Unless Gordon is an Exodus customer I'll assume he was sent the communique' by an Exodus customer. There's probably some truck with that customer, but if Gordon is only acting in his role as a reporter then, well, short of creating an imminent threat to someone's life (like revealing the whereabouts of someone in a witness protection program) or libel or a few other similar kinds of problems generally reporters report if they think something is newsworthy. Put another way, just about half of everything one generally finds interesting, from the white house's handling of certain emails to what the tobacco companies tried to do to thwart suits against them was once marked confidential. Almost everything interesting gets marked confidential. Put yet another way; If one's only plan is to mark a letter sent out to every customer (what? hundreds?) as marked "customer confidential" and hope that oughta stop it from getting out and that everyone who receives it agrees that it's in their best interest, or ethics, to go along with that confidentiality, then I think they need another plan. Sure, some things, like being let in on some cool products coming down the pike (or 128) and then running to the press would be pretty unsavory. But finding out that there some kind of internecine warfare going on between the vendor you're probably married to (technically, contractually) and some other vendor which is going to change the quality of your service and deciding that if this was brought out into the open, quickly, is a better thing to do with this memo doesn't shock me. Maybe I'm missing something, or maybe someone else is, but if something "company confidential" falls into the hands of a reporter it's generally not confidential for long if it's interesting. And that's not usually considered unethical on the part of the reporter unless as I said someone's life is in danger in some real and immediate way (and not metaphorically.) [spare me the wild analogies like violating a govt secrets act, we're talking about a lousy company confidential memo to customers not atom bomb secrets] On April 3, 2000 at 23:41 ferguson@cisco.com (Paul Ferguson) wrote:
At 08:31 PM 04/03/2000 -0700, Ulf Zimmermann wrote:
And I found that forward very interesting, as we did not get that info and its very valuable for us to know.
For the masses, now:
It is the forwarding of "private" or "confidential" e-mails that I find offensive, not the information or content.
- paul
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