IIRC espionage is only punishable by death; during wartime, if it leads to the death of a US agent, or if nuclear secrets are involved.
I don’t quite understand the law they’re being charged under. What does being an “agent” of a foreign government mean? If they aren’t obtaining classified information, what is the difference between espionage and just plain research? Is it the false identities?
18 U.S.C. 794 says it is a crime, punishable by death, to deliver to a foreign government or military “any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, note, instrument, appliance, or information relating to the national defense,” provided it is done " with intent or reason to believe that it is to be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation." It needn’t be classified information.
18 U.S. 793 applies any person who “goes upon, enters, flies over, or otherwise obtains information concerning any vessel, aircraft, work of defense, navy yard, naval station, submarine base, fueling station, fort, battery, torpedo station, dockyard, canal, railroad, arsenal, camp, factory, mine, telegraph, telephone, wireless, or signal station, building, office, research laboratory or station or other place connected with the national defense owned or constructed, or in progress of construction by the United States or under the control of the United States.” You can get up to 10 years.
:rolleyes:
Well played, I salute you.
The Foreign Agents Registration Act dates back to 1938, and was originally aimed at Nazi and Communist agents operating in the U.S. The “foreign agents” in question aren’t secret agents, just persons acting on behalf of foreign governments or foreign organizations. It’s not illegal to be a foreign agent in the sense FARA uses the term, but you have to register with the Attorney General–
lots of respectable Washington lawyers and lobbyists register with the U.S. Justice Department as “foreign agents” on behalf of foreign clients (foreign governments or companies or associations from outside the United States). If you don’t register, but nonetheless engage in the activities described in the law, you can be fined and/or imprisoned.
Since someone’s gonna say it:
“Anna Chapman” (or whatever her name really is) = total babe.
I’d be shocked if in the coming days or weeks there weren’t some well publicized arrests, a tit for tat move to insure an equal distribution of embarrassment.
“Soooooo hot, want to touch the heiny!”
The primary goal of a spy is not to be found out as a Spy in the first place. Protecting the content of the messages is secondary.
You don’t think the CIA notices when someone sends an encrypted email to a foreign address and has a little look to see who that person might be? Pretty easy way to give yourself away right there.
The cafe thing was quite clever actually. Have one agent in the cafe, another nearby and connect via an ad-hoc network. You can happily encrypt that connection and there is no way any casual observer would notice it. If you weren’t silly and avoided going to the same location on a regular schedule (as they did) you might even evade people actively looking.
Don’t worry. I understand that Rep. Joe Barton is readying a contrite apology to these upstanding citizens for the harassment they were subjected to by the Obama Administration.
But he is only speaking for himself, of course.
No need to use a “foreign address”. Just email it to a domestic host.
So I see that this Chapman woman (this is clearly the best photo of her) turned herself into the police rather than turn up to a meeting where she was the be busted, or entrapped, for being a “spy”. And she was in Britain until 2008, hence the non-Russian surname. Then she ended up hobnobbing with Warren Buffet in America.
There was a short on Daily Mash, something along the lines of “Spies arrested for reading Newsweek and telling the Russians what’s in it”, and that’s about the size of it.
Now, I’m going to look at that picture a bit more.
Wouldn’t it have been safer and just as simple to use a VPN?
Well, the new Daily Show correspondent who reported this story is kinda hot, so I guess it’s not a total loss.
Thanks, I thought I’d stumbled into a, “No Bombast, No Tsarchasm” thread.:rolleyes:
Yeah I don’t get how they were caught either. I have TrueCrypt encrytpion on my computer and it is at a level the NSA could not crack. Encryption is easy
I don’t get why they were pulled, especially as the charges amount to 5 years max. They had absolutely nothing worth knowing - after 15-20 years in situ. But I love the talking heads on tv telling us there might be hundreds more of these sleepers from different countries.
I’m starting to think this might be mostly about the FBI itself and, perhaps more generally, protecting financial budgets for organisations concerned with domestic activities. Would it be outrageous if the FBI selected a cell to expose that wouldn’t damage more worthwhile operations yet, at the same time, had a pretty face to guarantee media attention . . . A little promo for the hard-working domestic service in this difficult financial environment.