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 ...
