Glenn Greenwald highlights in this piece from The Guardian what the real scandal is behind all the recent hoopla surrounding the recent revelations concerning the extra-marital affairs among the elite leadership of America’s national security state.

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:

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So not only did the FBI - again, all without any real evidence of a crime - trace the locations and identity of Broadwell and Petreaus, and read through Broadwell’s emails (and possibly Petraeus’), but they also got their hands on and read through 20,000-30,000 pages of emails between Gen. Allen and Kelley.

This is a surveillance state run amok. It also highlights how any remnants of internet anonymity have been all but obliterated by the union between the state and technology companies.

But, as unwarranted and invasive as this all is, there is some sweet justice in having the stars of America’s national security state destroyed by the very surveillance system which they implemented and over which they preside. As Trevor Timm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation put it this morning: “Who knew the key to stopping the Surveillance State was to just wait until it got so big that it ate itself?”

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The US operates a sprawling, unaccountable Surveillance State that - in violent breach of the core guarantees of the Fourth Amendment - monitors and records virtually everything even the most law-abiding citizens do. Just to get a flavor for how pervasive it is, recall that the Washington Post, in its 2010 three-part “Top Secret America” series, reported: “Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e mails, phone calls and other types of communications.”

Read Greenwald’s complete piece as published by Reader Supported News, in which they’ve published some video links, featuring journalist Michael Hastings in an 8-minute clip from CNN’s Piers Morgan Show, where Hastings appeared with two Petraeus-defending military officials. Also included is a video to a speech Glenn Greenwald gave earlier this year on the Surveillance State and the reasons it is so destructive.

This related report from Forbes touches on the same points. It reiterates something I’ve been going on about for years now, how the massive growth of the national surveilliance state is leading us to a world of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

As the David Petraeus scandal spirals ever deeper into absurdity, it’s important to remember three ironclad rules of government:

1. Incompetence is a feature of bureaucracies.

2. Bureaucracies given special powers will exercise them. Incompetently.

3. This will continue, in escalating fashion, until they take it so far that a scandal erupts, and the public reacts against it and politicians act to rein it in.

“…it’s important to remember that since 9/11 the United States has created a formidable security state that needs only the slightest excuse to go on a fishing expedition through your emails and other electronic records. And that no one, not even the CIA director, is exempt from these dragnets, which tend to take on a life of their own.”

After all, as I read in one Twitter feed, “If the CIA director can get caught, it’s pretty much open season on everyone else.”

And here’s an interview with Glenn Greenwald on Democracy Now!, on the point that While Petraeus Had Affair with Biographer, Corporate Media Had Affair with Petraeus.