Bloomberg View: The Abiding Perils of E-Mail
In the Petraeus affair, a reminder of how not to keep secrets
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Perhaps the most vexing aspect of the fall of General David Petraeus is why, decades into the popular e-mail experience, a master of intelligence and spycraft thought his romantic e-mails could remain secret.
Let’s state for the record a fairly basic observation: E-mail leaves a virtually permanent, indelible record. You can empty your trash, you can bury your laptop, you can create fake accounts, but chances are there’s a server somewhere with a twin version of your correspondence. It’s waiting in the shadows to come back and haunt you like a ghost in the machine.