Current reporting makes it sound like Drum was basically right. Apparently the emails only mentioned Patraeus once (and only obliquely). The reason for the investigation was the FBI guy wanted to sleep w Kelly. Also apparently he was a wingnut. Kind of a shame Patraeus is goin down over this I guess. And a bit ironic, wasn't he a fantasy winger anti Obama candidate at one point?
The reporting I saw says the initial agent was a complete nut and the reason it's public, but he didn't actually work the case since he doesn't work cyber crime at all. They decided there was barely enough reason to investigate separately and decided no laws had been broken. Crazy fucker went and leaked shit all over the place because apparently everyone involved in this affair is mentally unstable, so it became public. It does answer the question of "wait, why does anyone care?", which is apparently that nobody cared except someone who probably shouldn't be employed by the FBI due to emotional instability.
I've read theories that this whole thing is engineered and/or happy coincidence so that he can distance himself from the Obama administration (he was the golden boy for Iraq) as part of a preparatory run-up to 2016/2020. Politics these days is like Lost seasons 1-3. Everyone's watching and throwing out the most wild speculations based on tenuous connections, but in the end most of it is just retarded fantasy. I'm going to wait until the 2016 election comes out on DVD then just watch it all in one weekend on Netflix.
I guess to me the most interesting thing in this (and this should clarify my post earlier) is that Broadwell had classified materials on her personal computer, and that no one is still sure how they got there.
... He thought that was actually the name of the fucking book?! I'm amused at the hints about Gen Allen possibly having an affair with the second lady. I'm really more amused than anything at finding out that our top brass are seemingly filming a Bravo reality show.
More seriously, I'm not particularly bothered by his affair (that's between the people involved), and he doesn't strike me as the kind of guy you could blackmail. That stuff only bothers me when the adulterer is a hypocrite about it. But The Director of the CIA got caught in a tepid affair by an email trail?! Clearly he is not fit for the job.
Interestingly, they used a pretty clever approach: he had a Gmail account that she also had access to. They would never send each other emails, but rather would write a draft and leave it, then the other would log on and look in the drafts and read it. So no emails going back and forth. Not clever enough, however. If only he had some concept of, say, encryption...
Sure. Or Dropbox, or any way of sharing files. Really, you'd think the DCIA would do it right: the two of them really ought to have employed one-time pads.
Public key cryptography has been around for approximately forever, but I guess only CRAZY ANARCHIST PEOPLE actually encrypt their emails.
Do you imagine the FBI wouldn't have taken anything encrypted with public keys straight to the NSA? I don't know what their state of the art is in terms of cracking keys, but I bet it's pretty good. No. A one-time pad was the only solution. Also in the process of trying to dredge up my like sixteen-year-old understanding of cryptography (no shit; I bought Applied Cryptography a half a lifetime ago when I was much younger) I discovered that apparently quantum key distribution is a thing. Schneier needs to update his book!
It's really not. If the NSA can crack RSA keys in any sort of reasonable time, they're not telling, and people like Schneier don't think they can break AES yet.. Factoring out (brute forcing) a solution is hugely time-consuming. It's absolutely not something that would be done in the course of a routine investigation. And if the NSA does have "a cryptoanalytic attack against the algorithm", then they're certainly not going to risk leaking that fact for something this piddly.
Anyway, absent an actual quantum computer implementing Shor's Algorithm (oh dear God would that be amazing or what, just from a pure science perspective), 2048 RSA should be considered effectively immune to direct attack. Sidechannel attacks and lead-pipe cryptoanalysis are far more likely.
Given the history of this stuff, I would have zero confidence that the NSA operates by normal rules. If there's an attack on public key that brings it into crackable by the NSA's server farm, they've proably fond it.
But there's absolutely no way they would risk it getting revealed by using it on a case like this where they don't have a solid excuse for where else they got the information. Coventry, etc.
I thought that the crazies would try to connect this with Benghazi but this story is starting to get so crazy that Benghazi seems to be getting lost in the shuffle. Would that be a fair assessment?
He's the head of the CIA. If he was sending odd encrypted emails to someone harassing someone else about an affair and who happened to be giving a lot of speeches that implied access to secret documents.. it would be a short fucking conversation about "We need the encryption key on that account. Nowish would be nice."
Lol. Sounds precisely right to me. Anyway, I wonder if the classified material is simply troop movements and whatnot. Those details are often classified mildly and would probably be inevitable for a woman who was taking notes for a book.
Everything conceivable and inconceivable is classified these days. The dates and times when Petraeus took a shit are probably classified, as is the secret surveillance video of him grunting while doing his (classified) business. The brand of toilet tissue used is classified, as are the locations of said dumps, and he had to sign the log at each sanitary facility before entering, and that log is also classified, and guarded by Marines day and night lest it fall into the hands of terrorists or other malcontents. I'm half expecting a visit from some scary men in suits because I've revealed classified information in this post. Too goddamn much (classified) information.
No. The crazies are 100% connecting this with Benghazi. The Daily Show did a whole segment on it. Heck, my previous post in this thread was a guy making fun of them. Trust in the crazies not to let you down.
Ironically, this is a known issue in cryptography circles and someone you may know from other contexts worked on this problem.
While I'm thinking about it: What the fuck is the FBI doing going through Jill Kelly's emails, and what the fuck are they doing releasing publicly that a) she was emailing with this other General dude and b) characterizing the emails as "flirtatious." Do we give up any presumption of privacy when we report a crime?
That's a good question. Presumably they've got free rein on account of potential lawbreaking on her part that they stumbled across, so they are deflecting attention furiously.
What potential lawbreaking on Kelly's part did they stumble upon? It really bothers me that this general dude is going to probably lose his job because the FBI decided to dig through some civilian's email for no good fucking reason and then blab about the contents of that email. And I'm not even a big civil libertarian type!
I have no evidence. I'm just saying given the general wackiness with her "diplomatic immunity", her crazy FBI contact, and so on, there's probably something. Also apparently there's something about her and improper use of a cancer charity. The possibilities are limitless once you're an idiot and the FBI starts going through your stuff.
I guess. I just don't see how being an idiot (which she seems to be) give the FBI carte blanche to not only trawl her email, but expose random bits of it.
I'm not endorsing it or saying it's the right thing to do; my guess would be she handed over way too much when she thought her friend could handle it discreetly, then it went all NATIONAL SECURITY, and she's now in no position to do anything about it.
