If you are ever considering sending an anonymous email you should probably forget about it. Or, you’ll at least want to take more precautions than the CIA director’s mistress did when she went to a Starbucks in North Carolina to write a nasty email about people in Tampa, Florida.
By the third week of June, the FBI had identified [Paula] Broadwell as the cyberstalker, [Special Agent Frederick] Humphries said, relating how he saw FBI videotape of “a BMW pulling up to a Starbucks in North Carolina and shortly thereafter the alleged subject of the case enters and logs on, and some of the e-mails were being sent, so they had a firm idea of who it was.”
Everything is on film.
This came out in a defamation case related to the outing of David Petraeus as an adulterer with a low regard for the basics of cybersecurity. It’s alleged that the FBI and through them the Obama administration smeared the victim of Broadwell’s cyberstalking in an effort to protect Petraeus in the lead-up to the 2012 election. However, the administration was always concerned that Petraeus would run for the Republican nomination (which is why, I believe, they first sent him to Afghanistan and then later made him CIA director in the first place). I don’t think they were particularly interested in protecting him, and Obama announced that he was being replaced with an hour or two of the exit polls being published on Election Day.
On the other hand, the CIA has some influence over the FBI and they watch each other’s backs. If Petraeus got special treatment, at least for a while, I think his position of power explains it better than any desire on the Obama team’s part to want to cover for him. I think they were ecstatic to be able to get rid of him.
