Letters to the Editor – Weekly Issue of January 10, 2011
A reader writes in about email piracy.
January 24, 2011
E-mail piracy
John Hughes makes some good points in his column, "WikiLeaks's real victim: old-school code of trust" (Dec. 20, 2010). Perhaps the most important one is the stifling effect that WikiLeaks will have on diplomatic communications. Fear of further message pirating makes it hard to engage in the frank communications that are often so important to diplomacy. Yet where was this stand on the principle that hacking private e-mails is bad during the so-called Climategate e-mail thefts? Researchers are now curtailing the content and number of e-mail exchanges to the detriment of scientific progress. E-mail pirating is wrong, and both diplomacy and climate science are the worse for it.
Charles Keller