TED's DIGITAL JUNGLE - DIGITAL LESSONS FROM L'AFFAIRE PETRAEUS

TED'S DIGITAL JUNGLE #9- DIGITAL LESSONS FROM L'AFFAIRE PETRAEUS

"If a C.I.A . Director can get caught, then its pretty much open season on everyone else."

- Marc Rotenberg, Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Center in the New York Times, 14 November, 2012

L'Affaire Petraeus has been unfolding for the past week, and, like many others, I have been trying to make sense of what now seems to be a private matter that has spiraled wildly out of control thanks to what appears to be misconduct on the part of some FBI agents and the power and speed of digital technology. There was an excellent article in the New York Times today that raised what, for me, is the central issue here: internet privacy.

There are some important lessons here for all internet users.

For example, we now know that FBI agents, for reasons known only to them, decided it was worth spending taxpayer funds to investigate some supposedly nasty anonymous e-mails ( I have not seen them, but according to John Miller of CBS, they were not " threatening", so they could not be considered criminal ) sent to a very well-connected private citizen from Florida who had a "friendship" with an FBI agent, who clearly wanted to get to know her a lot better. Somehow this FBI agent managed to convince his superiors to investigate the matter, and they proceeded to track down the e-mails to the computer of the now- famous-for-fifteen-minutes Paula Broadwell. The FBI agents then somehow managed to get a subpoena to impound Ms. Broadwell's computer, and investigate the contents, in the process discovering her apparently explicit correspondence with David Petraeus, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. This discovery suddenly transformed what had been a private squabble between two civilian women into a major national security issue, and led to the resignation of Mr. Petraeus, even though no one has accused him of breaking any laws or other misconduct.( Since Mr. Petraeus was C.I.A. director at the time of the murder of the American Ambassador to Libya in Benghazi, there has been speculation that these incidents are somehow related, and that Mr. Petraeus resigned to avoid testifying before a congressional committee investigating that attack- however, one must assume that Mr. Petraeus knew full well that he could be compelled to testify even if he had resigned, so that does not seem likely - at least at the moment)

However, as columnist Roger Simon pointed out yesterday, Mr. Petraeus could certainly be accused of being oblivious to a fundamental law of internet security: namely, there is no such thing as security on the internet anymore. Most of us know that our office e-mails are not private, and can be read by our bosses; however, the term private e-mail is an oxymoron, since either private hackers or, as we have seen, the government can gain access to your accounts and put whatever is there in the public or legal eye. Now we all know ( I hope!) that hacking is illegal, and that there are limits to what the government can do - though after this story, I wonder what those limits are nowadays. The second amendment protects us from illegal search and seizure, and there are certainly limits to what the government can do on your property. These limits might vary, but the essence is that evidence obtained through an illegal search cannot be used in court. Likewise, evidence obtained through an illegal wiretap cannot be used in court. However, in l'affaire Petraeus, one could argue that the investigation of the e-mails sent to Ms. Kelley was unwarranted, and that the seizure of Ms. Broadwell's computer was illegal, and that therefore none of this should have happened. But it did, and, as they say, that horse is out of the barn, with sad consequences for many of those involved.

In my previous post, I discussed some of the issues raised by Wikileaks. One can rest assured that the US State Department and other government institutions are going to be a lot more careful in what they write and, above all, in how they store their information.

So, at the risk of stating the obvious: There is no such thing as privacy on the internet, and users would be well advised not to have anything on their computers that could cause them problems, either legally or personally. That means on your "private accounts" as well as your business accounts.

The fact that a man of Mr. Petraeus' stature and experience choose to ignore these realities, even after Wikileaks, boggles the mind. All of the correspondence in question was written on his private g-mail account.However, the conduct of the FBI in this case is even more troubling. It will be interesting to see how FBI officials attempt to justify both the origins and the subsequent snowballing of a case in which there has yet to be any talk of criminal malfeasance of any kind, and I am very glad the American Civil Liberties Union has their eyes on this case.