Lovers have always used the sharp edge of technology
It is only five years since I was the Financial Times aerospace correspondent, but a striking number of the Boeing people I knew then have been fired or sent to jail.
Philip Condit, the chief executive, was forced out in 2003. His departure came after Michael Sears, the chief financial officer, was caught discussing a Boeing job with a Pentagon official who was still awarding contracts to the company.
Mr Sears, one of the most likeable of Boeing's top executives, was sentenced to four months in prison. Then last week, Harry Stonecipher less personable but always civil paid the price for his affair with a senior Boeing employee.
I have not come across many people who think Mr Stonecipher, who was called back from retirement to succeed Mr Condit, deserved to be punished by anyone other than Mrs Stonecipher. The affair was consensual, the woman did not report to him and her career and salary were unaffected. Why did Mr Stonecipher have to go?
It seems he was sunk by an e-mail. His explicit electronic correspondence was sent anonymously to Lew Platt, Boeing's chairman, by an employee and the company feared the embarrassment of it being published. It was an extraordinary lapse by Mr Stonecipher, given that it was an e-mail, discussing his “non-meeting” with the Pentagon official, that sealed Mr Sears's fate.
Why did Mr Stonecipher do it? Chief executive hubris, possibly. Or perhaps he, like the rest of us, simply found e-mail a beguiling medium. It is such an immediately personal form of communication one click and you have sent some words to a friend, a few seconds later and you have a reply that it is easy to forget that those lightly dispatched messages lurk forever in some digital dungeon.
For all our apparent ease with it, e-mail is still in its infancy. Its etiquette is half-formed; only recently have most e-mails been properly punctuated, abandoning thank goodness the lower-case stream
of consciousness of a few years
back.
Attitudes to e-mail interception are strange. Boeing's announcement that its directors had demanded and received Mr Stonecipher's resignation offered no condemnation of the employee who snitched. Would the directors have taken the same approach if their informant had been steaming open Mr Stonecipher's letters or eavesdropping on his telephone conversations? They might still have told Mr Stonecipher to go, but I bet they would have felt soiled by the way the information had come to them.
We still have an enormous amount to learn about internet communication in general. I was an early online buyer of groceries and a great enthusiast for internet banking. I reckoned companies as large as the ones I was using would shield me from fraudsters. Since the FT reported last week on a piece of software called Troj/BankAsh-A, I have been less sure.
The software does not send an e-mail purporting to be from your bank, asking you to confirm your password. Every time you log on to a bank website, you are warned against that. Instead, it enters your computer as a virus or attachment and secretes itself, waiting for you to log on to your bank website. When you do, it presents you with a fake bank website that is so convincing that you happily type all your details on to it, thereby providing them to a criminal gang. According to our report, it is only a matter of time before this “malware” becomes widespread, frightening us all off internet commerce.
If it is any comfort, we have been here before more than a century ago. One of the most fascinating books of the dotcom era was The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage. The book was not about the internet but about its 19th-century predecessor, the telegraph. But it was the same story: scams, crimes, breaches of privacy and messages too anatomical to print.
“Spies and criminals are invariably among the first to take advantage of new modes of communication. But lovers are never far behind,” Mr Standage observed. Those conducting illicit affairs were more wary of the telegraph than internet users are today because messages had to be transcribed into Morse code by operators and retranscribed at the other end. But that did not stop relationships developing between the operators, as well as the exchange of language that would have embarrassed the sender if it had seen the light of day.
The criminals were as inventive then as they are today. Among the first to misuse the telegraph were horse-racing punters. Before the telegraph, news of a race result somewhere else could take hours or days to arrive. But early adopters of the telegraph used their privileged position to place bets once they knew which horse had won. Rules were introduced forbidding the transmission of race results, but people simply began sending the information by code.
Banks, which wanted to use the telegraph for money transfers, were held back by security worries. Was the message informing them that a sum had been deposited in one town and should be released in another genuine? “The opportunity for fraud has been the chief obstacle,” the Journal of the Telegraph said in 1872. The banks developed a complex series of codes and passwords to foil fraudsters.
Whenever companies came up with a way of protecting their telegraphed information, criminals found a way around it. John Bonfield, a Chicago policeman, told the Chicago Herald in 1888: “It is a well-known fact that no other section of the population avail themselves more readily and speedily of the latest triumphs of science than the criminal class.”
Companies were still grappling with the telegraph when it was superseded by the telephone. The internet will no doubt one day be replaced with something apparently better. But whoever uses it will struggle to keep pace with the criminals and lovers will continue to make fools of themselves. We are not as modern as we like to think we are
罪犯与情侣都迷高技术
在我担任《金融时报》航空航天版记者的短短5年时间里，我所认识的波音公司职员中被解雇或锒铛入狱的人数之多，颇为惊人。
首席执行官菲利普?康迪（Philip Condit）被迫于2003年离开波音公司。在他之前，首席财务官麦克?希尔斯（Michael Sears）被揭露与美国国防部某官员商谈由波音公司提供一份职位，当时该官员仍在批核给予波音公司的政府合约。
在波音公司高级管理层中人缘不错的希尔斯被判处入狱4个月。而到了上周，个人魅力略逊一筹、但一向彬彬有礼的首席执行官哈里?斯通塞弗（Harry Stonecipher）因为与公司一位高级女性管理人员的绯闻，也付出了相应的代价。
在我碰到过的人当中，并没有多少认为这位退休后被波音公司返聘接替康迪职位的斯通塞弗，应当受到除了斯通塞弗夫人以外的任何人惩罚。这种风流韵事出于双方自愿，那位女士也并没有告发斯通塞弗，而且她的事业和薪水也未受影响。那么为什么斯通塞弗要被迫离开波音公司呢？
他似乎是栽在一封电子邮件上。波音公司某职员将斯通塞弗有大胆表示的电子邮件匿名发给了波音公司董事会主席卢?普拉特（Lew Platt），公司害怕这件事公诸于众可能带来的尴尬后果。斯通塞弗在这件事上犯了一个不寻常的失误，况且这封电子邮件所谈论的竟是他与那位五角大楼官员的“非会面”事件――就是注定希尔斯命运的那桩事。
斯通塞弗为什么这样做？也许是作为首席执行官的傲慢使然。也有可能是因为他跟我们一样，只是把电子邮件看作一种好玩的沟通媒介。作为一种直截了当的个人交流方式，只需点一下鼠标，就可以给朋友传去几句话，并在数秒种后收到回复，因此很容易令人忘记，那些随便发出去的信息会永远保留在某种数字地狱中。
尽管从表面来看，我们对电子邮件已习以为常，但它仍处于初期发展阶段。邮件的礼仪规范尚未成熟；即使到了最近，大部分电子邮件的行文断句才得到规范，前些年那种用小写字母打出来的意识流文字终于看不到了，真是谢天谢地！
公众对于电子邮件被截获所持的态度颇令人费解。波音公司在宣布董事们要求并接受斯通塞弗的辞职时，并未指责那位告密的员工。如果那位告密者采用蒸汽加热的方式打开斯通塞弗的信件，或者窃听他的电话，董事们还会采取同样的方式吗？他们可能仍会让斯通塞弗走人，但我敢打赌，他们会感到这种获取信息方式不够光彩。
我们在互联网通讯方面仍有很多东西要学。我很早之前就开始在网上购买杂货食品，并且网上银行的积极拥戴者。我认为我所选择的这类大公司都会确保客户免受欺骗。但自从《金融时报》上周报道了一种名叫Troj/BankAsh-A的软件程序以来，我已经不那么有信心了。
该程序并非发送一封声称来自你银行的电子邮件，要你确认密码。现在每次登陆银行网站时，你都会被提醒要防范这类邮件。该程序要做的，是以病毒或附件的形式进入你的电脑并隐藏起来，等待你登陆银行网站。当你登陆时，它会提供一个假冒的银行网站，看上去很容易让人信以为真，这时你会十分乐意地将所有详细信息键入，于是这些信息会落入犯罪团伙手里。根据这篇报道，这种“恶意程序”迟早会蔓延开来，使所有人都不敢再使用电子商务。
其实在一个多世纪前我们已经领教过这种困境，意识到这一点也许是个小小的安慰。由汤姆?斯坦奇（Tom Standage）撰写的《维多利亚时代的因特网》是互联网时代最受欢迎的书籍之一。但这本书讲的并不是互联网，而是其在19世纪的前身――电报。两者的故事情节一模一样：都是诈骗、犯罪、侵犯隐私，以及肉麻得无法印出来的信息等。
斯坦奇先生评论说：“最先利用新通讯模式的总是间谍和罪犯，而热恋情人也不甘后人。”那些暗尝禁果的人对电报所持的戒心，要比现代人对互联网的戒心要高，因为电报内容必须先由话务员转为摩斯电码（Morse code），然后到了另一端，又由那边的话务员解码还原。但这并不能阻止话务员之间互生情愫，以及使用那些一旦公诸于众就会令当事人羞愧难容的字眼 。
从前，犯罪分子的创新能力并不比当今的同行差。最初将电报用于不正当途径的是赛马赌徒。在电报发明之前，其它地方的赛马结果可能需要几小时甚至几天才能送到。但最先使用电报的人则利用他们这种特有的优势，在先得知哪匹马已经获胜后才下赌注。后来便有新规定出台，禁止传送赛马结果，但人们的应对办法是用密码来发送比赛信息。
银行也曾希望利用电报进行资金转账，但由于担心安全问题而迟迟未采用。假如有封电报说，在某个小镇的款项已经存入，因此可以在另一个小镇将钱兑出，这样的信息可信吗？《电报杂志》在1872刊登的文章中提到：“主要障碍是存在欺诈的可能性。”为此，银行纷纷开发一系列复杂的代码和密码来防范欺诈。
但是每当公司机构找到一种保护电报信息的方法，犯罪分子总能找到相应的破解方法。芝加哥有位名叫约翰?邦菲尔德（John Bonfield）的警察在1888年这样对《芝加哥先驱报》说道：“众所周知，在所有人群中，没有哪个群体能比犯罪分子更轻易、更迅速地利用最新科学成果。”
当那些公司还在摸索电报应用时，电报已被电话所取代了。毫无疑问，互联网有一天也会被某种更为优越的技术所取代。互联网用户将需要竭尽全力才能跟上犯罪分子的步伐，而情侣之间也将继续大出洋相。毕竟，我们并非如自己所想象的那么先进。
