Petraeus-Broadwell affair: The art of using tech to be discreet

In the old days it was the ’lipstick on your collar' that you had to watch out for if you were having an affair, but things have become a lot more complicated today.

E-mails, text messages and the like have made it much easier for us to communicate with each other, but as shown in the case of CIA director Gen. David Petraeus and his biographer Paula Broadwell, that same technology also makes it easier for cheating couples to get caught.

Even when they think they’re being discreet.

Broadwell and Petraeus never actually sent each other emails, choosing instead to leave messages for each other in the drafts folder of a shared email account. This is however a tactic that has been used by terrorists for some time. According to the American Civil Liberties Union website, the technique has been used by Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, Richard Reid(the shoe bomber), the 2004 Madrid train bombers, terrorists in Germany, as well as some domestic “ eco-terrorists.”

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Which, according to the_Washington Post_, is probably why it was not enough to throw federal agents, who were investigating a complaint byPetraeus’s friend Jill Kelley that she was receiving harassing e-mails from the account.

Apart from the high profile nature of the entire incident which has thrown one of America’s foremost federal agents into the spotlight, what it also highlights is the security of the information we put online. If the CIA director can’t crack how to do it properly, what hope is there for rest of us? Is trying to do something online in complete privacy not even an option anymore?

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Well, don’t panic. Because it is.

The first mistake Petraeus and Broadwell made was to rely on a cloud based web mail service like Gmail.

The Washington Post hands out a few handy alternatives to that, including by John Reed of Foreign Policy,who suggests ultra-secure, encrypted services such as Hushmailand Tigertext. Hushmail, uses encryption keys to ensure that only the sender and receiver can read a message. And Tigertext gives messages a limited lifespan, so they’re deleted automatically after a time.

The Post also suggests a number of other services:

Vaultletmail, which encrypts e-mails in transmission, and users of unsecured platforms like Gmail can read the messages by entering a secret phrase. (The example used is “the condor flies at night.”)

“ 10 minute mail,” which provides disposable e-mail addresses that expire after that time frame.

( Read more here)

The Daily Beast concentrates more on the thorny question of whether it is even possible to have a truly ‘secret’ affair anymore. Its hilarious (yet useful) list offers suggestions such as “Keep an internal list of excuses and make sure to rotate through them” and “Don’t share passwords with a lover, particularly a jealous one” ( You can read them all here).

But what is also called into question in this entire affair (pun unintended) are the powers that are being employed by Federal agents that allow them to also search through highly personal information we put up on the Internet:

The New York Times quotesAnthony D Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union as saying,“There should be an investigation not of the personal behavior of General Petraeus and General Allen, but of what surveillance powers theFBI used to look into their private lives. This is a textbook example of the blurring of lines between the private and the public.”