The reliance on e-mails as definitive, incriminating evidence of chicanery was once a given, but that didn't last long. Social media have now damaged the credibility of such e-mails, as the monumental Bear Stearns fraud verdict shows.

E-mails shooting back and forth during 2007 between Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin looked like bullets that hit the target, damning the two hedge-fund goniffs on charges of securities fraud. (See my previous item for details from the indictment.)

Such careless and stupid e-mails revealing crooked behavior doomed previous goniffs, like Jack Abramoff and his henchmen in the infamous Wampumgate corruption scandal of the Bush era. (The unmasking of that scandal was one of John McCain's finest moments, if you recall.) The e-mails wove a fascinating web of corruption extended to the religious right, several congressmen, and Karl Rove. And the e-mails not only brought Abramoff and crew to justice, but they forced congressmen out of their jobs.

But this is a new time, and texting and twittering have now convinced many people that e-mails are also thoughts on the fly that aren't necessarily proof or even strong evidence. That's obviously because we all now rue some of the thoughts on the fly that we text and twitter. And texting and twittering are even more careless and less thought-out than e-mails.

So cases built on e-mails no longer have the cred they once had.

But the problem is this: Those thoughts on the fly are often really good evidence of malicious or illegal intent. Twittering and texting have merely inured the common folk, blinding them to that fact. Just because someone twitters, texts, or e-mails incriminating statements doesn't make those statements not incriminating.

In any case, John Hueston, who prosecuted Enron's top crooks, Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, says it best in this morning's New York Times:

Emerging economies get new role (BBC)

G-20 roundup from Pittsburgh. Click on the above video for Russian TV footage of black-clad cops rousting black-clad protesters, as a robotic-sounding voice emanates from a police loudspeaker: "No matter what your purpose is, you must leave." NYT story here.

Twitter's Value Is Set at $1 Billion (WSJ)

Thanks to all of you who get paid nothing by Twitter despite your being its only product/asset, the company that hasn't yet generated any significant revenue is about to get $100 million in new funding. In August 2008, Twitter had 4.3 million unique visitors; this August it had 54.7 million. Now hooked, users are, like it or not, about to be bombarded by advertisers and marketers. Too bad most of you are either out of work or otherwise can't afford to buy all the shit you'll be told to buy. (See next item.)

The Long Slog: Out of Work, Out of Hope (WSJ)

Typically excellent human-interest WSJ story, this one focuses on jobless Americans. Introducing an array of hard-luck yarns: "Nearly 15 million Americans are jobless, and the number is widely expected to remain high even as the economy slowly begins to recover. Part of the problem many of the unemployed face: the very fact that they have been out of work a long time."

IPO Market Snaps Back as Taste for Risk Returns (WSJ)

Five companies go public — the biggest IPO week in a year and a half. One of them is electric-car battery maker A123 Systems. Two others are REITs.

Boss blames smartphones for stress as company suicide rate comes under scrutiny (The Age, Melbourne)

CFO at France's biggest telecom warns that, as story says, "the barrage of emails from smartphones and personal computers was stressing out employees."

Market's Eyes Are Bigger Than Its Stomach; Chokes On New Supply (StreetInsider.com)

Double bubble trouble.

Yes, Celebs Have Tax Issues Too (ABC News)

No, not a reality show, but a slideshow.

MORE HEADLINES FOLLOW

Now something else to worry about for those try to get jobs: your past posts on Facebook. "Facebook Activities Haunting Job Seekers," reports Baselinemag.com, which points out that "social networking poses a serious threat to job seekers who have posted inappropriate information about themselves."

Bosses are finding it so easy to check up on applicants' Facebooking info. Or, to put it another way, "tech geeks need to keep future interviewers in mind before bragging about their beer pong champion status or posting crazy pictures."

The real danger may be that a prospective boss would see that you're so boring and/or banal that he/she wouldn't want you around. So think twice about telling everyone that you're thinking of fixing some oatmeal or that you like puppies.

But if you've already made a fool of yourself on Facebook, maybe you can claim at your next job interview that someone stole your identity and posted all that bullshit.

Seriously, though, identity theft is supposedly reaching "epidemic" proportions, and practically all of it is because you're always on your damn computer, typing that banal bullshit into Facebook and Twitter, so hackers have you in their sights almost constantly.

Maybe there really is hope that Facebook and Twitter won't completely fill up with corporate attempts to go viral all over us — we've got enough problems just fighting the social-network addiction.

Harper's senior editor Bill Wasik, creator of the flash mob, conducts enough experiments in his new book to give us a clue about the emerging next stage of networking: social capitalism. Via James B. Arndorfer's Ad Age piece on Wasik's And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture, Wasik writes:

Wasik, says Arndorfer, "dives into a variety of corporate efforts to tap into viral culture at a time when traditional advertising is losing its effectiveness." He creates a MySpace page, and he friends only corporations. He goes to a Ford Fusion "flash concert." Maybe Wasik will wind up being the McLuhan of the viral media.

Social networking is just marketing, but of yourself. So does it really make sense for corporate marketers to jump in and try to do their marketing amid millions of people marketing themselves? Maybe not. Arndorfer quotes Wasik:

Congress Gets an Upgrade: $500 Million Slated for Purchase of Eight More Planes as Lawmakers' Travel Soars (WSJ)

Solution: One-way tickets.

Job Losses Slow as Rate Drops (WSJ)

This just in. Drop in the unemployment rate "suprising." Perspective: "Though still a terrible loss by historical standards, the data suggest a turning point is at hand after job cuts earlier in the year that totaled as much as 700,000. The economy has lost 6.7 million jobs since the recession started in December 2007."

Key Lawmaker Received Countrywide Loans (WSJ)

That's not the whole story. NY Congressman Edolphus Towns, the sorry-ass successor to Henry Waxman as chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform panel, resisted calls for a probe of a Countrywide mortgage program. Then it turns out that Towns had received loans from Countrywide, one of the major bottom-feeders in the subprime market.

Palin Autographed Xbox on eBay for $1.1 Million (Anchorage Daily News)

Console yourself.

Sentiment Readings Disturbingly Bullish (Pragmatic Capitalist)

"I would liken the current environment to a card counter who has just been on a tear playing blackjack, but finds that the deck is currently running low on face cards. The odds now favor the house. You can stay and press your luck, but the smart move is to simply walk away from the table."

AIG Posts $1.82 Billion in Net Income, First Profit Since 2007 (Bloomberg)

You would think this means that the government won't have to be so panicky as it dismantles AIG, which means that its valuable assets won't be practically given away, which means that taxpayers won't get even more screwed than they have been by AIG's $182.5 billion bailout.

Study finds women directors damage profits (FT)

"Female directors ... had a better record of attending board meetings. ... Yet while those traits often helped badly governed companies, the Ferreira and Adams study suggests that increased monitoring can have a negative effect on well-governed businesses." Are any businesses "well-governed"? In any case, don't shoot the messenger.

Another Hurdle for Jobless: Credit Checks (NYT)

You prospective employers are going to hold our bankruptcy against us? What do you think happened to us after we lost our previous job?

Security experts scramble to decipher Twitter attack (Computerworld)

What was the motive for the Twitter outage? Political (to silence a Georgian activist)? Pissy (nerds' contempt for Twitter)? Pure hacking fun? Whatever, it's a big deal for the rapidly growing phenomenon of social capitalism.

Rodeo booms despite US recession (Telegraph U.K.)

"If anything, the deepest and longest American economic downturn since the Great Depression appears to have boosted the popularity of the Wild West events." And your point is ...?

How To Blow A Bubble (Baseline Scenario, James Kwak)

Greenspan's Fed used to be the "bubble-maker-in-chief." Now, "the ideological initiative may be shifting towards Goldman Sachs."

Hedge Funds Rally as Cash Flows Back In (WSJ)

Investors are writing more checks to Stephen Schwarzman, so that's got to be a good thing.

New York Times Co. confirms Globe is for sale (Boston Globe)

That's not much of a surprise. Neither is the fact the Times hired Goldman Sachs to do the selling. Yet more fees for extremely healthy Goldman, which got bailed out by taxpayers and now is hired to bail out the NYT.

Paying for News: Let's Get On with It (Seeking Alpha, Fred Wilson)

"We can talk until we are blue in the face about whether people will pay for news or not. Talk is cheap. Actions are not. So I'm eager to see the experiments begin." He likes the Financial Times's approach. From an earlier post by Wilson, "Monetize The Audience, Not The Content": "The best freemium models allow anyone to use the service for free and then convert the most serious/frequent/power users to paying customers."

Court OKs nearly $17M in Madoff case legal fees (Newsday)

Most of it goes to Baker & Hostetler; most of the rest goes to trustee Irving Picard, who says he won't take a penny but will give his share to his firm — which is Baker & Hostetler.

Citigroup Takes U.S. Stock Trading to New Levels (Bloomberg)

Attention, history buffs: On Wednesday, Citigroup became the first stock on U.S. exchanges to exceed 2 billion shares being traded in one day. Click on this for other record-setting days.

Autoblog's take on Hyundai's Twitter feed. More on the "link economy" here, here, and here.

Facing a blitz of new operating systems for a new generation of smartphones that are already unchaining Web users from their desks and lightening the load on their laps, the open-source folks at Mozilla sped up their work on Firefox 3.5 and are formally releasing it today, touting it as a major upgrade. And the new release does seem markedly faster and better.

"The Fantastic Firefox: Why Mozilla's new browser augurs great things for the Web," Slate's Farhad Manjoo gushes. Other reviews are also good. And my own experience so far backs that up.

With smartphone users increasingly burdened by proprietary operating systems for iPhones and Google and Palm devices, among others, Mozilla's open-source approach keeps laptops friendly and free of fees and contracts. How much longer laptops will be the Web device of choice, though, is up for debate.

Mozilla's a mostly non-profit crew (intentionally). On the other hand, Firefox is no MySpace, which is being overwhelmed (just as monetization of social-networking sites is just around the corner) by Facebook and YouTube and Twitter.

Mozilla's not likely to be left in the dust during this current monumental shift from notebooks and desktops to handheld Web access. Google, which knows how to make money, is unlocking its smartphone Android software, which opens the door much wider for development and spread of Mozilla's mobile Firefox version, Fennec.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 is a snorer on regular computers, and a it probably will continue to be dull on smartphones as time goes on. But even on laptops and desktops, Firefox faces a host of "new challengers," says CNET's Stephen Shankland:

Mozilla's Department of Evangelism is hard at work.

Senator Chuck Schumer, one of the most powerful Democrats in D.C., called yesterday for a national biometric ID card.

This is part of the Democrats' drumbeat: Trying to stop the invasion of illegal immigrants by launching a bigger invasion: a far-reaching assault on Americans' privacy and civil liberties.

At least Schumer, who chairs the Senate's primary immigration subcommittee and, more importantly, is a primary caretaker of Democratic Party campaign cash, acknowledged the civil-liberties aspect of this. But as far as he's concerned, it's already a done deal. Apparently, President Barack Obama is already on board, too.

Leave it to liberals. This isn't the first time that they've sacrificed civil liberties in their attempts to solve problems. During World War II, Democrats, supposedly bent on suppressing Nazi sympathizers, passed the Smith Act (formally the Alien Registration Act). Used mostly against right-wingers at first, it was heavily used after the war to suppress lefties. In 1957, the Supreme Court finally threw out prosecutions under the Smith Act as unconstitutional, but the law remains on the books.

The Japanese internment camps — that's a whole other story, including the fact that even civil libertarians like William O. Douglas OK'd them (in the Korematsu case).

Today's Washington Post story carries the blandest of all headlines: "Senate Democrats Address Immigration." But right in the first paragraph, the story says that the Democrats' plan includes "a requirement that all U.S. workers verify their identity through fingerprints or an eye scan." The story continues:

As respected Internet pioneer and privacy advocate Lauren Weinstein said in his PRIVACY forum alert late last night about Schumer's quote:

Track Weinstein on Twitter, and check out his lively PRIVACY Forum, widely read by top geeks.

Obama's probably not a regular reader of Weinstein. The White House seems to have already embraced the Dark Side. As the Post story says:

It goes without saying — and the Post story doesn't say one word about it — that a national ID, especially a biometric one, would create an unprecedented database that not only will rest in the government's hands but also will eventually wind up in the grasp of marketers and advertisers as a key part of "behavioral marketing." Coupled with the personal data already being compiled by the growing web of social media and other ways of tracking people's "preferences," Americans' lives will increasingly become open books available for inspection. Consumers will increasingly be targeted — and kept track of. That may very well be OK with most people. But is this the kind of face book that you want?

Ford's massive campaign to promote its European model Fiesta ahead of its introduction into the U.S. invades New York City on Friday, but the automaker's social-media blitz has already started.

You've gotta hand it to Ford. Here's how it's promoting its agitprop for Fiesta: "FORD FIESTA AGENTS TEAM WITH GOD'S LOVE WE DELIVER: AGENTS WILL DELIVER MEALS TO LOCAL NYC RESIDENTS THIS FRIDAY"

The unbailed-out automaker — Detroit's Big One — has a "director of social media" now, so what do you expect but "The Fiesta Movement," an ad campaign already plastered on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr.

OK, so Ford's social media ad campaign is not as entertaining as the tail-chasing tale of hypocritical adulterer Senator John Ensign on Titter.

In fact, this ad campaign — full of self-referential stuff that makes it sound like a parody of an ad campaign (is it?) — does point to a growing use of social media that's already obvious: a blitz of marketing in which you'll have a hard time distinguishing friend from foe online. Restating the obvious: Any day now, Facebook and its ilk will no longer be referred to as "social media." They'll just be called "media" as more and more advertisers invade what is for now mostly interpersonal space and turn "social" into "marketing."

Ford needs to do something. In case the company itself doesn't mention it, "Ford pins hopes on small car market," as Australia's Manufacturers' Monthly points out. That's actually "small-car market," with the hyphen, although the car market is definitely smaller. In Australia, for example, auto sales are down about 20 percent.

As a preview of Ford's hard-sell campaign over here for the Fiesta, here's the promo material for what it calls "LOCAL FORD FIESTA AGENTS GIVE BACK":

Pretty strange that Ford would use the word "viral" in a campaign that vows to help AIDS victims. But that's what "viral" means these days, as AIDS recedes from the headlines and as even less reputable hucksters than car dealers try to bareback us online to buy their products.