Currently in New Jersey "What? Arrested ! How are we going to find out where Lebron and Bosh are going?.....NOOOOOOOO !!!" DD
Hmm, strange timing given the recent warming up of US-Russian relations and security cooperation. Anyone know the whereabouts of Anna Kournikova? :grin:
Thank goodness we caught them before they shot up a shopping mall or destroyed River Phoenix's childhood.
Her facebook friends list shows as a blank page, even though she has 175 friends. Clearly a case for ToyCen428. And yes, would hit (after waterboarding her).
I found this entertaining to read through http://blog.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk/2010/06/russian_spy_case_shows_things.html
What exactly did they do that was so wrong? All they were likely doing was collecting information and lobbying. The government's charges?: "Unregistered agents of a foreign government and money laundering"? Please... This whole case looks to be a farce. I am starting to become more and more pissed with this government of ours. What's funny is that there is quite more to fear from the agents of other foreign countries at work here ,both official and unofficial, foremost among them Mexico.
So you're pissed at the US government for arresting people that are doing something illegal? You do realize that if the specifics involve state secrets, it's not going to be included in the public information available in the indictment, right? Out of curiousity, what information do you have to suggest that "All they were likely doing was collecting information and lobbying"? Or are you pissed at the US government based on an unfounded assumption you made up?
Unregistered agent of a foreign government is a big deal, whether you think it is or not. If it was such a non-issue as you seem to think, why did they make up their false identities with detailed backgrounds (what they called their "legends") and in a couple of instances steal identities of dead people. If you are doing dead drops in abandoned fields and sending secret steganographic files to "Moscow Center", you probably have some idea that what you are doing is against the law.
yawn........... if what they did/doing is so serious why arent they being charged with espionage? this is all to ruffle up obama's meeting with medvedev coming up...........they say they've been following these people since the early 2000's and they've got nothing? what some stops at coffee shops? these old school spy tactics are pointless, russia cant be that stupid and if you want to impact US law, go into the petroleum industry, not what these guys were doing. and that anna chapman can spy on me anytime!
I just can't believe they had spy sex and even had children to blend in. I mean, what on earth do those poor kids think? They grow up american and yet mom and dad are Russian spies??? What a mind F that has to be. Here's my theory on what actually happened. Spies get sent to u.s. and set up with jobs and cash and all that stuff. Then they realize that heck, life in the U.S. is actually a hell of a lot better than back home. They decide to get married in fake, have real kids,, and make a life here while paying homage to mother russia by doing some cursory harmless espionage and "checking in" just to keep their lives in tact. They probably figured they could just keep chugging along until one day the Russian agency got bored and just forgot about them because the intel they were getting was not very useful and what were they going to do - ask them to come home?
Which is why they've been working on the case since 2001. It was all a giant "long con" presupposing hypothetically that someone might one day seek better relations with Russia. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articl...en_t_the_russian_spies_charged_with_espionage [rquoter] Why Weren't the Russian 'Spies' Charged with Espionage? Because they didn't find out anything secret. Yesterday, federal prosecutors unsealed criminal complaints against 11 people who were allegedly part of a Russian spy ring. According to the prosecution, the suspects lived in the United States under false names while trying to penetrate "policy-making circles" on behalf of Russia's SVR, the successor to the KGB specializing in foreign intelligence. The defendants were charged with "conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government without notifying the U.S. attorney general," an offense that carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. Why weren't they charged with espionage, which can often bring a life sentence or even the death penalty? Probably because they never found out very much. U.S. law defines espionage as transmitting or attempting to transmit "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" to a foreign government with the intent to harm the United States or give advantage to the foreign nation. Because federal prosecutors have not charged the "illegals," as they were known because they had no official credentials, with espionage, they either never got their hands on anything -- or it can't yet be proven that they did. With details about messages in invisible ink and buried money caches, the criminal complaint might read like a Cold War-era spy thriller, but it's still unclear what exactly, any of the defendants are supposed to have found out. The closest thing to espionage in the charges is a meeting at a seminar between defendant Donald Howard Heathfield and a U.S. government official who "works on issues of strategic planning related to nuclear weapon development," but it doesn't appear that Heathfield learned any classified information. Although prosecutors might still file additional charges, the activities of these so-called spies don't appear to be on the same level as clear-cut espionage cases like those of Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who sold classified information to the Soviet Union and Russia over more than two decades, and Aldrich Ames, the CIA case officer whose leaks to Moscow led to the deaths of at least 10 U.S. agents in the Soviet Union. Both men are currently serving life sentences in federal prison. Violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which requires that agents representing the interests of a foreign power register with the Justice Department, is a far lesser offense and one that rarely merits much media attention. Prominent FARA cases include Iraqi-American businessman Samir Vincent, who admitted to acting as an unregistered agent of Saddam Hussein's government during the U.N. "oil-for-food" scandal, and former President Jimmy Carter's brother Billy, who was forced to register as a foreign agent to avoid charges that he was paid $220,000 by Muammar al-Qaddafi's government to curry favor for Libya in Washington. The scandal, and a resulting congressional investigation, came to be known as "Billygate." [/rquoter] They were operating under false pretenses. If what they were doing was so innocuous, why did they create elaborate fake identities, engage in dead drops and other spy techniques and generally skulk about like classic cold war spies? For techniques that are so outdated and irrelevent, a whole lot of countries are using them. Read some of the quotes in the complaint relating to the back-and-forth over whether Moscow Center or the couple would actually own the house in New Jersey. Based on the amount and frequency of contact with handlers, if they thought they were going to be forgotten, they should have been disabused of that notion fairly early on.
