Email isn’t really private, so think before sending

I was in the middle of an email to an old friend this week and had written a sentence about a mutual acquaintance that was more than 50 percent positive but contained a snarky word or two. I paused. “Is that necessary?” I thought to myself.

No, it wasn’t. So I deleted the sentence.

Maybe it was the Neera Tanden effect. But I think it was really the Henry Blodget effect. Blodget’s emails were made public in 2002 by former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. A year later, the Securities and Exchange Commission hit young Henry with a $4 million fine and a permanent ban from the securities industry. The issue was that, although the emails contained honest commentary on the dot-com companies Blodget was following as an analyst for Merrill Lynch, his published research reports did not.

So in that case the emails themselves were actually a lot less embarrassing than what Blodget had been saying in public. But I do remember taking the lesson from the whole affair that nothing one writes in an email is entirely private.

Since then, email revelation after email revelation has only reinforced that view. Sometimes, as with Blodget, the emails are obtained by a prosecutor. Sometimes they are unthinkingly forwarded by an acquaintance. Sometimes they are cut and pasted and sent to a newspaper by somebody who doesn’t like you. And sometimes they are acquired and handed over to Wikileaks by Russian hackers who break into the account of somebody you send lots of emails to.

That last is what happened to Tanden, the president and chief executive officer of the Center for American Progress, a Democratic think tank. She communicates frequently with her predecessor at CAP, John Podesta, who happens to be Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign chairman. In March, Podesta fell for a phishing scam most likely run by Russian spies. And for the past few weeks, Wikileaks has been sharing the resulting bounty with the world.

The Tanden message that has gotten the most attention was a less-than-friendly description of Stanford law professor and former presidential candidate Larry Lessig. On his blog, Lessig reacted magnanimously, writing: “We all deserve privacy. The burdens of public service are insane enough without the perpetual threat that every thought shared with a friend becomes Twitter fodder.”

Yes, we all deserve privacy! But by this point we should all be aware that we don’t quite have it with emails. And if you can’t say something nice, maybe just pick up the phone.

Justin Fox is a columnist for Bloomberg View.