A FEDERAL CASE & AFTER THE CATCH

YOUR TEXTS AND TWEETS COULD BE EVIDENCE

     The federal charges against a former BP engineer, alleging he deleted 300 text messages which seemed to indicate the leak of the Deepwater Horizon was worse than the company was saying is important for many reasons.

       The impact on the case is obvious. What is says about personal responsibility in a corporate crisis is another subtext and so too is the disposition of all those texts and tweets that millions send through the ether every day. When is a message yours, and when does it belong to others, your employer or a federal prosecutor?

        When I was an investigative reporter all our work got a legal review before broadcast.  One of our attorneys advised that once we cleared legal and broadcast the program, all our notes relevant to the investigation should be destroyed, putting them beyond the reach of a subpoena, should litigation result, as it would occasionally.  It made you think.  Some times I dumped notes, other times I kept critical files. Later of course those files became debris for later staff people to discard, though many of my files are in curated collection at an historical society.  I'm sure the statute of limitations has run on all of that work by now.

SPEAKING OF WORK

       Here are a few seconds of watching a fisherman work,

after the catch of the day has been hauled off the boat.

See you down the trail.