Is e-mail private, or in the public domain?

Many years ago -- the early 1980s to be exact -- I was working for a high-tech firm that was just installing e-mail into all our offices. It was amazing to be able to send computer-based messages to everyone in the building and, eventually, to our other locations.

One day, I received a message about something-or-other from the system administrator. I was surprised to find that she had inadvertently (at least I hope it was inadvertent) attached a document containing the username and password of everyone in our building, from the director on down to the mailroom personnel.

Being the ethical person that I am, I contemplated the mischief that I could do, but dutifully informed her of the security breach so we could engage in a flurry of password-changing throughout the organization. However, I learned a valuable lesson at an early stage -- be very careful what you put into e-mails, because you never know where they will go or how long they will endure.

The point was driven home again to me this week when a friend forwarded to me a piece he found humorous. Imagine my surprise when I recognized it as something I had written in 1995 and posted on a newsgroup. In its current iteration it has no attribution, but has apparently been making the rounds. I queried my friend, who told me he had received it from his cousin who had received it from someone else.

This certainly wasn't anything that I found embarrassing or which I have since repudiated, but it drove home to me the endurance of those things we think impermanent. And it also illustrates how something can receive wide distribution due the influence of the Internet.

This rather long introduction takes me to the topic at hand: an e-mail written to a friend by a journalist attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January. In the e-mail, she gives a candid and disturbing picture of what the delegates were doing and saying behind the scenes.

The friend, for whatever reason, posted the letter on an Internet discussion board, and the game was on. The letter was cross-posted on other sites and found its way into a rather lengthy discussion of the LawMeme board at Yale University Law School. (For that discussion, see http://research.yale.edu/lawmeme/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=938.)

The journalist, at first denying that she had written an e-mail for public consumption, later admitted the authorship, but was aghast that someone she considered a friend would betray her by making a private communication public.

This raises several important questions:

* Should we have an expectation of privacy in things we send, especially to friends, over the Internet? How about to strangers?

* If so, is that expectation reasonable?

* Is it necessary that we mark such things as "confidential" or "do not forward" if we wish them to be kept in confidence -- or is confidentiality the default?

* If someone finds such an item -- initially meant to be private -- in a public forum, is it permissible for that person to discuss or pass on such an item?