Online Privacy Issue Is Also in Play in Petraeus Scandal

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigation that toppled the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and has now entangled the top American commander in Afghanistan underscores a danger that civil libertarians have long warned about: that in policing the Web for crime, espionage and sabotage, government investigators will unavoidably invade the private lives of Americans.

There has been a cascade of unintended consequences. What began as a private, and far from momentous, conflict between two women, Jill Kelley and Paula Broadwell, David H. Petraeus’s biographer and the reported author of harassing e-mails, has had incalculable public costs. The CIA is suddenly without a permanent director at a time of urgent intelligence challenges in Syria, Iran, Libya and beyond. The leader of the American-led effort to prevent a Taliban takeover in Afghanistan is distracted, at the least, by an inquiry into his e-mail exchanges with Kelley by the Defense Department’s inspector general. For privacy advocates, the case sets off alarms. “There should be an investigation not of the personal behavior of General Petraeus and General Allen, but of what surveillance powers the FBI used to look into their private lives,” Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said. “This is a textbook example of the blurring of lines between the private and the public.”