Posted on 11/13/2012 8:56:48 PM PST by Jyotishi
Late last week, CIA director David Petraeus stepped down from his position after an FBI investigation revealed an extramarital affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell. Curiously, the revelation of the affair came about using location data from Gmail. Here's how the FBI put together the pieces, and how you can keep them from doing the same to you.
How the Affair Was Revealed by Tracing through Gmail
As you'd expect, the timeline of the affair itself is terribly complicated, and to understand the email trace that lead to the outing of the relationship, we do need to vaguely understand what happened with the affair. Here's a very brief summation of the events.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the original red flag that caught the FBI's ear was a series of anonymous, threatening emails sent to Jill Kelley, a Florida woman who organized military social events. The FBI then traced those threatening emails to their origin—probably with an IP address given up by Google—to Paula Broadwell. The FBI then got a warrant to monitor those email addresses, and eventually stumbled upon another email account where Petraeus and Broadwell left drafts of messages for each other:...
(Excerpt) Read more at lifehacker.com ...
That's guano.
Once the FBI knows about the account, the fact the communicants were viewing each others drafts instead of exchanging messages between separate accounts is irrelevant. They'll go to the access logs and trace the IP addresses and lay out the exchanges on a neat geographic timeline.
The critical error occurred when Broadwell sent the intimidating emails to Jill Kelley. That sort of amusement called for much higher levels of security than simply exchanging love notes on Gmail — high enough that you must assume the FBI will get the IP from which each message was sent, yet will not get you. Possible, but very inconvenient. Broadwell f'up up, pure and simple. If she wanted to intimidate Kelley, it needed to be from a totally isolated (geographically and temporally) account.
The ONLY question is WHY did the FBI get involved??? This sounds like a CAT FIGHT between to Groupies...nothing the FBI should have worried about, so WHY??? HOW did it get so far??
I am almost NOT BUYING the story of the “threatening” e-mails sent between the tramps........something’s not right.
.
use homing pigeons....
We cannot survive with with a lead ship class this stupid.
“Leadership class”
Lead Ship Makes sense too. Very heavy soft metal, easily punctured and will sink VERY fast.
My understanding is Petraeus and Broadwell werent actually sending emails between them but were composing emails and leaving them in draft, then each knowing the password of the others gmail would log in each day and read the drafts.
There are over a billion computers in the world, yet this web page found your particular computer. Ever wonder how it did that? Ever wonder if someone else could ‘trace’ it?
Internet anonymity my arse.
The question is then what would Mitch Rabb do?
You’ve been ‘GooGled’.
It almost didn't, based on what I've read. The FBI was indeed about to brush it off as a cat fight, but Kelley's shirtless FBI friend wielded enough influence to kick start an investigation. And, of course, once the identities of the participants emerged, it was too good not to finish. I mean, once they tied the IP to Broadwell, at most a Google search would be needed to connect her to Petraeus.
I guess it all depends on how much you trust the operator of the proxy server.
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