Engineer At Boeing Admits Trying To Sell Space Secrets To Russians (arstechnica.com) 70
An anonymous reader shares an ArsTechnica report: Gregory Allen Justice, a 49-year-old engineer living in Culver City, Calif., has pleaded guilty to charges of attempted economic espionage and attempted violation of the Export Control Act. Justice, who according to his father worked for Boeing Satellite Systems in El Segundo, Calif., was arrested last July after selling technical documents about satellite systems to someone he believed to be a Russian intelligence agent. Instead, he sold the docs to an undercover Federal Bureau of Investigation employee. The sting was part of a joint operation by the FBI and the US Air Force Office of Special Investigations. The documents provided by Justice to the undercover agent included information on technology on the US Munitions List, meaning they were regulated by government International Trade in Arms regulations (ITAR). "In exchange for providing these materials during a series of meeting between February and July of 2016, Justice sought and received thousands of dollars in cash payments," a Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement. "During one meeting, Justice and the undercover agent discussed developing a relationship like one depicted on the television show 'The Americans.'"
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Wouldn't it be nice if the Alt-right faced up to the fact that the Russians are not the friends of the West. Any alliance with Russia, as history demonstrates, is always of a short duration, so if all the Trump supporters believe that Trump has gained some sort of valuable coin, I suggest a quick review of the Franco-Russian Alliance and the Grand Alliance to see that Russia's unity with the West is always of relatively brief duration.
Re:Wouldn't it be justice if... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Are you fucking retarded? This wasn't FBI satellite technology; This was Boeing/Government satellite technology. Maybe if you learned to read you wouldn't sound like a complete fuckwit.
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Let's put it this way: how do you think the world would feel, if the Germans celebrated an annual holiday for the SS and Gestapo, as Russia celebrates the crimes of the Cheka, NKVD and KGB each year??
Now you know how Europeans feel everytime Americans start talking about "their boys in Iraq".
Re:Wouldn't it be justice if... (Score:5, Interesting)
Except, of course, this had nothing to do with the Russians. They didn't try to buy secrets. This was all FBI acting like they believed the Russian boogeymen would.
Yep, it was a USA home-made sting. And, apparently, in the legal process of sorting this out, it had to have been determined that it was not entrapment.
The article is really short on details, but I just don't see a random search of a guy's car, which turned up a scrap of paper with the Russian embassy address on it, led the FBI to set up a (complicated) and expensive sting.
It just makes me wonder if the FBI "always getting their man" would be better stated as, "We always get a man."
Hell, when I lived in DC, I had the addresses of lots of embassies in my home and car. They throw great cultural-awareness soirees on occasion, and I went to them for the free cultural experience (food, drink, an artist, dancers, whatever). So... just having the address to an embassy on you does not automagically make you a spy. (In LA, where he got busted, "Embassy Row" is along Wilshire Blvd. They're clustered.)
There is far more to this story than has been reported, so we can only guess at why, how, when, and what for the guy who plead guilty of speaking with the FBI.
HINT: Never speak to law enforcement. Ever. Google it.
Re: Wouldn't it be justice if... (Score:2)
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You realize a few years ago Russia was our friends again right? Do you know remember how Obama lectured and mocked Romney in 2012 debate saying the 1980's called, they want their foreign policy back over a comment he had made saying Russia was a threat?
Yeah, until Russia invaded Ukraine 3 years ago, annexed Crimea, and shot down a civilian airplane. Do you remember that?
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You do REALIZE that Crimea was apart of Russia before the United States was even a country? Or do they not teach you idiots history?
As I recall Crimea was *apart* from Russia until Catherine the Great defeated the Ottoman Empire in 1783. Although the constitution of the US wasn't adopted until 1789, I think USA was technically a country between 1776 and 1789...
Although the Russians managed to keep Crimea after the Crimean war (1856), as an indirect consequence of that war, the Russia ended up selling Alaska to the USA. This was part of a bizarre time when US and Russia actually were allies. During the US civil war (1861-1865), Britai
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It doesn't fucking matter who it belonged to before. The fact remains that it was Ukranian territory when Russia came in and took it during the Russia-led Ukranian civil war.
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Re: Wouldn't it be justice if... (Score:2, Informative)
Any alliance with Russia, as history demonstrates, is always of a short duration
Congratulations; proving you wrong was trivially easy [wikipedia.org].
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Fascinating, the page returned:
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YEAH!! Ronald Reagan was totally right when he called them an Evil Empire in the 80s.
All the Democrats stood in complete unity with him and sang God Bless America at his brave brave patriotism and standing up to those Soviets!
Just look at Teddy Kennedy's 1984 campaign for proof that he totally agreed with Reagan. Totally.
http://thefederalist.com/2015/... [thefederalist.com]
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YEAH!! Ronald Reagan was totally right when he called them an Evil Empire in the 80s.
All the Democrats stood in complete unity with him and sang God Bless America at his brave brave patriotism and standing up to those Soviets!
Just look at Teddy Kennedy's 1984 campaign for proof that he totally agreed with Reagan. Totally.
http://thefederalist.com/2015/... [thefederalist.com]
1984.
The book was a warning, not a manual.
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Re: Wouldn't it be justice if... (Score:1)
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Your examples (and other historical examples) actually show that it is the other way around - the West is not a friend of Russia. As the history demonstrates indeed.
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netflix (Score:3)
You saw it here first. (Score:3, Funny)
Trump to announce former engineer as new FBI director.
Umm Oops! But more common than you think. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well first of all, I would say you're really up the creek without a paddle if you try something like this. This falls under epic bad life choices. Still, I remember watching a spy documentary and strangely even seemingly reliable folks will sometimes leak information for the thrill, some sort of mid-life crisis or even due to depression. Former actual Russian spies have said sometimes it isn't even for that much money. It's unfortunate but something that folks in the Intelligence community have to deal with time and time again.
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Is this the best you paid russian goons can come up with?
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Is this the best you paid russian goons can come up with?
Really? Russia (USSR) was the first to launch an earth-orbiting satellite. That is kind of a big deal. No, it is a really big deal.
It led to the formation of ARPA, now DARPA, which has a $3B annual budget, with a mission of the US not getting caught by surprise (by anyone, technologically) again. Most would consider a $3B to be lot of cash to lay out annually, in perpetuity, for the aforementioned core mission – all because of Sputnik.
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Russia might have put up the first experimental satellite because the US was busy working on the plans to put humans on the moon. This singular achievement has not been repeated by any other country.
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Russia (USSR) was the first to launch an earth-orbiting satellite
Who gives a shit? The US was the first to successfully launch a Mars-orbiting satellite, a Mercury-Orbiting Satellite, Jupiter.. Ceres.. Saturn..
Sure, Russians got a head start on space exploration back in the 1950's, but the US has surpassed the Russians in space exploration and technology to the present day, and has more satellites, probes, and rovers exploring space and other planets than the Russians do.
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This has got to be fake news (Score:2)
The US should be stealing rocket secrets from the russians!
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Come on guys -_-. All a story like this is going to do is take pressure off of another "certain" person. People really are that dumb. Place your bets; one week? Two weeks? I wonder what Bills the U.S. will pass or people will be fired in the meantime. I also like how it's normal to talk about a country we aren't at war with like we are. Conservatives have the weirdest ways of expressing nostalgia. All of the world's leaders are ego maniacs and placing blame in a generalizing way is playing a dangerous game of Jenga.
Yeah, the geezers trying to restart a "Cold War" with Russia are so misguided and stupid.
Russia is a competitor, just like China, India, or Germany. But there is no comprehensible reason that Russia is the sworn enemy of the US. Unless our politicians continue to behave that way, creating an enemy... [Source: 1984, George Orwell]
When it comes to espionage (Score:3)
I think the Chinese know how to play game better than anyone else. Gather all the trade secrets [fortune.com] and intel [indiatimes.com] that you can, while "systematically dismantling" [windsorstar.com] anyone leaking the same to the world.
Sometimes I wonder what the going market rates are for this sort of thing. Did this guy try to sell to Russians, because they pay more than the Chinese?
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I think the Chinese know how to play game better than anyone else. Gather all the trade secrets [fortune.com] and intel [indiatimes.com] that you can, while "systematically dismantling" [windsorstar.com] anyone leaking the same to the world.
Sometimes I wonder what the going market rates are for this sort of thing. Did this guy try to sell to Russians, because they pay more than the Chinese?
No, probably not. The Chinese espionage model is to send over 'graduate students' as spies, who then report everything they see back home. That is, China doesn't need to hire locals, since they have thousands of moles in our University system already. I don't know about the pay, but at a guess, I'd wager that no US citizen would find the $$ amount appealing. Just a guess.
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The FBI agent who offered to buy said he was working for the Russians, but it probably would have worked out the same if he said he was working for the Chinese.
Creating the situation for a crime and then charging a patsy who jumped into the situation seems like a waste of time and a reduction of resources available to real law enforcement to me - but someone is probably going to get a promotion out of it so that's "mission accompli