"a surveillance state run amok"

I don't have anything remotely unique or interesting to add to the discussion of l'affaire Broadwell, but I have to agree that Glenn Greenwald has a good point here:

So all based on a handful of rather unremarkable emails sent to a woman fortunate enough to have a friend at the FBI, the FBI traced all of Broadwell's physical locations, learned of all the accounts she uses, ended up reading all of her emails, investigated the identity of her anonymous lover (who turned out to be Petraeus), and then possibly read his emails as well. They dug around in all of this without any evidence of any real crime - at most, they had a case of "cyber-harassment" more benign than what regularly appears in my email inbox and that of countless of other people - and, in large part, without the need for any warrant from a court.

Anyone who has been paying attention for the last 11 years knows that the capacity that exists for monitoring electronic communications is essentially limitless. But what we have here is a high-profile, concrete example of how readily it is used on the thinnest of pretexts.

That this led to some salacious news and/or (serendipitously, it would appear) uncovered a possible breach of national security ought not distract us from this fact.