Mark Lyn­der­say

Re­gard­less of which side of the po­lit­i­cal di­vide you choose to sup­port, it's clear that the dis­cus­sions about the re­cent rev­e­la­tion of a thread of e-mail con­ver­sa­tions of­fered in Par­lia­ment by Op­po­si­tion Leader Dr Kei­th Row­ley has pro­voked strong emo­tion­al re­ac­tions.

That's un­der­stand­able when it comes to pol­i­tics, but such sen­ti­ments are whol­ly out of place when it comes to the tech­nolo­gies un­der­ly­ing even such com­mon­place ser­vices as e-mail trans­mis­sions.

Tech­nol­o­gy is ab­solute. It deals in ver­i­fi­able bits that ei­ther are or are not. A mes­sage ei­ther has a prop­er trans­mis­sion head­er or it doesn't. If it doesn't, it's un­ver­i­fi­able and use­less as ev­i­dence, re­gard­less of who of­fers it. This may be a con­fus­ing mat­ter for politi­cians, who trade in mood, feel­ings and al­le­giances, none of which have any im­pact on bits.

In­for­ma­tion on the Web may have mood and feel­ing, but its ex­is­tence is track­able and ver­i­fi­able every step of the way (un­less peo­ple take the trou­ble to use anonymis­ers and oth­er iden­ti­ty ob­scur­ing tools).

E-mails can't just look right or wrong, they are ei­ther tru­ly elec­tron­ic trans­mis­sions and can be ver­i­fied as such with a track­able foot­print or they are not. It re­al­ly is as sim­ple as that.

As of this writ­ing, there has been no pub­lic rev­e­la­tion by the Op­po­si­tion Leader of dig­i­tal copies of these al­leged trans­mis­sions that might be scru­ti­nised by au­thor­i­ties.

That this sim­ple fact has not oc­cu­pied a greater pro­file in the dis­course is an il­lus­tra­tion of the pas­sions dri­ving the sit­u­a­tion and it may point to a wide­spread mis­un­der­stand­ing of the na­ture of e-mail, which can't sim­ply be trans­posed to print while re­tain­ing its es­sen­tial char­ac­ter.

Like much of mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy, the hum­ble e-mail has come to be dressed in ap­peal­ing and read­able skins of de­sign, whether users choose to read their mail in a ded­i­cat­ed client or us­ing Web based e-mail ser­vices.

An e-mail is far more than the words we are in­vit­ed to read be­cause this dig­i­tal doc­u­ment, like its pre­de­ces­sor postal mail, trav­els through mul­ti­ple col­lec­tion and trans­fer points be­fore reach­ing its des­ti­na­tion.

Sit­ting next to the man­age­ment in our liv­ing room, I'll of­ten send an e-mail with a link to some­thing in­ter­est­ing.

De­pend­ing on the state of the In­ter­net at the pre­cise mo­ment I send the e-mail off, it may get rerout­ed halfway around the world be­fore reach­ing its des­ti­na­tion, some­one sit­ting with­in reach of my out­stretched hand.

Every rout­ing that e-mail takes gets logged with­in the e-mail it­self and pro­vides a unique im­print of its spe­cif­ic source, trans­fer his­to­ry and des­ti­na­tion. Gen­er­al David Pe­traeus found out just how de­tailed that in­for­ma­tion can be to his con­sid­er­able mis­for­tune (http://ow.ly/lkv­gA).

De­tec­tives pur­su­ing clues among phys­i­cal ob­jects look for iden­ti­fy­ing in­for­ma­tion, DNA ev­i­dence, fin­ger­prints, ma­te­ri­als that are out of place.

Dig­i­tal de­tec­tives as­signed to re­view these ac­cusato­ry e-mails will search for much the same thing, but it will be found in the bits of dig­i­tal trans­mis­sion, not in pa­per fac­sim­i­les.

The sec­ond part of the sched­uled re­view of Nokia's Lu­mia will ap­pear next week. Read an ex­pand­ed ver­sion of this col­umn here (http://ow.ly/adAll).

?