Wanna cut the force fast?: Let the FBI read all our e-mail

By Matt Pottinger

Best Defense lack of privacy correspondent

If we are to follow the policies implied by the U.S.
government's handling of the Director Petraeus and General Allen cases, here's
what we should do: Open up the personal email accounts of all 2.3 million U.S.
military service members to the FBI and the Pentagon and let them have at it.

Just think of the benefits: We could complete the Afghanistan
drawdown overnight because 99 percent of our troops would be sidelined by
investigations into "potentially inappropriate" communications. We
wouldn't have to keep clarifying the nuances of "rebalancing" versus "pivoting"
toward Asia anymore -- all our ships would be stuck in port while sailors are
queried about sending "flirtatious" messages. And we could avoid the fiscal
cliff by laying off service members who, at some point in their lives, typed
words that someone, somewhere, construed as "intimidating."

In all seriousness, the aspect of the Petraeus and Allen
investigations that should most disturb Americans is our government's invasion
of citizens' private email accounts on the thinnest of pretexts, its reading of
every last message, and its sharing of the most lurid snippets -- regardless of
their irrelevance -- with members of Congress and unnamed officials who, in turn,
share context-free summaries with the press.

These developments give me a grudging respect for the KGB. At
least it had to expend real energy gathering the information it used to
embarrass, compromise, and incriminate the citizens it spied on. U.S.
investigators have it much easier. They have access to dossiers every bit as
juicy as anything the Stasi ever compiled, but they hardly have
to lift a finger to get them. Americans now compile their own
dossiers in the form of email archives, social media accounts, phone and
text-message logs, online medical records, and geo-location trails left by
their smartphones. The deterrence of shoe leather? Not any more. All that investigators have to do is serve a subpoena on Facebook or Google or
AT&T to get minute-by-minute records of the last decade or so of our lives.
(Most Americans are probably unaware that investigators
usually don't need warrants to read
citizens' emails. Or to access our location data.).

One wonders how America's most important general, George
Washington, would have performed for the country if his private correspondences
had been read and spread by government agents and press back then. In
1758, while he was engaged to marry Martha, George wrote at least two love
letters to Sally Fairfax, the wife of one of his longtime friends. To this day,
historians debate the nature of George and Sally's relationship. There is no
evidence the two ever slept together, but the letters surely would have created
a scandal if they'd come to light during the American revolution. At best, they
would have caused a serious distraction for the embattled general and his
underdog army at a time when distractions could have meant defeat. 

Washington understood as well as anyone the necessity of private
words staying private. He knew that the fate of a new republic -- and not just his
ego -- depended on his sustaining a good public image. After his retirement, he
spent years censoring his letters of material that might undermine that goal.
He even had his wife Martha burn their letters to one another after his
death. 

That option doesn't exist today. There's no furnace to pitch our
emails into, no delete key that can erase our indelible digital
scribblings. Numerous backup servers don't permit it. The most we
can expect and demand is a government that helps protect our privacy rather
than obliterate it.

Matt Pottinger served as an
active-duty Marine from 2005-2010. He runs a small business in New
York.