If ever there was a reminder to be cautious with e-mails, it came this week as romantic missives from South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford to his Argentine lover surfaced in the national press.
Sanford, a conservative Republican who disappeared for several days to rendezvous with his lover in Argentina, returned to the United States on Wednesday to find out his tryst had been exposed in the media, along with months' worth of steamy electronic exchanges between the couple.
"I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificently gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curves of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself . . . in the faded glow of night's light," one of Sanford's messages read. "But hey, that would be going into sexual details."
The State, a South Carolina newspaper which first published the correspondence, said it received the e-mails anonymously as early as December of last year. They appeared to come from a personal e-mail account belonging to Sanford rather than a government-related account, according to the paper.
Sanford is now battling for his job as some constituents call for his resignation.
How the anonymous source obtained the e-mails and whether that source violated any laws in doing so isn't clear. What is clear, experts said, is that anyone using e-mail, text messages and other forms of electronic communication that can zip around the globe in seconds should simply assume that the whole world is reading.
"Never intermingle professional stuff and personal stuff," said Elizabeth Charnock, chief executive of electronic data analysis company Cataphora Inc., based in Redwood City, Calif.
Sanford is hardly the first public figure to become tangled in his own e-mails.
Frank Quattrone's career at Credit Suisse First Boston as a celebrated investment banker was derailed in 2003, in part by e-mails in which he allegedly suggested that his colleagues should destroy evidence. Quattrone was then charged with obstructing justice and witness tampering. His conviction in federal court was later reversed and all charges dismissed.
E-mails figure prominently in the fraud and insider-trading lawsuit filed this month by the Securities and Exchange Commission against Angelo Mozilo, the former chief executive of Countrywide Financial Corp. The suit accuses Mozilo of hiding the troubled mortgage lender's true financial condition from shareholders even as he lambasted his own company's loan products as "toxic" and "poison" in e-mails to other executives.
