petraeus

The extramarital affair scandal engulfing former CIA director David Petraeus has brought massive public attention to the convoluted U.S. laws governing e-mail privacy. We've got some quick tips for keeping your electronic communiques private.

Before getting into the more technical side of things, there are some simple behavioral changes you can make.

Always log out of your e-mail when you're done using it. This goes for any online service, including social networking sites. Logging out prevents a cached password from keeping you signed in even after the browser has been restarted.

Never use your preferred personal e-mail … Read more

If former CIA Director David Petraeus had secretly stashed love letters he exchanged with his paramour at home under his mattress, he might have actually done a better job of protecting his privacy.

Blame federal law for this counterintuitive result. Because it's so easy to dash off an e-mail -- or edit a Gmail draft -- you might think electronic correspondence should receive far greater legal protections and be more difficult for the FBI to read.

Not quite. Because of the way a key federal privacy law was worded in 1986, back in the pre-Internet days of analog modems, … Read more

More than a decade in the future, we'll see a still-strapping Secretary of Defense David Petraeus greeting troops aboard the decks of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Barack Obama.

OK, so that reality seems a little less likely in our world of carbon-based life forms now that Petraeus has resigned his CIA post amid an adultery scandal, but it's still very much part of the digital world in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2.… Read more

Humans make errors.

Some are tragic. Some are merely funny. Some would say that the recently-revealed entanglements of generals David Petraeus and John Allen generally contain a little of both.

However, ABC Denver found an utterly bizarre way to err during its recent news broadcast about the military four-step.

For, in reporting on the affair, it produced a cover of Paula Broadwell's biography of Petraeus, "All In," that was instead adorned with an odd title.

It was "All Up In My Sn****." (The asterisked word rhymes with "catch.")

This, of course, was a … Read more

Federal authorities are investigating another U.S. general for alleged "inappropriate communications" with a woman related to the scandal that brought down CIA chief Gen. David Petraeus.

The Defense Department Inspector General is reviewing communications between Gen. John Allen, commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, and Jill Kelley, who has been linked to the e-mail scandal that led to Petraeus' resignation last week. The department is currently reviewing 20,000 to 30,000 documents -- described mostly as e-mails -- between Allen and Kelley, an acquaintance of Petraeus, a senior Defense Department official said. … Read more

In an effort to cover a trail of messages between him and his mistress, former CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus reportedly used a tactic favored by terrorists and teenagers -- communicating via draft e-mail.

Petraeus and Paula Broadwell, the co-author of Petraeus' biography and the woman he was having an affair with, set up private Gmail accounts in order to communicate, the Associated Press reported today. In addition to creating the e-mails under false identities, Petraeus and Broadwell decided to exchange some messages using the draft function, as an added precaution.

Instead of actually e-mailing each other, they would compose … Read more