How about this.
Assume every email or text you send could become public one day and communicate accordingly. Simple.
Most professionals know this. Anyone near a lawsuit knows this. Apparently, this crowd is more concerned about being hip and joking around in emails that they never considered they would become public. Wrong assumption. Unfortunately, could become a career ruining assumption.
With respect to the business records; obviously Sony’s IT Dept. didn’t have a strong enough firewall / company protocols in place. Business record disclosures are truly egregious. Not much sympathy for dumb emails, however.
While no one should disseminate this information, just a touch of hypocrisy from this group that lives in gossip (see, TMZ’s success, for example).
This is the policy my company had. Pretend that any email you write you will have to explain to a judge...or a lawyer deposing you. I really can’t believe that these senior execs were so careless that they wrote some of this stuff.
People were first paranoid about copying machines..then we got email and it was copying machines on steroids with a memory.