The story of General David Petraeus’s fall gets stranger by the day, but one especially surprising detail is the rudimentary way he and Paula Broadwell carried on their secret e-mail conversations. The CIA director and his mistress apparently sent messages by creating a Gmail account under a pseudonym, then leaving notes in a draft folder that either one could read.
The method has been used by teenagers and Al Qaeda operatives, and it raises a number of questions — for instance, why the nation’s top spy didn’t know that Gmail accounts are supremely hackable; or that governments often request private data from e-mail companies; or that it’s easy for law enforcement to gain access to stored e-mails; or that an account, no matter whose name is on it, is traceable via the user’s IP address.
Comments
There's something my mother told me in 1962, that had Patreus' mom told him, he would be sitting in Foggy Bottom, VA right now, instead of the hot seat: "NEVER write anything down you wouldn't want the whole world, including me, to read." Wise counsel, and truer now than it was then, since today's technologies only make it possible to be a bigger fool, faster. Thank you Mom.
Perhaps both you and Petraeus should have heeded your mother's advice, geolovely. Had Petraeus done so, he would most assuredly still be Director of CIA. Had you done so, that small handful of people who still read Globe editorials would be unaware of your ignorance of an elementary fact known to most schoolboys: namely, that CIA Headquarters is located not, as you contend, in Foggy Bottom (headquarters of the Department of State), but rather in Langley, Virginia. But perhaps you had Bottoms, Hot and Foggy, on your mind.
What kind of 'schoolboys' do you hang out with? if they were actually old enough to vote Mr. Lion, they'd know the CIA was originally located on E street, in Foggy Bottom, and while you might not have been able to follow the complex comedy the statement was a little pun involving bottoms, sitting, and a hot seat. Could you do us a favor and help reduce the number of people reading the BG by taking your silly vitriol elsewhere.
Though I know the answer to the question: Of what business is it of the government's to go messing around in this email account-(the general makes himself vulnerable to blackmail and extortion of state secrets when he has an affair) it still makes me uncomfortable. He wasn't breaking any laws that I can think of. Probably breaking all kinds of army policies. Under what authority does the government get access to this private information? What crime was the general suspected of breaking?
What law breaking, what crime committing?
Why did an FBI agent violate proceedures and go directly to Eric Cantor with the reports about Patraeus? And why did Cantor sit on them?
The President should have refused to accept Patraeus's resignation. This entire scandal is a feels like a story on Entertainment Tonight. The issue of security is a side show.
This sanctimonious editorial by ethically confused Globe editors - offering pompous criticism of the former CIA Director's insufficiently honed sense of Internet security while completely ignoring the more fundamental moral failing of adultery - reminds me past editorials by these same self-appointed moral arbiters, and one in particular: the editorial that criticized Congressman Barney Frank for writing a letter of recommendation to the Probation Officer of his then-boyfriend and prostitute Steve ("Hot Bottoms") Gobie on Congressional stationery (O! the shame!), while completely ignoring that "Hot Bottoms" had been running his male prostitution ring (and performing acts that would make all nature blush) out of the Congressman's apartment.
Wow, yeah, Barney Frank, but even more of a concern: what about the Globe's editorial stance regarding Grover Cleveland's sexual assault on Maria Halpin?!?!?