E-mail Whistleblowers   

Whistleblowers are taking a new route to the newsroom: electronic mail. That's because "E-mail" – correspondence exchanged through computers – now can greet reporters in its own type of plain brown wrapper.

Joe Abernathy, a former special projects reporter at the Houston Chronicle who is now a senior editor at PC World, says he received "massive amounts of documentation" via anonymous E-mail for an investigative piece he's working on. The eventual result, he says, will be "a major story of rebellion among some NASA scientists who stood up to do what they thought was right."

Abernathy's sources used a somewhat complicated E-mail protocol that masked their identities. Until recently, however, people with less experience on Internet, that computer network of computer networks, found it difficult to send such messages without a "return address." Now, largely because of free Internet "remailer" services, it's much simpler (see "E-mail: Land of 1,000 Sources," Free Press, May).

To some observers, filching information via E-mail has become almost too easy. "We're certainly seeing E-mail have profound implications in the corporate espionage process," says Shari Steele, director of legal services for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group concerned with civil liberties in computing. "People are sending out sensitive documents that they legally have no right to."

To protect their identities, sources can send their messages to remailers that forward it to the reporter only after removing the return address (participants in online discussion groups about such topics as illegal drugs often make use of such services, Abernathy notes). In fact, a remailer helped shape a page one story in the Washington Post last June. Staff writer Joel Garreau reported on a stunning federal foul-up whose details, he says, were gleaned in part from an E-mail message circulated by a then-anonymous computer consultant.

The message described a Treasury Department electronic "bulletin board" open to the public that included instructions on how to create harmful computer viruses. The message included an attachment taken from the board showing an index to the material available.

Abernathy and Garreau add a note of caution: Reporters should never rely solely on E-mail tips. "You must verify your information through traditional channels," Abernathy says. "That just can't be overstated."

Ûdds Paul Ferguson, the consultant who alerted Garreau to the Treasury virus recipes, "Anonymous E-mail does have a place, if for nothing more than whistleblowing without reprimand, rebuttal, retribution or vendettas."