Don't Use These Lame Acronyms If You Don't Want to Get Nabbed by the Feds

[unoti]

Whenever you write an email, you should envision how it'll read as evidence in a court transcript. Envision a jury reading over your shoulder. That's essentially what will happen if there's a preservation order and a court case.

This is just one of tons of reasons why email is overused. Live, interactive, two-way conversations are better for most things. Making better use of interactive conversations does require some planning and discipline, to keep a list of what you need to discuss sorted by person. But the benefits of that practice are numerous, and increased privacy and plausible deniability is a comparatively minor benefit.

A few reasons to prefer interactive discussion to email:

- plausible deniability and increased security

- reduced chance of misunderstanding

- less time spent and potentially wasted carefully crafting the perfect message, because you can monitor your recipients reactions in real time and dynamically alter your delivery depending on which parts are immediately understood and agreed upon

- collaborate on the ideas interactively and rapidly, rather than a simple one way transfer

Email is good for some things, but it's seriously overused.

[protomyth]

I had this illustrated to me early in my career in a mostly harmless way.

I worked on an early-childhood / social work combo grant program as a "Data Consultant"[1]. We were in a building that had celebrated its 100th year, and it had one bathroom. The nurse had accused the males of "poor aiming". In a memo about fairly normal stuff, I included a paragraph in my status rebuking this claim and pointing out we have young children using the bathroom who might not be quite up to our level. I also pointed out this would be something that the early childhood people might need to work on with the children. I am pretty sure every word of it was viewable by a nun since we had one on staff. I was a very sarcastic person and not a bad writer of tales at the time.

About two weeks later, I got a call from the assistant project officer inquiring about this bit of information. He also informed me all of our correspondence internal to the program was reviewed by the project office in DC and a section of my memo was "well reviewed" in said office. Given the data requirements, I am pretty sure there is a box in a warehouse with this memo in it.

Since then, I write e-mails and memos like they will be reviewed.

1) It was a research grant and they needed help with data reporting and I sure as heck didn't come up with that title.

[loup-vaillant]

Then, once the interactive discussion is done and a decision is made, make sure to write it down in an email.

Covering your ass is often more important than covering your tracks.

[Todd]

"They use terms to find evidence of whether someone is trying to hide their activities because evidence of a cover-up is frequently more potent than the evidence of the alleged crime"

Each of these steps towards a surveillance state would be easier to stomach if the path weren't so clearly identified in 20th century fiction.

[codyb]

This doesn't really sound like the surveillance state to me. This is regulators combing through the e-mails of the people they regulate who control vast swathes of the United States and global economies.

And unless you want to bug every single person's office which sounds a lot more like a surveillance state to me, I don't particularly think looking at the activities of people who are taking things offline is particularly egregious.

The funny thing is, if the people just discussed it by e-mail, they might get away if no one ctrl-f's for their terms! Ha!

[current_call]

“Taking a conversation offline provides evidence of intent because if you’re trying to cover your tracks, you probably know what you’re doing is wrong,”

I can't tell if this is big business trying to make investigating white collar crimes harder or the federal government trying to drum up support for mass surveillance. I'm leaning towards the former based on where the article is.

[mhurron]

Why can't it be both? It's not like they're going to use one type of investigative procedure on one group and not on another.

[linkregister]

This article is a waste of space. Clearly if your work emails are being subpoenaed by a federal investigator, you're already under suspicion (the article is talking about federal insider trading investigations). All this means is that if you refer to an out-of-band conversation, then they will look there.

[spudlyo]

I disliked this article as well. Saying 'Ctrl-f' instead of 'search' irks me, it's unprofessional, and furthermore we all know Ctrl-f is forward-char.

[dogma1138]

What's exactly the case here? The Feds won't grab anyone who's PMing some one on Facebook "I'll call you" or "Lets talk on the phone".

This is a very specific case where Traders (that either were under suspicion directly or indirectly through suspicious dealing on an investment firm) were intentionally communicating with each other using office provided communications and constantly asking to go offline or to talk through other means.

This is nothing more than any other pattern one would find out through exploring any other media, for example one of the ways LEO's find illegal activity usually drug related is when by identifying numbers that only receive or make very short calls, this activity is then usually correlated with creating social networks of the phone numbers and what in many cases you get is a binary relationship with phones being used only to receive or make calls.

While this might sound suspicious to you, or just interesting after investigating how those criminal networks work through actual investigations criminologists identified this pattern as direct correlation to illegal activity which can be used as supporting evidence to get a wiretap or a search warrant.

There are a metric ton of various behavior patterns that might be suspicious and are usually related to some sort of a "illicit" activity if you are looking at some one who's leaking information and you have a GPS location on your suspects then some one who's driving every 3rd week out to the middle of no where might be your prime suspect, now he can be stargazing, he can be cheating on his wife, or he can be meeting with a contact or making a dead drop.

[x3n0ph3n3]

I usually defer to a different mode of communication when it's more convenient or appropriate to the discussion. Instead of trying to type a novel to explain something, I'd prefer to engage in a conversation in order to identify parts of the topic that can be skipped. This usually reduces the time cost to communication.

[Todd]

Well, if you cross paths with this new breed of prosecutor, it will be incumbent upon you to prove your innocence. It appears that they no longer need evidence of a crime, just perceived intent. This may be starting in the financial services industry, but it will obviously spread to become a pervasive "best practice" in the future. Couple this with machine learning and the tone of your conversation may eventually be sufficient "proof" of intent.

[jkot]

This is just insane. Email communication is completely open, it is like writing on the postcard.

[lordnacho]

The lines on a trading desk are recorded anyway for regulatory reasons. All this is doing is telling the authorities when it might be a good idea to pull those records.

[mbrownnyc]

Sell side, not buy side.

[PhantomGremlin]

Anyone conspiring to commit criminal acts should remember what Martin Lomasney said[1] about 100 years ago about the importance of discretion:

   Never write if you can speak;
   never speak if you can nod;
   never nod if you can wink.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Lomasney

[task_queue]

Privacy implies guilt. Otherwise, you'd have nothing to hide.

[dogma1138]

This isn't "privacy" this is a pattern if a trader communicated with 50 other traders but only asks 2 others to go offline every time they talk and they do the same that's an artifact that anyone with half a brain would think is worth looking into while investigating financial misconduct.

[totony]

And then you think you're clever and use "call my CP" (for cell phone) and the feds come confiscate all of your hard drives

[rietta]

Wow, so asking for a PGP key or asking if they have TextSecure on their phone must be REALLY bad!

[mhuffman]

What are you trying to encrypt citizen? If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about!

[paste0x78]

BRB TTYL LOL

[rietta]

"We're still on for dinner on Thursday, right?"

Some things are better said in person...

[kctess5]

Why not use PGP?

[SomeCallMeTim]

Because the average person has no idea how to use it?

Because both parties have to have it set up for it to work?

Because setting it up wrong will grant you no protection?

Because it just encrypts the communications in transit but when you're already under suspicion they can grab your computer, which has the unencrypted files on it?

Because in a setting like this (trader's work computers) you're often not even allowed to install any software?

[mikeash]

Surely using PGP would also be a big "investigate me" signal in this context.

[mamon]

When I was a child I loved USA, thought it was great country, and dreamed of visiting it one day. Now, when I'm grown up and finally I can afford intercontinental travel I am seriously afraid to even enter USA. I might be arrested for no reason, or have my cash forfeitured, also for no reason... I think that few remaining free countries in the world are Switzerland, Singapore, Australia, and maybe Hong Kong

[tome]

Citing Singapore and Hong Kong just make you sound a bit silly.