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Lewd e-mail had always been passed around Dow Chemical Co. in Midland, Michigan, "but when one worker complained of seeing offensive material on a terminal last May, it set off the largest-known crackdown on computer misuse in the U.S. workplace." The result: 39 workers were labeled with "computer-age scarlet letters. Pilloried in the media, and declared deviants by Dow, they're finding that other companies won't touch them. They have faced the humiliation of explaining to their families what happened, and financial strain has pushed some to bankruptcy. . . they still struggle to comprehend how their lives were upended by something as innocuous as e-mail."

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