim to state that traditional journalists are more open and trustworthy simply because they have been around longer (the organizations, not the individuals of course).
Regular news organizations reported the Iraq had WMDs because the government sources said so, without any actual evidence. Or published fake Hitler Diaries. Meaning it's not all that rosy and checked and ethical as you make it out to be.
I don't see the "contrast" you claim exists. If anything, wikileaks has a better track record than a lot of traditional media organizations when it comes to publishing verified information, so far.
PS: The likes of Murdoch and Bezos prove outside influence in journalism is a real thing to worry about.
This is a very reasonable point, and I have some real questions about the recent failure to redact in the Wikileaks releases. That said...
> The question is not whether we should give corrupt organizations a pass (we shouldn't)
The majority of the criticism I've seen absolutely misses this step. It treats "Wikileaks is shady" or even "Assange might be a sex criminal" as a rebuttal to "this thing in this email you sent is incredibly unethical". Time and again, the discussion of Wikileaks ethics comes up only when they embarrass someone, as a defense for the person embarrassed.
I'm not sure what to do about that. Ideally, I think we'd do it the opposite way - the published emails that weren't ethical embarrassments are a way bigger violation of privacy. I'd like to see Wikileaks held to account for publishing harmless and personal messages, while seeing the leak subjects held to account where the things they did were actually bad.
Good point. I noticed that many of the people questioned about info in the leaks don't answer the questions, but just state that the info was obtained illegally. Q: "The email says you did X wrong thing. Is that true." A: "That email was obtained from Russion hackers!" Q: "Maybe, but in any case, did you do X?" A: "Russian hackers are bad!"
> Wikileaks claims they use leaks to serve the public's interest. That makes them a public interest organization.
That's some pretty intense equivocation from where we started. Acting in the public interest does not make you "a public interest". The details of Chelsea Manning's gender identity don't influence the ethical status of her leaks.
Assange's claim (which is not my claim) seems to be that groups with structural power and objective control over people's lives should be forced into transparency or inefficient secrecy. That's largely governments, and agencies like the DNC that shape them. It's also militaries, powerful investment banks, and other groups like utilities which can control access to credit or basic needs.
None of that is representative of Wikileaks. Their influence all happens at one remove, by doing things which the public reacts to. If their disclosures on X are accurate and the public gets mad about X, that can be a direct conversation between X and the public that need not involve them. "Abusive" here seems to mean groups that can take direct financial/legally/physical action on people.
Having said all of that, I understand how selective enforcement works. If you know that a disclosure will harm a person, and take that act to achieve your interests, it's a cop-out to blame "the public" if you're choosing what to disclose. But it's relevant that Assange has made it quite clear that he's disclosing to hurt Clinton; his political motivation is already public knowledge.
There's really no good answer here. You can explain how you make your decisions, but "not leaking a document" is inherently a secretive act. No one can be sure your choice was honest and public-spirited unless you do reveal the document, so all that's left is faith. That's part of why Snowden and other leakers have gone through respected news orgs, because if someone's judgement is the deciding factor you might as well choose well-regarded judgement.
I don't have much of that faith in Assange at this point. I think his leaks are probably selective and politically motivated. It would be interesting to know who funds them and what they say internally, but that couldn't possibly clear up the whole question. After all, if Assange reads one paper about Clinton and one about Trump, and says "the one about Clinton is worth leaking, but the one about Trump isn't in the public interest", how could you possibly evaluate that claim without both leaks?
But none of that means Wikileaks is equivalent to the groups he's demanding disclosure for. Ethical questions on our part do not amount to hypocrisy on his part, and it's still a distinction worth drawing.
Well, Wikileaks goes and does things like "leak" a bunch of Turkish emails containing nothing which "exposes" government action and which does put ordinary citizens -- many of them already vulnerable -- at risk.
At that point Wikileaks needs to be auditable to find out who decided that would be a good thing to do and why.
Fair point. I'm honestly horrified that Wikileaks did that, and it should probably make prospective leakers question their judgement with material that could endanger private citizens.
I was speaking the to larger claim that Wikileaks owes us transparency to avoid being hypocritical, which I still don't accept. But at this point, they might well owe some transparency not as a public establishment but as some people who screwed up badly with the power they were given.
There's no way to know if a powerful organization is abusive, anyway. I'm willing to bet my aunt's knitting group isn't abusing anyone outside its membership.
I'm being flip, but there's real substance here. A government, bank, utility, or military has direct power over people. They can cut people off from money, property, or freedom without any offering any recourse or external accountability, and that makes them potentially abusive to the public.
A private citizen, hobby group, or business with strong competitors is generally not at risk of abusing the public. They don't have the power, or couldn't sustain it while behaving badly.
So there is a narrative where we can decline "full transparency" while demanding transparency from public actors. The role of media (and Wikileaks) here is complicated, because they lack direct power but can still have predictable influences on the world; even so, we don't have to grant privacy as a totally symmetric right.
I agree that as a matter of policy, perhaps media organizations and Wikileaks shouldn't be held to the same standards as governments.
But that's not a distinction that Assange makes in his rhetoric, and I'm doubtful it's one he will make in practice either. Would Wikileaks really hold off on publishing if it came across a damaging leak about a news organization?
I feel Assange and his supporters do a great disservice to the public debate by oversimplifying things. Sometimes secrets are necessary for the proper functioning of our governments.
Stalin is an interesting choice [1]. He was very much in a position to say nice night tonight, then change his mind a month later and have all of the records altered.
Maybe they're just OK with being "closed, conspiratorial and inefficient." It's not hypocrisy unless they insist on choosing something they're denying others, and they aren't necessarily.
No. Wikileaks isn't interested in revealing your emails. They go after people in positions of power who have demonstrated the willingness to abuse that power.
There's not necessarily a relationship, it's often just people blurting rumours at a reception, commentary from opposition activists and so on. What's their abuse here? That years ago, they had enough sympathy to a nation that Assange is on crusade against now?
'Blurted' (thinking this is how a diplomatic reception works is straining) utterances don't end up on Wikileaks, and the united states isn't different now, for better or worse, than it was any number of years ago. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with this. If you don't personally agree with Assange that's one thing, but I think it's irrational to think that accepting his goals, you should still be forgiving of collaborators.
are they a governing agency with authority over people, acting under the auspices of a democratic charter ? Democratic government is supposed to be open and transparent. There is no reason for it not to be. Which is why WL do things like show secret anti-democratic cooperation between government and corporations.
I see. So the interesting moral claim is not "the end justify the means" (which is too obvious) but rather "For every mean there exists at least one end that can justify it", which is controversial.
You have to dig a little deeper to understand the actual mission of wikileaks I believe.
Their claim is that technology allows governments to conspire. Not in an Alex Jones kind of way but simply that technology allow governments and people in power to exchange information effectively enough to coordinate various plans.
Some of these are good some of them are bad, but ultimately the idea that the governments can conspire is bad and so Wikileaks want to make it so impractical to use technology to communicate that they are forced to use other less effective means.
You can't only understand wiki-leaks if you only understand them as a political organization. You have to understand them as an techno-activist organization using information to destroy the way information is used by those in power.
Yeah, because people in power have always had so much trouble until e-mail. The most that can come from this is that people who might not have gotten the memo before, will have now: conspire in private, over drinks.
No need to take a cross-country train to meet your counterparts anymore; everyone ends up rubbing shoulders with everyone else far more frequently these days.
> or they can be closed, conspiratorial and inefficient
The problem is he's describing exactly the modus operandi of some bad actors on wall street. Cozy relationships, exploiting advantages (gained through unethical, or illegal means), and general obfuscation of how they're able to extract fortunes from the financial system.
If you create more of this, that's not a remedy, it creates more opportunities for bad actors.
Am I truly the only person who thinks Wikileaks is a government run honey pot?
Of course I don't have any substantial evidence but just looking at it, it seems like a contrived apparatus with a James Bond like villain at the top, branding that looks like it came out of a B rated movie and 'leaks' that seem serious enough to get the media up in a frenzy and attract anyone with any real leaks.
I wouldn't be surprised to read about its conception by some mid-level CIA agent in 30-40 years.
I don't think they're government run, but I've been seeing quite a lot of information recently from Wikileaks that seems to be fabricated. Maybe I'm not doing enough research and the information I'm reading is just made up by underground conspiracy sites that tag the Wikileaks name on it for attention. Whatever the case, Wikileaks from 5 years ago seems a lot more reliable than Wikileaks today. At least to me.
It's actually pretty hard to create convincing email headers across thousands of emails.
Many of these highly eyebrow raising emails are CC'd to gmail accounts, for example. If it was fake, you could ask Google for the logs to prove at least it wasn't received.
And if there are DKIM headers, then that's certainly strong evidence that the header and body are legit.
The web interface does show some of these things, but I think with Wikileaks you can always get a torrent of the raw files they've obtained. At least, that was usually the case. The DKIM information is verifiable, and if Wikileaks was overtly fabricating something, people would love to be able to attest to that fact. Hillary Clinton could say that Wikileaks is overtly lying, but doesn't, because there are multiple ways of verifying this particular leak and it would be nonsensical to try to outright deny it. Instead, she tries to Putin her way out of any discussion involving this. Do you think she would do that if she could just deny?
I'm not stating it as a fact but a mere possibility that I draw from what is publicly available. I'm sorry if it offends your renegade-hackerman world view but it is hardly farfetched or beyond the capabilities of the US government to set up and control a honeypot that intercepts real leaks.
US government takes security very seriously. A real organization like wikileaks would not even see the light of day.
The third option is for organizations to store loads of credible misinformation in addition to the "real" info. Probably this false information will be generated by software, so generating it will be very cheap. Hackers will have the problem of knowing what's real and what only looks real. Wikileaks will have difficulty maintaining credibility as hackers post lots of false data.
(It's not like this problem hasn't been solved by the intelligence agencies already.)
> Hackers will have the problem of knowing what's real and what only looks real.
So will legitimate internal members of the organization.
Haven't you ever had to wade through your company's intranet wiki trying to figure out which documents were are actually useful versus the giant piles of things that are outdated, wrong, superceded, etc?
That won't work because you'll be adding noise to your own data. You'll have trouble searching through your own data-sets for "real" stuff. If you do something to designate what's real, you're just back to square one.
o me, that is a very good outcome, because organizations can either be efficient, open and honest, or they can be closed, conspiratorial and inefficient.
This seems like a false dichotomy.
Wish I had more time to go in to why I think that. One counter example might be The Manhattan Project.
Could you do the manhattan project over 15 years without a leak? Time is a factor in these things.
And I don't think necessarily the people on the project would think what they are working on as 'abusive' per say. Compared to killing civilians from a helicopter, being corrupt, dodging taxes or spying on the entire world like the gestapo, the manhattan project probably had a different feeling to it.
Was the Manhattan Project efficient? How do you go about assessing that? Do you have any term of comparison? Do you think it's unlikely that it would have been done sooner and cheaper if it didn't have to be kept secret?
Well, for one thing, everyone working on the project was kept in the same big research compound in Los Alamos. No one in, no one out. It had the dual purpose of efficiency (all the researchers in one place) and secrecy (none of said researchers were allowed to leave).
> Dimon uses email but is known to keep his replies short and factual, favoring "yes," "no" and "thank you."
I mean, come on. Everyone uses email. Having said that, everyone also knows there are things you put in email and things you only discuss face to face, or over the phone.
And the dividing line doesn't necessarily have anything to do about breaking the law.
Everyone on wall street has had an email they typed up get into the hands of someone who they wish it wouldn't.
Whether its shitting all over an analyst for not being good at their job that got back to the analyst or doing something similar to a CEO, these things can harm your future relationship with these people who you may need to do business with again.
You rant over the phone, you issue actionable orders via email for the same reason. One has no trace, the other has a record you can point to.
>Having said that, everyone also knows there are things you put in email and things you only discuss face to face, or over the phone.
A lot of people don't know this. One of my favorite classes in business school was "Business Communications." a lot of the stuff seemed really basic, but I'm amazed how much of it is disregarded in the wild.
First job out of school (early 1990s), working at a "big" consulting company. All the new hires had it drilled into them that you do not talk about work outside of work. And you never discuss anything client-specific in public, on a plane or in a cab, in a restaurant, etc.
Email wasn't a worry, nobody had it then. I think they had an internal system of some sort but the line staff consultants didn't have access.
Also, emails can be subject to discovery during a lawsuit. If you want to discuss things you don't want some lawyer looking over a year from now, you keep all discussions face to face or via phone. Email is only for things that should have a papertrail.
Personal anecdote - I can confirm this as one recently deposed in a corporate lawsuit that I'm not even a party to. Email systems are awash with information that most people would never have expected to become public. You see all kinds of stuff in emails by employees: office gossip, embarrassing comments, foul language, snark about fellow employees and competitors and the company, non-work-related comms .... all of it subject to being twisted by opposition lawyers to try to bolster their case and which can end up verbatim in front of the eyes of a jury.
Not actually. I've been a consultant for a few years now, and have worked with executives who have their assistants print out their email for them in order to review. It isn't limited to Wall Street.
Though it's probably something we'll see less and less of as the years go by.
Emails seem like a big risk, with so much data even if you are trying to do everything right you have to handle everything perfectly or it just gives other people more stuff against you. I feel like the recent leaks are good examples of that
Furthermore, if you have an entire conversation, its much easier to cherry pick specific parts to make the person look however you want them to look.
If you're a big enough target, having lots of conversations is much worse than having none, because you will make a mistake, or something will be misinterpreted, either accidentally or willfully.
Ya, I don't want to get into a political debate at all but a friend on Facebook said Clinton's emails have "pretty much proof that she murdered one of her staffers". Turns out that if you give people 60,000 emails and they will find proof for everything.
On which note, I'm a bit amazed by people I see insist that "there's nothing objectionable in Hillary's emails".
Specific content aside, it would downright miraculous for 60k emails to not include something embarrassing to someone, and setting an expectation for that just commits us to lying or condemning anyone who uses email.
> everyone also knows there are things you put in email and things you only discuss face to face, or over the phone.
Sadly, no. I often have to remind co-workers not to discuss things like patents or license issues in email, IRC, etc. These are seasoned developers who absolutely should know better - we do take training in this every year - but it still keeps happening.
My first job was at an investment bank. I was taught very early on that I needed to watch what I said in my emails. I'm not sure if it was true or not, but someone told me that every month, someone from compliance looked over a random selection of my emails and my manager would have been informed if they found something wrong.
What everyone on Wall Street appreciates is that your emails are a permanent record and should be treated accordingly. When there's a real risk that your emails will later turn up in court, you are gonna be a lot more careful about what you say. Even things that seem innocuous when you write them may not look good if they come under the spotlight later (something like "Hey John, the code in that repo looks messy..." may come back to bite you if it turns up in court). So I was taught to always keep to facts in emails rather than opinions ("this data set has 246 invalid phone numbers and 20 fake email addresses" is a fact... "this data looks messy" is an opinion subject to all sorts of interpretation later).
You might think that there's nothing that you have to hide. If that's true, then by all means, say what you want in your _personal_ email. But when you are using your company email, remember that you don't have many rights to privacy there and so treat it accordingly.
I once dated a lady who did data recovery and "e-discovery" for the legal department of a large corporation. A large part of her job involved grabbing disk images of people's hard drives, and then digging through them and people's email, looking for any information relevant to lawsuits, internal investigations, subpeonas, etc..
"His staff filters important messages, prints them out and puts them on his chair for review"
A desire to filter out noise and apply their attention in a selective manner is probably the biggest motivation to avoid email. At this level, I imagine people would like to receive a concise written or spoken summary, think about the content, discuss it with the relevant people and then make a decision. Since they control their own time, and have staff to respond to "tactical emergencies," they're free to organize their schedule and staff in order to optimize the decision-making process.
"There's a real danger when you're really famous. I can have a drink or two at night; I don't need to have an apparatus that, in a drunken joke, even, I could say something, go to sleep, and wake up in the morning and my career be over."
Its incredible how there's all this email related stuff in the press and not one word about email encryption. Pretty much everything supports S/MIME, yet almost no one uses it. The DNC hack could have been avoided if those emails were encrypted, for example. Hackers would then also have to get private keys on top of data. That's another layer to get through.
I suspect baby boomer led management think memorizing passphrases and using encryption is "too hard" and are calling the shots right now and we're all paying the price for it. We should be teaching each other and the younger generation that email encryption should be seen the same way we look at https now. Not too long ago https was regarded as for just 'credit card stuff only' because it 'cost time and resources.'
Its sad that something as critical as email doesn't have end to end encryption.
I'm a big fan of passphrases for important sites. For most sites I use a randomly generated pw that's stored in a password manager. I use separate pw managers for home (1password) and work (lastpass).
Since a pw manager can be cracked, for important sites (financial , email, etc), I make up a sentence that describes my feelings about the site. These I keep memorized. As a bonus, as my feelings about the site change, it's a great prompt to update my password.
I'd like to throw a layer of physical security into the mix (eg one of those usb keys), but it seems like there still aren't universally accepted options. Anyone have suggestions for this?
It's not highly relevant because in both corporate and government, your email can be legally reviewed as part of a legal case or investigation, where the security employed isn't material.
I'm not saying encryption isn't a good idea. I'm just saying people haven't discussed it much in this thread because it's not really relevant to the primary concerns of the people talked about in this article.
I have worked with C-level executives at several very large companies. Due to the nature of regulation at companies of this size, many of these individuals are under subpoena almost continuously. As a result of the record keeping requirements of a person under subpoena, their life is much simpler if they conduct all business in person and keep no files. They use e-mail exclusively for interactions that are intended to be public. Any business communication to them is usually scheduled through a secretary and done in in-person meetings with projected slides.
It's not that they have anything to hide -- but at the same time, corporate espionage is a real thing and you have to protect trade secrets and you know the government receives a copy of every e-mail and document that you do.
For interest, at a previous company were told to cc in legal for sensitive communications and write something in the subject header to say it was confidential and for legal review, even though you had no expectation for them to join the conversation. This put the emails into some privileged information category. It wouldn't stop a court getting access if they wanted to read comms but it significantly increased the benchmark to gain access as it was a client lawyer conversation.
Not necessarily. They just don't want the risk of their emails being used against them due to misinterpretation.
A great story I heard from a former employer was a lawsuit around a new sleeping pill. One person taking the drug ended up killing his wife while on it (in combination with a ton of alcohol and other drugs). The drug manufacturer was sued and decided to vigorously defend the safety of the drug.
Well, some low-level lawyer in the company decided to spout about the science of drug development (have no actual education around it) and said in an email "maybe the dose is too high?".
Slam dunk. That statement looked incriminating. The company quickly settled after that email was found. Just not worth the time or money to fight it. A settlement was the cheapest way out.
The phrase "something to hide" has a loaded connotation that implies wrong-doing. Everyone has something they'd rather not be public, but the phrase means more than that.
To add to this, there are also lots of things that can be misinterpreted or taken out of context. I imagine that most people would treat email differently if they knew that all of their emails would become public information. Smart executives at large companies simply assume this and send emails accordingly.
The entire public sector, and most organizations over 1000 people. Bureaucracy is what happens when your dunbar-number sized network overflows and starts to metastasize.
When people say they work for a company that is collaborative and non-hierarchical, I've found it either means they are a manipulative and delusional tyrant or they are the sucker at the table.
My large organization manages this pretty successfully by having small teams that don't interact much.
It's absolutely hierarchical from a macro level, but engineers live in pretty collaborative 5-10 person leaf nodes and we don't need to interact across the tree very often.
What you describe might exist for senior management, but they generally take cross-team dependencies to be a bug in the way the tree was partitioned, and fix it at the next re-org.
Wouldn't you prefer encrypted email more than a conversation. You do get a lot of self destructing emails too. And custom protocols included.
And they use phone calls too I presume. Those would also come under the same scrutiny right?
In some cases, they need to preserve email in case the company is sued and emails are subject to discovery. If these guys want to talk in private, they talk face to face. Email is only for things that should have a papertrail.
Public and other regulated companies are subject to minimums on the retention policy. They do have to keep them just because they were created.
The standard enforcement protocol is to block all non-company webmail (and other messaging systems) and SMTP so everything runs through corporate Exchange or IM configured with the appropriate retention policy.
I expect that as creating and dealing with wiretap recordings gets easier, we'll see email retention policies extended to voice communications. Currently that only exists for certain highly sensitive positions that interact with the public, AFAIK.
> Every member, broker and dealer [...] shall preserve for a period of not less than three years, [...] Originals of all communications received and copies of all communications sent [...] (including inter-office memoranda and communications) [...]
The thing I always think when I read articles like this (and this one from the NY Times about Senators & Email [1]) is that they don't use email because they don't have to. They have jobs that come with many assistants & aides who can communicate electornically on their behalf. They started working in these positions before email became the norm for business/professional communication and happen to have had careers that span both eras.
I wonder if these people are the last (or some of the last) people that don't use email to communicate.
This doesn't seem so crazy. Google deletes emails after a few months for rank/file and 6 months for executives for the sake of avoiding lawsuits as well.
> ... after a few months for rank/file and 6 months for executives
What's your source for this? I can easily believe they delete emails. But I would expect them to be subject to various laws about email retention, and those laws typically require companies to hold on to emails for years.
Not covered in this article, some people simply never transitioned to new technology because they are older, unfamiliar/inclined with tech and didn't have to.
A colleague who was at a fairly known investment company told me of a senior exec whose PA left printed emails and left them on his desk. He would then write replies on the paper version and the PA would type and send them.
Nothing to do with secrecy. He was just older and never adapted to computers. I feel this logic fits occam's razor nicely rather than being over conspiratorial. It's not like you can't use email for efficiency, and do the 'lets take this offline' response when going somewhere sensitive/secretive.
I wonder how many tech executives don't use email?
I've got a feeling Tim Cook doesn't use a computer, maybe just an iPad with a carefully curated list of messages and financial reports for him to browse.
>Janet Napolitano never used email as the head of DHS
i know at least one candidate for President of US who right now is very very sorry for not following such best practice while at her last gov job, and who has basically become the showcase of "Trying to dodge discovery the Wrong Way".
> RS: One of the unintended consequences is the opposite effect, which is what we've seen with the Department of Defense, and even the State Department, here in the U.S., of trying to make secrets more impenetrable rather than less and trying to take precautions against what has happened from happening again in the future. How do you regard that?
> JA: Well, I think that's very positive. Since 2006, we have been working along this philosophy that organizations which are abusive and need to be [in] the public eye. If their behavior is revealed to the public, they have one of two choices: one is to reform in such a way that they can be proud of their endeavors, and proud to display them to the public. Or the other is to lock down internally and to balkanize, and as a result, of course, cease to be as efficient as they were. To me, that is a very good outcome, because organizations can either be efficient, open and honest, or they can be closed, conspiratorial and inefficient.
1: http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2034040,00...