It's the abuse of the U.S. surveillance state, writes Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian:
What is most striking is how sweeping, probing and invasive the FBI's investigation then became, all without any evidence of any actual crime – or the need for any search warrant…
And how it has now eaten itself, leading to the deposition of the top official trusted with its implementation:
As is now widely reported, the FBI investigation began when Jill Kelley – a Tampa socialite friendly with Petraeus (and apparently very friendly with Gen. John Allen, the four-star U.S. commander of the war in Afghanistan) – received a half-dozen or so anonymous emails that she found vaguely threatening. She then informed a friend of hers who was an FBI agent, and a major FBI investigation was then launched that set out to determine the identity of the anonymous emailer.
That is the first disturbing fact: it appears that the FBI not only devoted substantial resources, but also engaged in highly invasive surveillance, for no reason other than to do a personal favor for a friend of one of its agents, to find out who was very mildly harassing her by email. The emails Kelley received were, as the Daily Beast reports, quite banal and clearly not an event that warranted an FBI investigation…
