James Murdoch's e-mail defences
Posted by Christie Malry on December 13, 2011 at 11:51 pm
It's an old joke, but it's still funny:
Because it makes e-mails really hard to understand.
> Why?
>> Top-posting in e-mails!
>>> What annoys you the most?
And it looks like James Murdoch will be adopting the top-posting defence to show that, no, he really didn't have any knowledge about the phone hacking that was taking place at the News of the World:
Emails showing James Murdoch was copied into messages where the potential scope of phone hacking at the News of the World was discussed in June 2008 have been released by MPs.One mentions a "nightmare scenario" arising out of a case brought by PFA footballers' union boss Gordon Taylor.Mr Murdoch has said he only read the most recent email in the chain, requesting a meeting.
In the good old days, it was generally seen as better 'netiquette' to not forward great gobs of e-mail on to people. Instead, you were encouraged to include only enough of the earlier e-mails to make it clear to what you were replying, and to include your response below the text, not above it. Now, had this approach been adopted, someone would have had to take a conscious decision precisely what to inform James Murdoch about.
The top-posting craze, which is largely Microsoft's fault, means that enormous chains get constructed very quickly. A great deal of it consists solely of other people's legal disclaimers, so people tend to simply ignore it altogether. Unless expressly instructed to do so, I certainly never go back through pages and pages of old e-mail just in case there may be some nugget I'm expected to have picked up.
An additional defence which James Murdoch may wish to consider is the "I get lots of e-mail, you know" defence. As a director of a major international business, it's naive to presume that he can read and retain all salient information from every e-mail he has ever received. If prosecutors want his head, they're going to need a gun with rather more smoke coming out of it than they have at the moment.
If a director of a major company claims to have no knowledge of an important email message sent to him by an employee, he is either incompetent or lying. Imagine an accountant saying that his calculations are wrong because there were too many numbers to process.
At the time, he couldn't have known it was important. While it may look important in retrospect, it's unreasonable to use the benefit of hindsight to say that he 'should' have read the entire length of an e-mail chain despite being added only at a later stage.