Was someone at CENTCOM fluffing for Jill Kelley on Wikipedia?

Gen. John Allen, L, who is being investigated for "inappropriate communications" with unpaid military socialite Jill Kelley, R. (ABC NEWS)

It's bad enough to learn that Marine General John Allen and CIA chief David Petraeus intervened in a custody battle involving CENTCOM socialite Jill Kelley's sister, and shocking to learn that Allen may have sent as many as "30,000 pages" of email to Kelley (this is how the FBI measures email, guys, in printed pages). But what, pray tell, the fuck, is this?

Boing Boing pal Andrea James, who is a Wikipedia editor, saw an odd edit when writing the Jill Kelley bio: On 9 February 2012, a US Central Command IP added "Jill Kelley, amateur ambassador and chess player" to Arcadia University's Wikipedia page.

Your theories? I mean, who was that, John fucking Allen? I'm so baffled by this thing, I don't know that I have it in me to even try speculating anymore.

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silkox

That’s a fun new twist, all right. That ip address seems to have many users; it’s also the source of a few edit to the Lisa Nowak page, and many edits to the Rude Squad page. The detail in Jill’s listing: Jill Kelley, B.S.C, is out of place among the other distinguished alumni.
- http://glitch.tl/ Michael Smith
  
  Maybe its just a gateway with NAT behind it.
  - http://twitter.com/samari711 samari711
    
    It’s a Proxy server with heavy content filtering I’m sure
http://www.spockosbrain.com spocko

Now that you say printed pages is how the FBI measures emails, now 30,000 pages makes more sense than 30,000 emails. Here is why, say that you have written one letter, say One and 1/8th printed pages worth of text. That will equal 2 full pages.And say that instead of just starting a new email the person does a reply and this goes back an forth 4 times with just a few extra words or one and one 1/8th pages (equal to two pages)
Since it is a reply it narrows the text and makes it longer, say to 5 pages. And then that 5 becomes 9 page each way. Next thing you know you have 30,000 pages!
And I’m not even counting photos that are cut and pasted into the email does each shot of you naked count as a separate page?

What might be more interesting is knowing the frequency of emails and on whose side?
- LinkMan
  
  Once you eliminate 28,000 pages of quoted replies, 1,000 pages of “Bill Gates will give you $100 to forward this” and 500 pages that consist only of “Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail” (which always seems to run over to the next page when you do need to print out that e-mail), there’s just not that much left.
  - acerplatanoides
    
    nothing to see here? Is that your drift?
  - http://www.xradiograph.com/ OtherMichael
    
    If only there was some way that the “Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail” wouldn’t actually print when you actually print out the rest of the email.
- http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul
  
  How are pdf attachments counted? If they were sending bootleg copies of “50 Shades of Camouflage” to each other, how many pages is that?
Ethan Taliesin Houser

General John Allen is a total studmuffin and he’s only getting sexier with age!
gsilas

Well, that IP address has quite the history of military related edits, but only one for the John Allen page. If I had a wikipedia page, I would edit it daily!
- jhoosier
  
  “John R. Allen (born December 15, 1953) is a United States Marine Corps four-star general and had pancakes for breakfast this morning, followed by a satisfactory BM.”
Scott Alexander

It gets weirder…
http://www.slate.com/blogs/trending/2012/11/13/paula_broadwell_on_wikipedia_petraeus_affair_alleged_on_wikipedia_in_january.html
Teresa Nielsen Hayden

I don’t give a damn about the adultery angle. Officials who work at Petraeus’s and Allen’s level of discretion shouldn’t go anywhere near such a tangled mess of flaky people, informal social connections, and unaccountable expenditures. Don’t they know a giant hairball security risk when they see one?
- acerplatanoides
  
  Perhaps it was shaved. ;)
http://glitch.tl/ Michael Smith

30000 pages * 80 columns * 80 rows * 6/8 (assuming base64 encoding) gives 144 megabytes. So maybe these two were emailing word documents to each other for a while. Does the FBI print binaries out then manually decode them? Maybe they are trying to decrypt it ;)

One place I had to send binary files to had this fantastic email gateway which was better than me at detecting attached files. I had to pgp encode my data, ascii armour it, strip off the pgp header and footer and separately send instructions for the receiver to put their own header and footer on. That got it through.
- http://profiles.google.com/stryxvaria Stryx Varia
  
  Seriously tho. I’ve gone back through old email backups and the attached images are stored as binaries, just a solid page of text. The FBI wouldn’t get punked by a service provider like that would they? I mean google wouldn’t just hand over one bigass text file and the FBI prints it out to see the patterns, right?
  - http://glitch.tl/ Michael Smith
    
    The actual smtp and pop streams have to be ascii text, hence uuencode and base64. It is most likely that the FBI would be given those streams, but turning attachments back into binary files is trivial. I am sure they have tools to do that.
Donald Petersen

My theories? I’m sorry, I have none. This particular tempest in Uncle Sam’s teabarrel is beyond me. I patiently await the miniseries.
http://twitter.com/samari711 samari711

That sounds like a snarky comment left by one of the few people at CENTCOM who weren’t enamored with Jill Kelley
- rattypilgrim
  
  Yes. it does, especially after reading (thanks Antinous) that she phoned 911 several times last week to complain about reporters on her property and claimed she was an “honorary diplomat” and due the same protection as the real thing. The chess reference sounds equally sarcastic. But that could be my own projection.
Nadreck

It all seems pretty traditional. In “On the Psychology of Military Incompetence”, in the appendix on competency, Dixon points out that every really great general in history had a *very* active sex life. The skills of guessing what the other person is up to and timing your responses appropriately are directly transferable. A very active curiosity, a willingness to go exploring and compassion (as in an *appropriate* level of compassion for your troops) are must-haves in both fields. By comparison, the dolts who cause military debacles are generally in the closet about everything.

Ms. Kelley fills in the time honoured role of “camp follower” that you can read all about at least as far back as Kipling.

The only novel aspect of things is the new panopticon of the Internet. Even there, there was a lot of speculation about the moral effects of panopticons back in the Victorian era.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Ms. Kelley fills in the time honoured role of “camp follower” that you can read all about at least as far back as Kipling.
  
  Kipling? Tacitus!
  - rattypilgrim
    
    Tacitus? Grock!
  - Teresa Nielsen Hayden
    
    Jael and Sisera (and Barak)!
    - http://www.gyrofrog.com/ Gyrofrog
      
      That’s creepy/funny
- FoolishOwl
  
  The skills of guessing what the other person is up to and timing your responses appropriately are directly transferable.
  
  My partner and I prefer to use verbal communication and body language to directly communicate what we would like from each other, rather than each of us guessing what the other wants or imposing our wills arbitrarily. Maybe we’re just kinky that way.
http://imcravingpresidency.tumblr.com/ SedanChair

“Jill Kelley, amateur ambassador, queen of palace intrigue, CHIEF HARPY PRIESTESS SLUT of the base’s COVEN OF WITCHES that EVERYBODY KNOWS ABOUT, PRANCING AROUND”
blueelm

The talented Mrs. Kelly?
jmv

Interesting, I didn’t realize Arcadia University was once known as Beaver Female Seminary.
http://voidstar.com/ jbond

huh huh hu huh. She said, ‘Fluffing’.
- feetleet
  
  Surely, I can’t be the first person to put this together, but just in case – ‘Jill Kelly’ (without an ‘e’) is the stage name of a famous 90′s-era porn star. I don’t know who this CENTCOM girl is, but if she’s ‘fluffing for Jill Kelley’, you know she’s going places.
thespiansareweird

btw, I work in the eDiscovery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_discovery Pages are often used in regards to the collection of email or electronic documents as it is a holdover baseline from the days of reviewing/collecting paper documents. It is also a pretty good benchmark for quantity of email, since if you were to print them all to TIFF it would equal 30K pages (since you would get a new doc break at each new email, but some emails can go on and on and on) which gives a scope of the amount.

As a guide, the industry standard of amounts etc is that 1GB = 5k Docs/50K pages of material. So all in all, this is prolly around 600MB of email they collected.