Virginia Heffernan writing on the NYTimes Opinionator blog in an article, “The Trouble With Email,” makes a perhaps unconscious but very appropriate reference to one of my favorite Star Trek episodes “The Trouble With Tribbles.

Up to his chest in Tribbles

Too Much Tribble for Kirk

Heffernan notices that EEEEEEEK! email is discoverable, persistent, leaves a long footprint, and often embarrassing if not incriminating. The safer alternative is, ssssssh!, LDL — not as defined in the Urban Dictionary where some definitions may be NSFW nor the more common “Let’s Do Lunch,” but “Let’s Discuss Live”.

From whence comes “LDL”? According to Heffernan:

Goldman’s Jonathan Egol is the first known master. When a trader named Fabrice Tourre described a mortgage investment in e-mail as “a way to distribute junk that nobody was dumb enough to take first time around,” Egol shot back: “LDL.”

While one can wonder about the morality of Egol, Tourre, the use of LDL and even of Heffernan for spreading notice of the practice, LDL brings back one of the first email lessons that I, writing as Emily Postmail, tried to teach new users, that is, “email is not so much mail as a post card that cannot be easily retrieved or revoked or removed.” Ollie North found this out the hard way in the Iran-Contra Hearings.

This applies to most all electronic communications. But email seems more like Tribbles than most other activity streams: it seems so warm and attractive, it seems harmless but needs some attention, it needs more attention, it seems like the Tribbles to reproduce at will, but unlike the Tribbles there seems to be no end to it — no poisoned grain. No Trouble With Harry or even Trouble With Angels here.

Bones: They reproduce at will. And brother, have they got a lot of will!

Privacy vs Secrecy is another matter — this is what LDL is really about. The folks who got in trouble were mostly relaying illegal information in what they thought was a secret way. Most people are upset about violations of their privacy, their legal but none-of-your-biznez behaviors