Tag Archives: David Petraeus

The real David Petraeus scandal

Law, Politics, , , , , , , , , ,
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cF9u6SuKKE8]

It’s not the adultery, it’s the invasion of privacy:

The fishing expedition into Broadwell’s emails should, on its face, be considered a violation of the Fourth Amendment—while the FBI apparently had a search warrant, it’s hard to see how this warrant was obtained with the “probable cause” the Constitution requires. But the real scandal here is what’s currently considered to be legal. After a 180-day period has elapsed, private emails are currently considered public and require only a subpeona to a provider to be accessed. Even worse, the government contends that even inside the 180-day window opened emails carry no expectation of privacy. As Adam Serwer of Mother Jones puts it, “If you think the feds need a warrant to start looking at your email, you’re dead wrong.” The standards created by the The Electronic Communications Privacy Act from a time when most emails were downloaded rather than stored on a third-party server remain in place. In the current technological context, these standards are privacy shredding.

The invasions of privacy in this case make the need for major changes in the law clear. First of all, the federal courts should make clear that there is the same Fourth Amendment right to privacy in electronic communication that there is in telephone calls. The government should have access to emails only after obtaining a warrant after the showing of probably cause. Cases like the investigation of Broadwell’s email—in which “evidence” of wrongdoing that would not be considered adequate cause if applied to snail mail was enough to obtain a warrant—should not go forward.

And much more needs to be done to protect the privacy of employees. A recent decision by the Supreme Court of Canada provides a valuable road map. “Canadians may therefore reasonably expect privacy in the information contained [workplace] computers, at least where personal use is permitted or reasonably expected,” wrote Justice Morris Day. This is the right approach. The Fourth Amendment should give government employees a presumptive expectation of privacy in their electronic communications, including those on workplace computers. And the privacy of private employees should have a similar expectation of privacy established by federal statute. The fact that emails and text messages are stored on third-party servers should not be used to immolate the privacy of individuals.

You knew this had to happen

Film/TV, Humor, Politics, , , ,

The inevitable David Petraeus/Mean Girls analogies:

Mean Girls, that true classic of modern cinema, introduced America to a catty social undermining technique known as the “three-way calling attack”: A teen girl phones a friend to engage in some gossip, neglecting to mention that a third friend is listening silently on another line. It’s casual entrapment, a surefire way to gin up controversy in a small, closed social circle. But there are usually unforeseen consequences.

One week in, with more backstabbing details emerging every day, the Pentagon affair scandal has begun to seem like a giant three-way (or five-way) calling attack staged by a D.C.-military-elite version of the Plastics. The split-screen mayhem looks like this: General David Petraeus has a long-simmering affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, who gets jealous of Petraeus’s acquaintance Jill Kelley and sends her threatening, anonymous e-mails. Broadwell also dials in General John Allen, another acquaintance, sending him e-mails that describe Kelley “as a ‘seductress’ and warn[ing] the general about being entangled in a relationship with her,” according to The Wall Street Journal. Then Kelley gets an anonymous FBI agent on the line, intending that he only hear Broadwell’s attacks. But while he’s eavesdropping on that interaction, he overhears dirt that Kelley didn’t mean to expose — namely, that she was exchanging her own sexy e-mails with Allen. Oh, and that anonymous FBI agent was hot for Kelley and had sent her shirtless pics of himself. As the Plastics would say, “OMG.”

Oh, and it continues.

David Petraeus lives on — in Call of Duty: Black Ops II

Humor, Technology, , , , , ,

From Foreign Policy:

Like many of us, the makers of Call of Duty: Black Ops II, which goes on sale this week, apparently didn’t see the David Petraeus sex scandal coming. As Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo reports, Activision’s much-anticipated video game casts the former general and CIA chief as the U.S. secretary of defense in 2025, serving a female president who, according to Totilo, “looks a whole lot like Hillary Clinton” (I don’t see the resemblance as much, and Petraeus refers to “President Bosworth” at one point):

At least Petraeus wasn’t spending his off-hours at the CIA working on the game, though maybe that would have helped him avoid his current jam. A rep for Call of Duty: Black Ops II publisher says Petraeus was “not involved in making the game.” Actor and political impressionist Jim Meskimen is credited with voicing the game’s Secretary of Defense.

Minor Black Ops II spoilers follow.

Petraeus doesn’t do much in the game, and there’s no sign of Paula Broadwell, the woman with whom Petraeus had his affair. When we first see Petraeus, he’s receiving a terrorist prisoner on board the [USS Barack] Obama. Another mission in the game starts with Petraeus and the Clinton-esque President Bosworth on board a futuristic version of Marine One before it is shot down over L.A. The crash should kill everyone, but this is Call of Duty. The important people tend to survive. We don’t see Petraeus again, but an audio message indicates that he survived.

You can check out the scenes Totilo describes here. Call of Duty, of course, wasn’t alone in predicting a bright political future for the general. After the election, a number of assessments of who would compose President Obama’s second-term national security team — including one at FP– floated Petraeus’s name.

And hey, a decade from now the folks at Activision could have the last laugh. If the long history of political scandals has taught us anything, it’s that we may not have seen the last of David Petraeus.

#35: Start-Up Nation

50 Books for 2010, , , , , , , , , ,

In Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, authors Dan Senor and Saul Singer attempt to unravel “where [Israel’s] entrepreneurial energy comes from, where it’s going, how to sustain it, and how other countries can learn from the quintessential start-up nation.” Their goal is a noble one, and bolstered by impressive stats, such as this one: “In 2008, per capita venture capital investments in Israel were 2.5 times greater than in the United States, more than 30 times greater than in Europe, 80 times greater than in China, and 350 times greater than in India.”

The authors, in searching for the values and impulses most influential in producing Israel’s creative instincts, found an unlikely source: the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). “In the Israeli military,” they write, “there is a tendency to treat all performance — both successful and unsuccessful — in training and simulations, and sometimes even in battle, as value-neutral. So long as the risk was taken intelligently, and not recklessly, there is something to be learned.” Throughout their research, Senor and Singer return time and again to this same explanation, or some variant, to elaborate on the unique brand of innovation endemic in Israeli society.

What to internationals smacks of brazen effrontery is, at least according to the authors, merely chutzpah, that term so ubiquitous in descriptions of the Jewish people and so often bewildering to those unfamiliar with its meaning. “An outsider would see chutzpah everywhere in Israel: in the way university students speak with their professors, employees challenge their bosses, sergeants question their generals, and clerks second-guess government ministers.” As an American, this disregard for hierarchy has a certain populist appeal, especially as the much-maligned “24-hour news cycle” has helped the government metastasize into an especially cantankerous form of reality television in which competence plays second fiddle to inflammatory rhetoric.

On the other hand, at times the reasons given for Israel’s high growth look suspiciously more nationalistic than realistic. In one passage, an IDF major boasts, “If a terrorist infiltrates [an] area, there’s a company commander whose name is on it. Tell me how many twenty-three-year-olds elsewhere in the world live with that kind of pressure.” Indeed, he has a point. And yet one cannot help but notice that “the most moral army in the world” (as proclaimed by defense minister, and former prime minister, Ehud Barak) has had numerous recent run-ins leading to international condemnation (and possible criminal prosecution). Is this related to the unusually emphatic devolution of autonomy in the military? Perhaps this cannot be answered; and yet this question is left wholly unaddressed, even as the authors continually cite this very same individuality as a boon to the Israeli economy.

Start-Up Nation is a book worth reading, if for no other reason than the generous access afforded the authors by the likes of Israeli president Shimon Peres, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and even American general David Petraeus. The authors’ perspective is one of nearly-unbridled enthusiasm, owing to the vibrant nature of Israel’s start-up scene and the continuing promulgation of its inventive spirit. In this latter endeavor, Dan Senor and Saul Singer join the chaotic Israeli chorus that so deftly mixes fierce national pride with a heaping helping of chutzpah. If theirs is an accurate prognostication, the best has yet to emerge from Israel.