Feature image credit: Caleb Oquendo @ pexels
Your emails can get intercepted at any time. It’s true. You could use an encryption service to hide your message, but it’s a hassle.
So what if you wish to communicate with someone without the danger of your message getting discovered? Here’s a tip from The Art of Invisibility: The World’s Most Famous Hacker Teaches You How to Be Safe in the Age of Big Brother and Big Data by Kevin Mitnick. Use the draft folder on a shared email account.
Type your message then save it in the draft folder without sending it. Your contact should have access to this email account too, and they can then read your message and type a reply. But the email never leaves the server.
This was how former CIA director General David Petraeus communicated with a woman he was having an affair with, Paula Broadwell. While Petraeus had an established career of his own, Broadwell wasn’t far behind. She was a military officer who had graduated near the top of her class from the prestigious West Point. She was also an Olympic-distance triathlete, had two master’s degrees, was the deputy director of the centre on counterterrorism at Tufts University, and was a research associate at Harvard. It was quite an affair.
This came to light only because Petraeus’ friends started receiving threatening emails from him after he broke up with Broadwell.
When the FBI investigated the case, they discovered that Broadwell was behind the messages and that she had also been exchanging romantic messages with Petraeus.
The intriguing part is that none of the messages between Broadwell and Petraeus had ever left the drafts folder of the email account. It never passed through other servers and hence faced minimal chances for interception. Even if somebody accessed the account, evidence was gone as soon as the emails were deleted and the trash emptied.
Broadwell was a smart woman. Of course, she didn’t send the emails from her home IP address. Instead, she used various hotels. The FBI had to obtain the physical location of each hotel’s IP address through the log-in records from the email providers, which is allowed by law in the United States. Then they matched the records to Broadwell’s MAC address.
The FBI went through all that trouble because Petraeus was the CIA director at the time.
If you’re planning to use this method for clandestine communication, don’t send threatening messages with the email address, and don’t do it from the account of the CIA director, and you should be fine!
Chow Ping Lee is a content writer under Headliner by Newswav, a programme where content creators get to tell their unique stories through articles and at the same time monetize their content within the Newswav app.
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