Throughout the week over at Securities Docket, I highlight the most interesting columns and blog posts from around the web on the subjects of SEC enforcement and securities litigation. Here is a digest of my picks for the week ending September 16.

SEC's Encrypted E-Mail Program Creates Obstacles for Defense Bar Members

HRO Securities Defense Blog | Michael MacPhail | Sep 16, 2011

Assuming that the SEC's use of encrypted emails is necessary and justified (which I doubt), "smail" poses several operational disadvantages compared to regular email.  The most obvious disadvantage is the inconvenience of not being able to read, or respond to, the message using one's regular Outlook email program.... The program's undisclosed miserly email retention policy presents other problems.  Sent and received emails apparently are kept for only 90 days, and there is no obvious way to archive or store older emails.  For instance, users may not store older emails in folders created for that purpose.  Given the importance of email communications, which the Enforcement staff is using smail to send subpoenas and correspondence, the SEC's unwillingness to provide users with a means of storing emails is inexcusable.

Bribery abroad: A tale of two laws

Economist | Sep 16, 2011

[The Bribery Act] is fair, too. Unlike the FCPA, it has a “compliance defence” that allows a company to avoid the harshest penalties if the wrongdoer is a junior employee and the firm otherwise has a strict anti-bribery policy which is clear to all employees and effectively administered. One rogue employee can't easily cause a crippling probe into an otherwise blameless company. America's Department of Justice sees no need for such safeguards. And since few cases go to trial, judges have given little guidance as to what the FCPA's bewildering text actually means. So, for now, it means whatever an aggressive prosecutor says it does.

CEO pushes Reg FD limits on Twitter

IR Web Report | Dominic Jones | Sep 15, 2011

Alan Meckler, CEO of WebMediaBrands Inc. (NASDAQ: WEBM), may be single-handedly redefining how corporate executives in the buttoned-down world of public companies communicate with their investors. The 64-year-old media entrepreneur, whose company owns interests in a number of online businesses and blogs, has been using Twitter to talk about his micro-cap company in ways that have stunned some observers and even drawn questions from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Clawbacks Without Claws in a Sarbanes-Oxley Tool

New York Times | Gretchen Morgenson | Sep 12, 2011

Under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the Securities and Exchange Commission was encouraged to hit executives where it hurts — in the wallet — if they certified financial results that turned out to be, in a word, bogus. SarbOx was supposed to keep managers honest. They would have to hand back incentive pay like bonuses, even if they didn't fudge the accounts themselves. That, anyway, was the idea. The record suggests a bark decidedly worse than its bite. The S.E.C. brought its first case under Section 304 of SarbOx in 2007. Since then, it has filed cases demanding that only 31 executives at only 20 companies return some pay.

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