Don’t txt what you can speak

Old-timey Boston political boss Martin Lomasney lived by a code that those involved in sketchy activities would do well to heed:

Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink.

This could do with a bit of an update to cover more modern communications methods: Never txt or e-mail what you can speak…And never speak when there’s any possibility that what you say can be recorded.

For prosecutors hot on the heels of inside traders, the voyage of discovery through text and e-mails relies on checking for the use of certain acronyms and phrases.

TYOP (tell you on phone), TOL (talk offline) and LDL (let’s discuss live) are red flags for prosecutors combing through the e-mail transcripts of Wall Street traders suspected of illegal activity. (Source: Bloomberg)

After all, why would you have to TOL if you weren’t up to something shady? In legalese, it shows “evidence of intent,” awareness that what you were doing is wrong.

Of course, that something shady would not necessarily have to be insider trading. It could also be an extra-marital affair. But if that were the case, prosecutors wouldn’t be after you. Divorce lawyers, maybe, but not prosecutors.

Other expressions of interest include “call my cell” and “let’s go off e-mail.”

But the roster of suspicious wording is a living and breathing kind of thing:

New expressions and acronyms pop up all the time, and authorities say they build lists of favored terms.

There are also evasions, like substituting “fon” for “phone”, which is what Raj Rajaratnam, a hedge fund (phund?) manager now doing time in a Federal joint in Ayer, Massachusetts, did. Of course, maybe “fon” was just shorthand, and not an evasion tactic. (Raj is in prison at the same location where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was held during until he was convicted of the Marathon Day bombings. Nice company…)

Just because you text LDL is not, of course, the smoking gun. It’s just the smoke that suggests that there may well be a fire(arm).

Whatever the case, it continues to amaze me that there are people who remain unaware of the perils of using social media.

The guy who breaks into someone’s house and updates his FB page with a picture of himself with the loot he’s about to make off with. The intemperate tweet. The rancid e-mail that goes viral. The msg that puts you at the scene of the crime. The bullying comment. (A few months back, former Red Sox pitcher (and blogger) Curt Schilling went after – and unmasked – a bunch of young guys who had made outrageously vile comments about his daughter after Schilling posted about her heading off to play college softball.)

It may be that because 99.9999% of what people put out there is completely innocuous, they get lulled into forgetting that some of what they have to say could get them into trouble.

Same for searching for info on how to commit a crime.

Googling “how to get away with murder”? Nah, that one will never come back to haunt you.

From a law enforcement standpoint, I guess it’s fortunate that criminals are so focused on their crime, and so convinced that they’re smarter than everyone else, that it never occurs to them that they might get caught.

But they’re obviously not smart enough to know what Martin Lomasney had to say – and that, when it comes to criminality, Lomasney was right.