Cyril will pay price for his cyberspace lapse
Feeding frenzies that have followed other leaks should have been a lesson in how not to do politics
E-mail is one of the internet age’s more unpleasant inventions, and Cyril Ramaphosa has become the latest of the world’s more prominent figures to be exposed by it.You’d think that in the 28 years since August 6 1991 — the day the web first became public — we would have learnt to manage e-mail better, but no.Hillary Clinton watched her presidential bid evaporate after being outed first for using a private e-mail server for official public communications — including highly classified mails — instead of the properly secure State Department server, and then later having her staff delete a bunch of unwanted messages, which made her look like she was covering something up.Then the Gupta family had their life and times revealed in excoriating detail when whistleblowers leaked thousands of e-mails to the SA media.The savage feeding frenzy that followed both leaks, and the collapse of the empires from which they came, should have been an unforgettable lesson in how not to do politics, espe...
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