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SPEAKER_02: Imagine you're working for a big company, like say number seven on the Fortune 500 list. Oh, and it's around the year 2000. There's no Facebook, no Gmail. We're not thinking that much about privacy. And then the company you work for goes bust in spectacular fashion. Well, it was the corporate fraud case that sent shockwaves across Houston and the entire
SPEAKER_16: country, the fall of Enron.
SPEAKER_03: Congressional hearings begin this morning in the Enron investigation.
SPEAKER_02: And then some regulator in Washington releases your work emails, all of them. So all of a sudden, a lot of things in your life just became public, like...
SPEAKER_06: July 28, 1999, 1.42 p.m.
SPEAKER_10: Attached are the above reference documents. Hard copies will follow.
SPEAKER_02: But also some perhaps less routine business dealings.
SPEAKER_06: Subject 3, Dark Star.
SPEAKER_13: To further insulate the coal group and you from any claim that Enron misused the information, I suggest that you transfer the information to me, and I will hold it for safekeeping.
SPEAKER_02: And some cliche bad workplace behavior.
SPEAKER_06: No subject.
SPEAKER_00: I'm heading to New Orleans this weekend to do some partying. No Europa, just sluts in the quarter.
SPEAKER_02: And let's not forget the classic 90s chain emails.
SPEAKER_15: Hope you're having a pleasant first week of 1999, thought I would forward this on. Top 22 signs that you've had too much of the 90s. 22, cleaning up the dining area means...
SPEAKER_02: There were even some exchanges with coworkers that really shouldn't have been in your working box.
SPEAKER_06: No subject. Let me know when you're leaving.
SPEAKER_01: I'll be leaving probably in about 30 to 45 minutes.
SPEAKER_16: Walk me out, I'll give you a big wet kiss.
SPEAKER_01: But I want more.
SPEAKER_16: I'll give you all you want.
SPEAKER_02: The emails you just heard read by actors are real emails. They're just a few of the hundreds of thousands sent around the year 2000 by some of Enron's highest ranking employees. And when these emails became public, for the first time, there was a database of thousands of real emails sent by real people that was available to the public and researchers and at least one podcast host. But these emails aren't just a curiosity. They're not just a time capsule. I bet something you used today was touched by these emails. They've become a huge part of all of our lives. From Business Insider and Stitcher, this is Household Name.
SPEAKER_03: Brands you can trust.
SPEAKER_02: Brands you know, stories you don't. I'm Dan Bobkopf. Enron collapsed because of greed and corruption and fraud. But the emails Enron employees sent and received have had an astounding afterlife. They were used to create Siri and develop spam filtering and artificial intelligence. They've helped us understand gender and power. But at what cost? What happens when so much of our technology is based on the writings of some fallen energy tycoons? And should the emails have been released in the first place? These days, Enron is pretty much shorthand for corporate scandal. But back in the 90s, Enron was an energy trading company based in Houston. It bought, sold and traded natural gas and electricity and also apparently pulp and paper. But the thing Enron is really famous for is how it collapsed. In 2001, it was the biggest bankruptcy ever at that point. It looked suspicious because the company was telling everyone it was profitable and successful. And then out of nowhere, it went bust. The SEC investigated, prosecutors pounced, a number of top executives went to prison for fraud.
SPEAKER_03: Guilty verdicts in the biggest case of corporate fraud in history.
SPEAKER_11: Lawyers for Jeffrey Skilling and Kenneth Lay threw around complicated notions about margin calls and short selling.
SPEAKER_02: But the reason we have access to thousands of Enron's emails is because of something else. Something Enron did in California. California became one of the first states to deregulate its energy markets in the mid 90s. The idea was to introduce market forces and competition, you know, lower prices and such. Enron had lobbied hard for this. And then after deregulation came into play, mysteriously, California started experiencing serious energy shortages. And whenever that happened, Enron and some other companies just coincidentally raked in a whole bunch of cash.
SPEAKER_08: The worst one was physical withholding. So you just say, I'm not going to run my power plant tomorrow.
SPEAKER_02: Pat Wood was an energy regulator with FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. It was his job to help investigate this.
SPEAKER_08: Now, no one was dumb enough to say I'm not going to run it so I can make money off of a scarcity price. But that's what happened. I mean, when you don't run your power plant, which they were obligated to do.
SPEAKER_02: Wood says power suppliers would overplay maintenance issues, exaggerate problems so they could shut down their plants.
SPEAKER_08: What kind of smart engineer is going to actually go question that? I mean, you really had to get people under oath to really figure all this out.
SPEAKER_02: There were other tricks. Enron would buy power in California, move it to Nevada, and then sell it back at a profit. Enron was making bank. But by the second half of 2000, the tricks turned into a full on energy crisis. Electricity prices in California shot up 800% at one point. There were rolling blackouts affecting more than a million people. Now Pat Wood is a free markets guy. He was all for deregulating California's energy market. But what Enron did with that freedom is not what he had in mind when he was promoting free markets. I'm a big passionate defender of competition, but boy, I'm ruthless against people who,
SPEAKER_08: you know, want to F it up.
SPEAKER_02: So FERC investigated Enron and the market manipulators and through the investigation got tons of documents, like these memos describing in detail how Enron planned to manipulate the California markets to make lots of money.
SPEAKER_08: And they were really pretty shocking. I mean, you know, for one who loves competition and markets, it just kind of made me nauseated because I thought, man, is this the enterprise that I helped create?
SPEAKER_08: Was this house of cards? I mean, this is ridiculous. So I walked down the hall and showed it to my other three commissioners and I said, you know, I got a problem with this.
SPEAKER_02: During the investigation, Pat Wood and FERC were mostly focused on the memos, but they had also gotten a whole lot of emails from Enron. It was huge.
SPEAKER_08: It was thousands of, I don't remember if it's terabytes or whatever the word after tera is, but it was huge.
SPEAKER_02: So what were you finding in these emails that you wanted people to see?
SPEAKER_08: You know, 95 percent of them were about nothing that we were interested in, but it's hard
SPEAKER_08: to read. I mean, it was huge amounts of emails. So the other question was, you know, there might be something that somebody finds here from reviewing this stuff that we might have missed.
SPEAKER_02: FERC had to decide what to do with all this data. In 2003, Pat Wood was pissed about what Enron had done. So he kept thinking about transparency, just put it all out there and let the public see what the company did. But I'm sure behind the scenes, it must have been a hard decision to decide whether to release all these emails with all this personal information and irrelevant things. Yeah, well, I will tell you honestly, Dan, that that issue did not, was not front and
SPEAKER_08: center as much as it would be today, for example.
SPEAKER_02: So Pat Wood and the FERC commissioners made a fateful decision. They just dumped the entire email archive on the internet. All the Enron emails about gas trading and meeting scheduling and also the divorces and affairs and talk of parties, it was all there. I've heard different versions of what happened next. Some people say the emails were cleaned up, that someone went through and got rid of Social Security numbers and bank account info and stuff like that. Other people say Enron employees were actually given a chance to go through and flag things they thought should be redacted. But either way, Pat Wood admits FERC didn't try that hard to clean the emails up. And then after they were public, he just kind of forgot about the emails until I called a few weeks ago. And so what did you think would happen when you put all these emails out in the world?
SPEAKER_08: Never dreamed. I mean, when you told me, when we talked last week, when you told me what had gone on, I mean, I can't tell you how much I've been looking at on the web since you pointed me in that direction. There's so much on the web about this information. And I had no idea what would come of this.
SPEAKER_02: The emails took on a life of their own, far beyond what anyone at Enron or FERC could have imagined. Artificial intelligence, voice assistance, counterterrorism software all have roots in the Enron emails. After FERC released the Enron emails back in 2003, they just kind of sat there. Even though they were public, no one was really reading them because they were a mess. Like imagine you log into your email and you need to find one specific message, except there's no search function. You can't organize by date or sender or subject line. There's spam everywhere. That's what the Enron emails were like. And there were like half a million of them. So this is where the Enron email strange afterlife begins. First, some academics bought the emails from FERC. It became known as the Enron corpus. Corpus, by the way, is my new favorite word. The Enron corpus cost 10 grand. Then the researchers got to work cleaning it up, paring it down, and organizing it into something that could be cataloged and searched and studied. And then they went wild. They wrote papers, ran experiments, invented whole new areas of research, like network science.
SPEAKER_14: My name is PJ Lamberson and I'm an assistant professor in the communication department at UCLA. My research focuses on social networks and collaboration.
SPEAKER_02: We called PJ Lamberson because he was actually our producer, Sarah Wyman's professor. Yeah, and that is a first day of class I will never forget.
SPEAKER_12: What happened? It was just so cool. Like we all came in and on the board he had projected a network that was made up of the Enron emails. And so what we're looking at is a bunch of dots basically arranged in a pattern and every dot represents an email address in the corpus. And you can tell so much about Enron just from looking at this map, Dan.
SPEAKER_02: Like what?
SPEAKER_12: Some of the dots are bigger than other dots, which means that they're getting more emails.
SPEAKER_02: So are those the powerful people?
SPEAKER_12: Yeah, and you can also tell that some people are getting way more emails than they're sending, which is also kind of indicative of them being more important maybe. But then the really cool thing, like the reason I still remember this class four years after the fact, is that if you take a step back and just look at the entire network, you see something that's really interesting.
SPEAKER_02: What's that?
SPEAKER_12: So the way the map is organized, you can see projects because people at work will email back and forth when they're working on something.
SPEAKER_02: Like we did with this episode.
SPEAKER_12: Exactly. But the thing is, at Enron they were not making podcasts, Dan. Some people were actually doing some really sketchy, illegal things. And on this map you can actually visually see the difference. The projects that were totally above board and fine look completely different from the ones that were shady.
SPEAKER_14: I guess the way I would describe it, if you look at the network where people are talking about an illicit or illegal project, it looks like a really tight ball with a few little spikes sticking out of it. And so what that's showing you is that for those illegal projects, the communication is really concentrated among a core of individuals and they're not sharing that information or dispersing information about that project with other parts of the organization.
SPEAKER_12: Okay. So that's the best part because a computer has identified this. It's like a magic trick. The computer just has all of the data that's in the corpus that in and of itself doesn't really make any sense to anyone and it just looks like a huge mess. But then once you run an algorithm on that data, it's like shining a black light on all of the corruption that was happening at Enron. You can just see it laid out bare in front of you in this network. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: And it's clearly very useful to people for a lot of things.
SPEAKER_12: Yeah. And there is so much cool stuff that's happening with this technology. People are using it to predict how viruses spread through populations because the software can identify the people within a group who are most likely to spread something to the rest of the group fast.
SPEAKER_02: So the guy who's just going around shaking lots of people's hands will show up in this algorithm.
SPEAKER_12: Right. And one of the most interesting applications of this technology is that it's actually being used to identify terrorist cells. So like if you have phone records from a group of people, you can run these algorithms on those phone records and they can detect these kind of abnormal patterns of communication and you can see where the terrorist cells are.
SPEAKER_02: Okay. So the technology we developed using emails from Enron is now being used to fight terror. Yeah.
SPEAKER_12: And it's been used for all kinds of stuff.
SPEAKER_02: The Enron emails have been a huge opportunity for researchers like Sarah's professor. They're publicly available. There's no copyright. Researchers can swap them between institutions because no one owns them. But they've also been this really big deal for any research or technology that involves language. With these emails, this corpus is a rare example of unfiltered, uncensored, totally organic human communication.
SPEAKER_03: So the bankruptcy of Enron was really the wonderful stroke of luck for researchers interested in conversation.
SPEAKER_02: This is Owen Rambo. He works at an artificial intelligence company called Elemental Cognition, used to teach at Columbia. He's been a part of lots of different research projects involving the Enron emails and a lot of them involve using the corpus to train computers to understand human language.
SPEAKER_03: It's unique. There's nothing quite like it. And it's real. You know, these are real people who are conversing not in order to create data for linguists, but in order to achieve their goals, whatever it was, you know, some work-related goal or just tell each other jokes or whatever.
SPEAKER_02: Before the Enron emails, researchers like Rambo mostly had to work with stilted conversations or texts from old newspapers.
SPEAKER_03: One typical example is that people are, students are brought into a lab and play a game against each other and engage in conversation as part of the game playing. So they're real conversations, but they're very limited and they're not naturally occurring.
SPEAKER_02: But these Enron emails are what people really say to one another, especially when they don't think anyone is reading over their shoulder. And they've taught Rambo and computers a lot about how humans communicate. Like based on syntax and word choice, you can predict if an email sender is male or female, a boss or an underling. Bosses write shorter emails. Male bosses tend to write direct emails, like, give me the report by Monday. Female bosses tend to say things like, would you be able to finish the report by Monday?
SPEAKER_03: I can say something like it's hot in here and it can either be a speech act to inform you of this fact or it can be a speech act to request of you that you turn on the air conditioning. It is hot in here, I'm sorry. Yeah, it's actually okay.
SPEAKER_02: These are the kinds of problems that cause bugs in artificial intelligence. Machines aren't great at interpreting nuance or tone or intent. They need practice. And the Enron corpus is like one giant perfect training ground for developing those skills. It's helped train spam filters. Hey, the Enron emails had a lot of spam.
SPEAKER_01: We can connect you to the world's rich and famous. Capture the attention of millionaires.
SPEAKER_02: The emails played a role in the development of Siri. Google reportedly used them when it was developing Smart Compose in Gmail. If you've used Gmail in the last year or so, you'll know what I'm talking about. This is that thing where it predicts what it thinks you want to say next. Sometimes it's actually really helpful. But early versions have this bad habit of suggesting the phrase, I love you, a little too often. If you're a researcher, you could spend hours sifting, organizing, studying these emails and come to think of them purely as data. And then you might come across one like this.
SPEAKER_06: November 26th, 2001, 723 p.m. No subject.
SPEAKER_10: So you were looking for a one night stand after all?
SPEAKER_02: Whoever wrote that email probably didn't want it to have a long legacy. Did you feel any ethical qualms using the Enron emails?
SPEAKER_03: I relied on the process having worked. The process being that people were given the chance to withdraw emails. This said, I had my doubts because in one of the releases, the very first email you saw was a very personal email, which probably the sender didn't or the receiver more likely didn't want spread around.
SPEAKER_02: A few years ago, Owen Rambo was on a train in Texas. He and his husband were sitting in the dining car.
SPEAKER_03: And we started talking to the people who were added to our table and they were from Houston. And I was working on Enron day in and day out. So I just said, oh, did you work for Enron? Just like that. And the guy said, yes.
SPEAKER_02: It was kind of like meeting a celebrity. This guy was one of the 150 in the corpus.
SPEAKER_03: And that was just sort of such a fascinating, weird coincidence. And it reminded me that this corpus, which we give to our computers and run through algorithms and reduce the numbers and correlations, there really are real people at the other end. And you can meet them in Amtrak trains in Texas. And we then gossiped a little bit about other people who were mentioned in the Enron corpus, who sort of almost seemed like people I know.
SPEAKER_02: So much of what we know about the world and how it works was somehow learned through this corpus. And that technology was developed using the corpus. But Owen Rambo is right. These aren't just data points. These aren't just emails. They're real people at one energy company at one period of time, right before it went bust. And that raises all sorts of red flags.
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SPEAKER_02: There are two really obvious ethical issues with using the Enron emails for anything. First of all, the people who wrote them did not sign up to be part of an academic study. They did not give researchers or robots permission to comb through all of their old conversations. And we'll get to that. But first, there's another problem here.
SPEAKER_10: The biases of the people writing the emails could become the biases of the AI system that's trained on them.
SPEAKER_02: Amanda Levandowski teaches at NYU and studies how bias creeps into technology. And she's worried that a ton of our artificial intelligence is based at least in part on the emails written by 150 people at an energy company that went bust because of fraud.
SPEAKER_10: First of all, they're not geographically representative. A lot of those emails were from people based in the Houston office. It's not going to be representative in terms of corporate culture because it was a Houston-based oil and gas company. And because it's 150 senior executives at this company, you're not going to have the kind of gender or racial diversity that you might expect at a different sort of company.
SPEAKER_02: And if you're looking for evidence of this bias, you don't have to look any further than the emails themselves. Like there's this one email chain where someone sends an article about Bill Clinton's dog buddy getting hit by a car. The Enron official writes back,
SPEAKER_05: That is a shame for the dog. I'm very happy about Clinton's grief.
SPEAKER_02: There are emails about taking on the World Wildlife Fund.
SPEAKER_06: Subject WWF.
SPEAKER_16: Remember, this is the group that publicly announced that Enron has gotten away with murder for years and we are going to get them.
SPEAKER_02: These are the emails underpinning a lot of our artificial intelligence.
SPEAKER_10: If there are misogynistic jokes or shows of power in particular emails, those same implicit biases can become encoded in the AI that's trained on that corpus. Computer scientists tend to put this another way. They call it garbage in, garbage out.
SPEAKER_02: So who wrote this stuff? I wanted to talk to someone who worked at Enron at the time, who actually wrote some of these emails. All the names are there. And I found that a lot of them list Enron as a former employer on their LinkedIn profiles. So I started calling. And I hit a lot of dead ends.
SPEAKER_06: We're sorry, you have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service. While I was searching, though, I met someone else who was obsessed with the emails, a guy
SPEAKER_02: named Sam Levine. He's an artist and educator who has used the Enron emails in his own work. And his art deals with these questions. It forces people like me to really think about why reading through the corpus makes us feel so uncomfortable.
SPEAKER_04: So one of my favorite series of emails from the archive is between two people who were married and they both worked at Enron. And they're going through a divorce because she cheated on him, I think. And you can read their whole sort of correspondence.
SPEAKER_05: And what do you see in these emails?
SPEAKER_04: You know, it's like, I saw you today from a distance and like I thought about what we used to have and I'm so sorry and I hope we can be friends again one day, you know, and stuff like that.
SPEAKER_02: Do you feel like you're watching a relationship disintegrate?
SPEAKER_04: Yeah. It's also something you shouldn't read, really. You know, it's invasive. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, there's something like I feel kind of dirty reading these emails, even though it's so long ago, it's been public for so long. And yet it feels like, am I just a voyeur here?
SPEAKER_05: It is very voyeuristic. I tried to reach that couple Sam Levine was talking about to ask them how they felt.
SPEAKER_02: But I got a voicemail. Hi, Dan Bobkopf calling from Business Insider in New York. Eventually I reached the guy by email. He said he's not angry about his emails being released, but he didn't want to do an interview. Sam Levine, the artist, has been living with these emails for a few years now. Along with his colleague, Tiga Brain, he used the emails as the basis of an experimental art project.
SPEAKER_04: So our project is called The Good Life. And in The Good Life, you get the opportunity to receive all of the emails from the Enron archive, direct to your inbox in the order that they were originally sent, and with the appropriate amount of time between each email.
SPEAKER_02: Apparently a few hundred people have signed up to get their actual inboxes clogged with old Enron emails. Levine even did it himself. So you had this on your main email account? Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: And it's not filtered or anything? No, no. So I read every single one. Oh my god, how many times do you spend a day on this?
SPEAKER_04: Not that long, because a lot of them are really short. So it doesn't take that long to read all of them. And it's a really interesting experience, I think. Because a lot of times you'll see the email come in and it'll be like, meeting in room 10 in 15 minutes, and you're like, oh, oh no, I've missed a meeting. I didn't know about that meeting. And then you'll open up the email and you're like, oh, right, right, this happened in 1999, actually. It's okay. I didn't actually have to go to that meeting.
SPEAKER_02: Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, some of the Enron emails get caught in Levine's spam filters. How do you feel about your emails getting caught in spam filters that might have been trained on the very emails that you were trying to send? I think it's really nice.
SPEAKER_05: It works, I guess.
SPEAKER_04: I think it's great.
SPEAKER_02: I still wanted to know how it felt to be someone whose emails were released in the corpus, whose every word at Enron is now parsed and dissected by researchers without their consent. Eventually someone picked up.
SPEAKER_07: Hello. Hi.
SPEAKER_02: Is this Mitchell Taylor?
SPEAKER_07: Yes. Hi.
SPEAKER_02: Dan Bobkopf from Business Insider in New York. How are you? Good. How are you? Good, thank you. So I'm calling you for an interesting reason. Mitch Taylor was a managing director at Enron. He's also the guy Owen Rambo ran into on a train a few years back. Owen Rambo? I had to jog his memory.
SPEAKER_07: Oh, oh, oh, oh. What's his last name?
SPEAKER_02: Rambo, R-A-M-B-O-W.
SPEAKER_07: I do remember this now.
SPEAKER_02: Okay, so I had him on the phone. This was my big shot. I wanted to know how he felt when all these emails were dumped on the web back in 2003. Yeah, no, you would have thought some privacy advocates would have come to our defense.
SPEAKER_07: But at that point, being with Enron, there was no one coming to your defense. No one gave a s*** at that point. We were the evil empire, so everyone was happy for any bad things that happened to Enron people.
SPEAKER_02: He told me that there was so much news about Enron, so much bad press about Enron back then, that the email dump didn't really register. It was just another thing that happened. I've read some of Mitch Taylor's emails, by the way. Most of them sound like work emails.
SPEAKER_01: Subject, re-project granted update. Thanks for the update. With regard to further interference from the PUCN and the comment that the PUCN must approve each generation...
SPEAKER_02: You get the idea.
SPEAKER_07: I don't think I've ever gone and looked at which ones they had. I certainly didn't have a mistress. I didn't have any criminal stuff going on.
SPEAKER_07: Now, whether I've passed along an inappropriate joke, I may have been. I tend to be rather sarcastic at times in emails. That aspect of it has never come back to bite me in any way, at least that I've seen or that I'm aware of.
SPEAKER_02: When I first heard about this story, I remember thinking how weird and cool it is that the emails from Enron of all companies have been so important in our lives. That the company died, but the emails live on. But the more I dug into it, the weirder I started to feel about the corpus. I really shouldn't be able to read about strangers' divorces and affairs. I shouldn't have access to someone's daycare scheduling, even if it happened two decades ago. But on the other hand, I use Siri. I like when Gmail suggests what I was going to say so I don't have to type it out. I think it's nice that some real good and some real human progress came out of the Enron collapse, but at what cost? I really wanted to know what Pat Wood thinks about all this now. After all, he's the guy who released them in the first place, back when he was a regulator. And he told me he's lost sleep over it. Well, it was hard because I sat there and go, you know, it was just the impact on...
SPEAKER_08: And now that I've been through privacy breaches on my own, I just thought, man, I was a huge accomplice and doing that to a lot of people, a lot of them live in the town where I now live. There's probably a lot of people whose privacy was impacted significantly by what I did who live in my area code.
SPEAKER_02: He said that if he could do it over again, he'd probably released a lot of the emails, but would have taken much more care to scrub out the personal stuff to protect the people in there who were just collateral damage. What would you say to them?
SPEAKER_08: I'm sorry. You know, if you didn't do anything wrong, you probably don't have anything to be ashamed of. And if you did something wrong, damn it, I got you. But for all those people in the middle who just had a normal expectation of privacy of just kind of their personal affairs, or not personal, their business affairs and how they would be viewed, you know, I think that's, you know, I wouldn't want that. I wouldn't do unto others as you'd have them do unto you. I wouldn't probably want that done unto me like that.
SPEAKER_02: This episode was produced by a bunch of people who had email addresses in the early 2000s, like MusicMunchkin07 at Yahoo.com, Padula A at Comcast.net, and Love to Swim at Verizon.net. That's Sarah Wyman, Amy Padula, Jennifer Siegel, and there's also me. I think I was Critical Eye at AOL.com for a bit there.
SPEAKER_17: That was Dan Bobkoff. The show is called Brought to You By. It is excellent. It is produced by Business Insider. We'll have a link in the show notes and on our website. 99pi.org. Joe Rosenberg organized this feature for us. We'll be back with an original homegrown 99PI story next week. See you then.
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