Deleted E-Mail Can Leave Incriminating Evidence : Lawsuits: Stupid jokes, love notes, sexist slurs, breached confidences--it’s all there for the finding, computer sleuths warn. Think you’ve killed those messages out? Think again.

Computer sleuth John Jessen knows what e-mail lurks in the heart of America’s workplace, and it’s not pretty.

Stupid jokes. Love notes. Sexist slurs. Breached confidences. All in a day’s work as Jessen dredges computer files for electronic embarrassments that their authors thought long gone.

Electronic mail has revolutionized how corporations communicate, allowing workers to connect with far-flung colleagues in an efficient and often freewheeling forum.

It might be less freewheeling if people knew how many “deleted” e-mail messages are actually saved in their computer systems. They can pile up like little time bombs until someone like Jessen arrives, carrying a court order and a stack of blank memory cartridges.

“Can you really delete e-mail? Sure,” Jessen said. “Does it happen as a common practice? No.”

Jessen is the founder of Electronic Evidence Discovery Inc., a Seattle company that since 1987 has been going after computer evidence in civil lawsuits.

It’s a specialized field, to be sure. Jessen’s only full-time competitor is Computer Forensics Inc., another Seattle firm started by one of his former employees, Joan Feldman.

Business is booming for both of them. The nation’s estimated 25 million to 40 million users of e-mail are growing more comfortable--some say careless--with the medium. And more attorneys are recognizing e-mail’s potential as a source of unguarded information about the companies they’re suing.

“People are very candid talking around the coffee machine,” said attorney Michael Patrick in Palo Alto, Calif. “They seem to behave the same way on the computer.”

“They think they’re speaking confidentially, so they’re off the cuff. They’re very often insulting. What they don’t realize is it’s all being recorded, and often those recordings are stored for a very long time. When you send a message, you lose control over where it goes.”

Los Angeles police officer Laurence Powell learned that lesson after the Rodney King beating in 1991. “Oops!” began a message that Powell typed into his squad car’s computer. “I haven’t beaten anyone this bad in a long time.”

This year, an Air Force pilot’s profane e-mail account of Capt. Scott O’Grady’s rescue in Bosnia was made available on the Internet, much to the Pentagon’s chagrin.

“Pray for the U.N. leadership to get a clue and let us blow these bastards back into the Stone Age,” Capt. Scott Zobrist wrote of the Bosnian Serbs.

Air Force officials said Zobrist, stationed with O’Grady in Italy, sent the e-mail to a few military friends, never suspecting it would be forwarded, and forwarded again, until it was posted on the Internet for anyone to see.

Jessen has his own collection of e-mail tales.

“Hi David,” began one message Jessen retrieved from the files of a company that had fired his client. “Please destroy the evidence on the [case] you and I talked about today. Thx, Laura.”

David’s breezy response, titled “Evidence Destroyed,” was equally incriminating: “Hi Laura. Ack yr msg. And taken care of. Aloha David.”

Many workers think their e-mail is private. It’s not. Federal law allows employers to monitor employees’ e-mail, and even if they don’t, e-mail is fair game in lawsuits. When someone sues a company, the rules of discovery demand that the company produce all relevant business records.

“The fact that they live in a computer rather than a file cabinet doesn’t make any difference to the court,” said Feldman at Computer Forensics.

Often, files retrieved include e-mail thought to have been erased long ago. It survives because most computer systems are geared toward saving data, not deleting it.

Suppose one worker sends an ill-considered e-mail to a colleague at 5 p.m. The recipient logs on the next morning, reads the offending message and immediately deletes it, then phones the sender and makes sure he or she deletes any copies too.

Problem solved? Hardly. They’ve forgotten about their diligent computer system manager, who makes backup tapes of everything on the system every night, then stores those tapes for years.

Or suppose someone downloads an e-mail onto their desktop PC, storing it on the hard drive. Contrary to what most computer users think, a click of the “delete” key doesn’t really erase that file. It merely renames it and makes that spot on the disk available for new data. The file remains, readable by anyone who knows how, until overwritten.

And so the files persist and multiply, aided by technological advances that continually add more storage capacity, more automatic backups, and more redundancies to safeguard data from accidental erasure.

“The computer is like a file cabinet that can open its own drawer, put a file on the copy machine and then slip the copy into another cabinet,” Jessen said. “Sometimes I think it’s alive.”

Jessen and Feldman augment their high-tech detective work by advising companies how to become less vulnerable to computer snoops like themselves.

They recommend regular purges of old data, and they offer tips for avoiding e-mail blunders in the first place. Rule No. 1: Don’t put anything on e-mail that you wouldn’t want a jury to see.

“A lot of it is kind of juvenile, pointless,” Feldman said of most e-mail. “It’s cyber-chatter. Some people seem to have too much time at work.”

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Avoiding E-Mail Trouble

The sleuths who root out damaging e-mail from computer memories also advise companies on how to reduce their own vulnerability.

Some tips on e-mail etiquette from Computer Forensics Inc. of Seattle:

* Ask yourself: Would I want a jury to read this?

* Be polite. Make sure short messages don’t come across as brusque or curt.

* Don’t send offensive jokes or frivolous messages.

* Don’t write anything you wouldn’t want repeated. E-mail can be forwarded to hundreds of people, in and out of a company.

* Work out problems face to face, not on e-mail.

* Protect your password, and always log off when not using the system.

Source: Associated Press