The Cannon Blackberry

A word of advice to all white collar criminals and crooked politicians: after you write an e-mail, erase it from your sent mail, hit your computer with a baseball bat, burn the remains, and then shoot the ashes from a cannon. One should fire computer ashes chronicling ones own criminal activities particularly far. A prediction this blogger can make with some confidence is when Fitzgerald finally gets done indicting White House hooligans, it's all going to hinge on a few, absent minded emails with embarrassing grammatical errors (not unlike this blog). Mr. Rove has already gotten himself in trouble with an e-mail that discussed his conversation with Mathew Cooper, a chat that Rove told the grand jury never happened. And Matt Copper's e-mails with his Time magazine bosses helped to get Scooter Libby indicted today.

Among the many crooks who may wish they had followed my advice despite the expense is Ken Lay. All the Enron e-mails are now available on the web as part of a cyber public flogging.

I know someone who works in securities fraud investigations, and he recently told me that e-mails provide the bulk of the evidence in his work.

Linking this thinking with the wave of hi-tech mini-gadgets in one (e.g. the cell phone-camera-MP3 player), I intend to pioneer a device which both sends e-mails through the web, and fires sent e-mails from a cannon.

The Cannon-Blackberry device will also launch amateur skateboarding footage even if no crime was captured on film. Nothing against skateboarding—it’s just been documented enough.