Email, the system I invented in 1978, while a 14-year-old boy, to enable collaboration and communication among office workers at a small medical college in Newark, NJ, has now become the center of many controversies. For their 125th Anniversary issue, The Wall Street Journal commissioned me as email's inventor to write a brief essay entitled The Future of Email. That article shared what email really is and where email is heading. More recently, The New York Times interviewed me to comment on Hillary Clinton's use of personal email server to manage classified U.S. government communications. In that article, I shared that the use of a personal email server was extraordinary, wrong and clearly a well-planned strategy by Ms. Clinton to deny the American public's rightful access to communications that were government property. This book is a much-needed expansion of those thoughts and comments to provide you important insights to where email is going and why you as citizens must take action to protect this important medium, which has been subverted by vested interests. I believe with all sincerity and without hyperbole you should listen to what I'm going to share, as I am not only the world's leading expert on this subject but also have a historical and political perspective that will enable you to realize that if we do not act, our freedom, which has already been compromised, will suffer even more greatly, in a future where Have's and Have Not's will be defined by the level of security they have to their email communications.
Dr. V. A. Shiva Ayyadurai, the inventor of email and polymath, holds four degrees from MIT and is a world-renowned systems scientist. He is a Fulbright Scholar, Lemelson-MIT Awards Finalist, First Outstanding Scientist and Technologist of Indian Origin (STIO), Westinghouse National Science Talent Honors Award recipient, and U.S. National Medal of Technology and Innovation nominee. As a child, he was inspired by his grandmother's practicing Siddha, India's oldest system of traditional medicine, which led him to a major breakthrough: Systems Health(R), an integrative framework linking eastern and western medicine. His most recent invention, CytoSolve(R) is a technology that enables rapid discovery of multi-combination therapeutics without animal testing. In 1978, as a precocious 14-year-old, he was accepted to a special program in computer science at New York University. Later, at the University of Medicine and Dentistry, New Jersey (UMDNJ) as a Research Fellow, he developed the first electronic system to replicate the entire interoffice mail system (Inbox, Outbox, Folders, Address Book, Memo, etc.), which he named "email," defining email we all use and experience today. In 1982, the United States government officially recognized him as the inventor of email by awarding the first U.S. Copyright for "Email," when copyright was the only protection for software inventions.
