Gina Kolata is back to scare us silly again with a reminder to be careful what we put in our emails, using the incautious bastards at Enron as a test case. Apparently the company left a treasure trove of emails for scientists looking for links between email habits and corporate malfeasance. Already they've found all sorts of "telling information" and are "refining their ability to sort and analyze it." Yikes.

The kicker's on the second page, which tears a page straight out of Alias:

Since World War II, a five-nation consortium of the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand have cooperated in a vast communications collection and analysis program called Echelon, for example, one that has assumed increasing importance since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

No one in the unclassified world knows precisely what is being done with the Echelon data.

Echelon Is Reading Your Every Word [NYT re-titled by Sploid]