Welcome to the People's Republic of JPMorgan

“JPMorgan” is a registered trademark of JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Sorry for starting with a legal disclaimer, but you’ll see why in a minute.

You may recall that 18 months ago Greg Papadopoulos and I published a book called Citizen Engineer, where we tried to help engineers understand key topics related to the role in society, including sustainability and intellectual property. Since then we’ve traveled around giving talks (on our own dime) to help spread the word to students and engineering professionals. I know we’ve gotten some universities to think about their engineering curriculum, and hopefully we’ve gotten our message across to some engineers.

As part of the project we put up a website at citizenengineer.org. One of the features that I only got partially implemented were the forums. Unfortunately I didn’t get the security fully setup, so they have since filled up with spam.

Apparently some of this spam is very sensitive to JPMorgan, as it prompted them to send me the attached letter. The offensive content appears to be 4 spam posts that include random gibberish (with links, of course). Here’s a sample:

I’m not going to say much about the letter beyond highlighting a couple of sentences.

Its not even worth coming up with an ironic reply to that one.

Well, unfortunately their email is causing me to write more about banking and financial services, not less.

I’m not sure what else to say. If you are an investor in JPMorgan Chase, then I’m sorry to report that some of your profits are being used like this. If you are an employee, then I’m just sorry.