It's nothing new. It has gone on amongst the NGO and activist community for many years. Especially the aid worker (in places like Pakistan) and environmental de

It's nothing new. It has gone on amongst the NGO and activist community for many years. Especially the aid worker (in places like Pakistan) and environmental defender community (all over the world). We have investigated a number of instances of pitches by both government and corporate intelligence human penetration over the years in many different countries. In fact we cover it quite extensively in our security training programs that we teach. I think people are often surprised to know that we've seen nearly as many human penetration attempts as digital. The activist space is full of (mostly) good hearted humans who are as vulnerable as any normal person to flattery, money, ego etc (the common and preferred pitching point of a service) and weaknesses like crime, blackmail, revenge etc (the lesser preferred pitching point). On a side note, it's always worth pointing out, especially in Europe, that direct attitribution to a service making a pitch is never so sure. Many countries make pitches pretending to be other (usually local) services. For example the US and Israelis are often aware that Europeans often take personal political stances against their government policies so they will impersonate a local service like AVID. People have spent years not realising what service or country they are really working for.