As Former Employees Plotted, Mark Penn Watched: secretly intercepted e-mails

[Bluebear]

Well, he's clever, I will give him that...



Mark Penn

When all is said and done, the abiding lesson of an ugly breakup involving the political powerhouse firm Penn, Schoen and Berland may be this: Be careful what you say using company e-mail.

In early June, the firm of Hillary Clinton’s pollster Mark Penn brought a federal suit against four former employees of his high-powered firm, on the grounds that they were violating their contracts by trying to make off with some his most lucrative corporate clients. In the course of doing so, Penn's representatives submitted more than 100 pages of contracts, excerpts from his company’s employee handbook and—most extraordinarily—electronic communications showing, according to his complaint, that the former employees were “engaging in an orchestrated and illegal plot to sabotage” the business he had founded.

On June 20, a U.S. District Court judge agreed, issuing a restraining order against the former employees from engaging in any more competitive activity. But it is the e-mails—which were subsequently removed from the public record when Mr. Penn voluntarily withdrew his complaint from federal court in Manhattan and refiled it on June 21, practically verbatim, in state Supreme Court in Manhattan—that have become the focus of the fight.

On June 29, a former PSB employee, Mitchell Markel, filed a countersuit claiming that Mr. Penn and his colleagues at the firm had “created a fake e-mail address in Markel’s name and manipulated his BlackBerry Cingular Account so that every time Markel pressed ‘send’ on his personal BlackBerry, every outgoing e-mail from his Yahoo and Global Insights accounts was simultaneously intercepted and sent to the phony address, an address known only to them, and to which only they controlled access.”...

http://www.observer.com/2007/former-employees-plotted-mark-penn-watched

[hlthe2b]

1. Cleaver... and let's just say very unpleasant

to look at, I must say... Does nasty behavior show up in one's appearance?

[dsc]

6. If ugly comments show up in appearences I hope you don't have mirrors

you might scare yourself.

[hlthe2b]

7. Undeserved retort

truly... It is not his general size, shape or appearance that bothers me, but just like when I look at Cheney, he exudes something very unpleasant. Your nasty comment back to me, though, I'll write off to a misunderstanding of what I was trying to say.

[dsc]

9. sorry if I misunderstood your comment

we see alot of lookism on this site.

[Mojambo]

2. This guy is just BEYOND sleazy. n/t

[Gloria]

3. Kick this sucker!!! Looks like ROVE redux!!!!

[Bluebear]

4. Rove redux is right!

[Colobo]

5. Sleazy.

[Maribelle]

8. If it was his firm, those employee's emails were his - - not secretly intercepted.

Nothing sleazy about this extremely common practice.

When you work for someone else, the computer you use, the software that runs on it, the chair you sit on, the telephone you make calls on, all belong to the owner of the firm. If you work for any government agency, then the government owns them.

Most large companies have from time to time needed to extract specific employee's emails from their backups. It happens every day, in every major city, in every state, perhaps.

[Bluebear]

10. Yeah, Penn's a real prince.

[Maribelle]

11. I'm only talking about the retreival of the emails.

I'm trying to figure out all this Penn stuff. Sorry if I was not clear.

[Bluebear]

12. It wasn't just retrieval of email, but an interception.

Stinky :)

[Maribelle]

13. When the story talks about those emails ....

I do not believe the use of the term "interception" is based on a technological process.

That's actually my point. The account was set up, it seems, to blind cc an email address. When the send button was pressed, an electronic message was sent to the original recipient, and lot of electronic copies were probably saved, such as in the email backup server, in the blind cc email address.

To read any of the copies, and even to read the original, you have to retrieve them from the storage area.