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It’s no secret that the AdFreak in-box is often full of brazen and misleading PR pitches, but most of them aren’t really worth writing about. Still, this one caught our eye yesterday: an email from a company called Echoworx [2] with the subject header (we’ve retained the caps for maximum impact): “IF GIULIANI CAN'T PROTECT HIS CONFIDENTIAL DOCUMENTS, NEITHER CAN YOU.” I clicked on it because I have a thing for shameless attempts to capitalize on news events (in case you haven’t been paying attention, a lengthy document outlining the former New York mayor’s proposed presidential campaign strategy went missing and was leaked earlier this week [3] to the New York Daily News). Anyway, what makes this particular pitch so bad is that Echoworx is pushing some kind of email encryption product, but in the case of Rudy’s missing documents, it’s a plain, old, analog caper—involving a suitcase that went briefly missing, and, probably, an overworked Xerox machine that was employed to make a copy of the document before it was returned to the temporarily missing bag. Email encryption is the least of the campaign's problems—as for Echoworx, the problem of credibility comes to mind.
—Posted by Catharine P. Taylor