Koz and Effect

On Spying

There’s a lot of press on the recent bust of 11 Russians reportedly spying on the U.S. All in all, it’s reported that none of them managed to work their way into a position where national secrets might be divulged.

Or maybe not. According to reports, their “mission” consisted mainly of collecting open source information. Domestic response and general feeling towards U.S. political parties, information on the upcoming election, the feel of the population towards the current administration, all things an English speaker could find out doing a bit of reading on Google.

But an article on RFE/RL caught my eye. The social network gathered was quite extensive.  Perhaps the mission of this group was not as much of a failure as the FBI made it out to be, (insofar as gathering top secret information) but one that was more focused on providing a communications channel between the Russian government and the American tech industry. It’s all speculation, but I would think such an approach might have the advantage of bypassing normal public channels and thus avoid some of scrutany (not to mention political backlash) of firms like Cisco setting up shop next to the Kremlin.

I admit, its a lot of theorying and speculation on my part, and I’m sure only the FBI (and the spies themselves) know the truth. But given that so much espionage no longer is of the “top secret” variety, I’m inclined to wonder if this operation was focused in an entirely different direction than the one the investigators assumed it would be.

Edit: I haven’t read all of this yet, but security veteran Gary Warner has a really good series of articles going breaking down the whole operation. I should give these a closer look.