Personal Technology: How to be sure an indiscreet email does not land you in jail

Jeremy Wagstaff | Mon, 01/12/2009 3:58 PM | Sci-Tech

An indiscreet email that falls into the wrong hands can land you in jail.

Take the case of David and Fiona Fulton, a British missionary couple in Gambia. According to The Times, an email critical of the country's president fell into the hands of a Gambian who promptly forwarded it to the Gambian police.

The couple, hoping for leniency, pleaded guilty to sedition. Without luck: In December, the court sentenced them to a year in jail with hard labor.

If you're working in a foreign country, how can you avoid a fate like this? Well, there are technical solutions but they aren't much use without a good dose of common sense.

The first one is to comply with a country's laws. Gambia has been ruled by one man since 1994, and, in the words of Amnesty International, is a country where "fear rules, and arbitrary arrests, detentions and human rights violations translate into a culture of silence.

"All public protests have ceased. Self-censorship of the media is the rule rather than the exception, and individuals remain silent when their human rights are violated."

In other words, not a place you should be openly questioning the sanity of the president.

This is also a story about email. Email is an illusion. It feels private, but it's not. It feels like a letter - one to one - but it's not. It feels secure, but it's not.

Emails can be copied to other people easily by the sender.

Emails can be forwarded. To anyone. Without the sender's permission or knowledge.

Emails can be intercepted by more or less anyone.

Let's take these issues one by one. Although emails feel like letters of old, they're not really. It's easy to add another email address in the To or Cc fields.

You can even create mailing lists to send the email to large numbers of people via what feels like one email address.

And once they're in the hands of a recipient, that person can do what they like with them. They can forward them to other people, post them on a website or blog, or copy and paste the contents into a document. Your words are very much no longer your own.

In fact, you have no control over your email even before it has reached its intended recipient. Most emails are sent in what is called plain text, meaning that it*s not encrypted. Think postcard rather than sealed envelope.

This means that anyone who wants to - and with a modicum of knowledge - can grab your email between your computer and the computer of your correspondent.

That could be at any point on the Internet: It could be over the wireless connection in a cafe you're using to access the Internet. It could be at the Internet company providing that connection. Or it could be at any of the computers the email passes through on the way to your correspondent.

Now there's not much you can do once your email has reached its recipient. They can do with it what they will, and you'll be none the wiser.

(And this need not necessarily be about politics. If you're dissing your boss on company email, or being rude about the head of the village fete committee in an email to other committee members, be ready for that email to find its way into the wrong hands.)

So it pays to select your recipients as carefully as you select your words. Don't write something sensitive and then send it to people who might not be aware of its sensitivity.

If you live in a country where you think the president really is mad, and dangerous, then maybe think twice before you commit those thoughts to an email.

If you still feel the urge to write those words, or if your profession requires your writing sensitive emails, there are tools to help.

First off, if you want to be sure that the person you're sending the email to is following your request not to distribute the email more broadly, there are services such as ReadNotify.com.

Among other things, ReadNotify.com will tell you when and whether an email you sent someone has been forwarded to someone else. The service also boasts a feature that will force the email to self-destruct within a certain period, or when the recipient tries to copy, print or forward it.

A service like this is for the paranoid, but in the case of the Fultons, it might have saved them.

Still, I don't use this service and I think it's a little over the top. A better solution is the commonsense one: Don't send sensitive stuff to people you don't trust to be discreet about it.

So to the last bit. How do you ensure that snooping eyes don't read your emails before they reach their intended recipient?

Not enough people do this, and more should. This bit is not quite as easy as it should be, but the good news is that it's a lot easier than it could be. Basically, you need to encrypt your email - convert it from a postcard to a sealed envelope with a big lock on it that only the recipient can open.

Next column I'll explain how to do that. In the meantime, if you're in a country - or a company * where these things matter, think twice before you hit send.

@ Copyright

Jeremy Wagstaff is a commentator on technology and appears regularly on the BBC World Service. He can be found online at jeremywagstaff.com or via email at jeremy@loose-wire.com.

Source : www.thejakartapost.com