The real lesson from the Pentagon sex scandal: Your email, your liability

Bullets shatter bones, knives cut flesh, napalm burns, bombs explode. But nothing can hurt you quite the way email can, long after the smoke has cleared.

That’s one of the key lessons of the Petraeus sex scandal (aka the Love Pentagon) playing out across the InterWebs. Despite the bizarre twists and turns the story has taken, it also reveals a more troubling truth about our modern surveillance society.

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But first, the soap opera. This story has gone from tragic to comically surreal in a matter of days. If you haven’t been paying attention — and really, you ought to be paying attention, it’s just too good to ignore — here’s a quick summary of what we think we know so far.

Last May, Florida socialite and unofficial military liaison Jill Kelley received a series of anonymous threatening emails. According to an unnamed source who talked to the Daily Beast, these emails were less “I’m going to kill you” and more “Stop acting like such a skanky ho.”

Kelley calls up a pal of hers at the local FBI office and asks him to investigate. FBI guy starts digging through the emails and figures out that the anonymous sender is Paula Broadwell, national security analyst and co-author of a biography of General Petraeus. He then finds her real email account and discovers she’s been engaged in, um, nonmilitary maneuvers with Petraeus over a period of several months. The feds confront Broadwell and Petraeus, who both cop to the affair and quietly end it.

Digging through Kelley’s email account, the feds also discover 20,000 to 30,000 pages of “inappropriate messages” between Kelley and General John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan. We still don’t know what’s in those messages, but I’m sure we’re all dying to find out.

Somewhere along the line, the original FBI agent sends shirtless photos of himself to Kelley. (As the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Monica Kinney tweeted, it could have been worse — at least he didn’t send her photos of his manhood.) Shirtless fed is quickly removed from the case for becoming “personally involved” and is now under investigation, per the Wall Street Journal. Nonetheless, believing the investigation is being stonewalled to protect the president, in late October topless G-man spills what he knows to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

Oh yeah: Kelley has a troubled twin sister who once enlisted Petraeus’ help in a custody battle, which she ultimately lost. Have I missed anything?

It’s like “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” meets “Gomer Pyle.” Or maybe it’s an adult movie with the shirtless FBI agent playing the role of the pizza delivery guy. As Gawker’s Max Read put it, “The story has shifted from John Le Carré espionage novel to Vince Flynn right-wing thriller to misanthropic Coen Brothers farce.”

Now, cue the Internet.

Gawker has conjured up a helpful flowchart that shows all the players — so far — and how they relate to each other.

The New Yorker’s Andy Borowitz reports that the CIA has prepared a helpful guide for determining whether you are involved in the Pentagon sex scandal and don’t know it yet. (Hint: If your name showed up in Gawker’s flowchart, you probably are.)

The Weekly Standard’s Daniel Halper grabbed a screen capture from the ABC affiliate in Denver, which ran a video clip of Ms. Broadwell speaking at the University of Denver. Apparently somebody at the station felt the need to insert a cover shot of Ms. Broadwell’s book about the general in the background; unfortunately, he or she used a NSFW parody of the cover instead of the actual one. That image has since gone viral. Sorry, I can’t quote it here, you’ll have to click the link above. I gotta say, I think they’d sell a lot more copies with the new title.

The daily fishwraps have also had a bit o’ fun with this story, such as the Daily News (“In the Line of Booty“) and the New York Post (“Cloak and Shag Her“).

Despite all the craziness, which shows no sign of abating, there are serious implications in all of this, but they have less to do with who was doing what to whom or even what did or did not pose a threat to national security. The big takeaway here is how thoroughly just one federal agent can eviscerate your privacy and/or your career with minimal motivation.

From this vantage point, it seems like Kelley called in a favor with a fed who was warm for her form, and the story snowballed from there. It ended up taking down the head of the CIA and might kill the career of another four-star general, as well ruin up to four marriages. And it could get much worse.

Glenn Greenwald wrote a piece for the UK’s Guardian that gets to the heart of the matter:

So all based on a handful of rather unremarkable emails sent to a woman fortunate enough to have a friend at the FBI, the FBI traced all of Broadwell’s physical locations, learned of all the accounts she uses, ended up reading all of her emails, investigated the identity of her anonymous lover (who turned out to be Petraeus), and then possibly read his emails as well. They dug around in all of this without any evidence of any real crime — at most, they had a case of “cyber-harassment” more benign than what regularly appears in my email inbox and that of countless of other people — and, in large part, without the need for any warrant from a court….

This is a surveillance state run amok. It also highlights how any remnants of Internet anonymity have been all but obliterated by the union between the state and technology companies.

The irony, says Greenwald, is that in this instance the spy state managed to bring down the world’s No. 1 spook.

Surveillance run amok is the real scandal. But you’re not likely to see much coverage of that amongst the flowcharts, the snarky headlines, and the sex.

Are you involved in the Love Pentagon too? Implicate yourselves below or email me the dirt: cringe@inforworld.com.

This article, “The real lesson from the Pentagon sex scandal: Your email, your liability,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.