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US Government IT contractor could face death penalty over espionage charges
- mhb 3y agoWill we be seeing this for Menendez too? "At one point in 2018, prosecutors said, Mr. Menendez texted “highly sensitive” information from the State Department about employees at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo to Ms. Menendez. She forwarded it to Mr. Hana, who forwarded it to an Egyptian government official." https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/24/nyregion/robert-menendez-indictment-takeaways.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/24/nyregion/robert-menendez-...
- pstuart 3y agoOne would hope that he is not above the law -- the evidence publicly shared is quite damning.
- vuln 3y agoWhich evidence? Pictures of money, gold bars and a car? Everything I’ve read so far is tabloid like. The precedence has already been set. You can have an email server in a basement bathroom and share “highly sensitive” information with whomever you’d like and “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring charges. Menendez is falling on the sword for someone else. It’s nothing more than a distraction. Ask yourself “why now, instead of 11 months ago?” https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/state/2022/10/28/bob-menendez-nj-senator-declines-to-talk-about-federal-investigation/69599446007/ https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/state/2022/10/28/bob-...
- momirlan 3y agoright, so another innocent citizen ...
- vuln 3y agoIt just doesn’t make sense. One would think that someone under federal investigation isn’t going to leave out ill gotten money and gold bars… but here we are. Smart enough for global bribes but dumb enough not to cover up evidence of said crimes. Make it make sense. Just piss poor OPSEC?
- mhb 3y agoArgument from personal incredulity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity Criminals are dumb.
- Terr_ 3y ago> Everything I’ve read so far is tabloid like. If it hadn't been... would you have ever heard about it? There's a kind of survivorship bias going on here, not just in terms of which criminals get caught, but which allegations get public visibility.
- johncessna 3y agoDec 22 through Aug 23 That's a long time, I would love to know the breakdown on that. How long was he operating undetected vs how long was he operating after detection (while being monitoring/investigated)
- pstuart 3y agoInteresting: the article states he used "an encrypted application" but follows that with contents of the communication from that app. Did they break the encryption or access the communications through device exploits (once in plaintext).
- bragr 3y agoConsidering we haven't executed anyone for espionage or treason since Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, I seriously doubt that's a likely outcome for him, especially since someone you're going to execute has little incentive to cooperate with the counter-intelligence response. He'll get a few decades if he cooperates, and life if not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_imprisoned_spies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_imprisoned_spies
- ed_balls 3y agoif they go public with the charge, cooperation was not possible/finished.
- readyplayernull 3y agoA spy hanged in 2006: https://archive.globalpolicy.org/iraq-conflict-the-historical-background-/us-and-british-support-for-huss-regime.html https://archive.globalpolicy.org/iraq-conflict-the-historica...
- dredmorbius 3y agoThat event did not occur within the US judicial system. Though it did occur within a territory unlawfully invaded by, and occupied at the time by, the United States.
- striking 3y agoThis article appears to be a summary of https://www.cbsnews.com/news/state-dept-it-contractor-espionage-ethiopia/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/state-dept-it-contractor-espion...
- lostNFound 3y agoBut espionage is a Federal charge, which is currently under a execution stay, as has been for the past 2 non-trump decades. Will Biden ever follow through on his promise of abolishing the penalty? Possible campaign topic again.
- InitialLastName 3y agoAdd it to the list of "things presidential candidates promise, but that the president doesn't have the capacity to implement". The death penalty is authorized by Congress; POTUS can tell the Justice Department not to do it or push for it in sentencing, but barring a legislative patch release the successor can always issue a new policy.
- lostNFound 3y agoI agree and know this, it's more about how they are making promises they cannot keep. If Democrats ever get a majority in Congress again, and don't do it, however...
- gremlinsinc 3y agothis isn't worth their time until they get through the big shit like poverty, healthcare reform, housing crisis / nimbyism, climate, homelessness, automation, etc.... world is on fire, I think a law like this is like what you tackle when you've solved poverty, climate change. world hunger, and homelessness
- InitialLastName 3y agoThey aren't not trying [0]; it isn't the Democratic party that is blocking this. On the other hand (and granted that the death penalty is a barbaric atrocity) I'm inclined to prefer the US federal government focus most of its reform efforts (even those contained to the justice system) on issues whose death rates average more than 0.25 people/year[1]. [0] https://pressley.house.gov/2023/07/13/pressley-durbin-reintroduce-bill-to-end-the-federal-death-penalty/ https://pressley.house.gov/2023/07/13/pressley-durbin-reintr... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_executed_by_the_United_States_federal_government https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_executed_by_the...
- croes 3y ago[flagged]
- b8 3y ago[flagged]
- pfdietz 3y agoCalling the internment camps "holocaust camps" is peak Godwin.
- b8 3y agoIt was literally very similar to the holocaust camps, and scary that the USG did that.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> It was literally very similar to the holocaust camps They were within the scope of “concentration camps” as the term was used prior to being a euphemism for the Nazi extermination camps, and even compared to other examples of that class fairly mild. They were bad, but I can’t imagine any reason to call them “holocaust camps” except to deliberately minimize the holocaust.
- b8 3y agoWhy would I minimize the holocaust when my family were in ones? If it came across that way, I didn't intent for it to be so. Typical HN snarky dismissive comments and as per eugenics was brought up.
- pfdietz 3y agoExcept in the whole deliberate megacide thing. You know, what the word "holocaust" means. Equating the two is utterly despicable.
- lamontcg 3y agoDeeply fucking hate these kinds of headlines. It is always the maximum punishable by the law and they never, ever cite the actual sentencing guidelines or look at prior comparable cases.
- cobrabyte 3y agoComparative facts don't bleed—journalism's broken.
- b8 3y agoJournalism click baiting and sensationalism at its finest.
- AtlasBarfed 3y agoWell, they want to maximize the "deterrent" aspect of the law. This guy is probably going to get designated as a spy, I doubt he's executed. He's a chip in negotiations with the Ethiopians over something, maybe something with Tigray. If a Russian became a US citizen and got busted doing this, he'd be considered a Russian spy and swapped for something or someone.
- paganel 3y agoI could easily find this guy's LinkedIn profile, a profile which includes his past government-related jobs, and I'm wondering why would people make that stuff public? Or maybe I asked the wrong question and the correct one should have been: Why would the U.S. Department of State or the U.S Department of Justice allow their employees/contractors to make that contractual information public to the world, including to state entities that are adversarial to the US Government?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- janalsncm 3y agoSo is Dalke not also charged with espionage? He attempted to transmit messages to a foreign agent (who happened to actually be FBI). So maybe his incompetence makes his crimes less severe? I was under the impression that he also sent documents to a Discord group, and that there were foreigners in that group.
- Jtsummers 3y agoHe could face the death penalty, the title and article say the same with respect to this. It hasn't been determined whether he will face the death penalty. It could go the same way as with Dalke.
- jonathankoren 3y agoWho was the last spy executed? The Rosenbergs? Aldrich Ames and Robert Hansen are considered the two most damaging spies in history, and both of them got sentenced to life in prison. Times like this, I'm reminded of Ken White's (aka Popehat's) comment about how federal sentencing guidelines actually work. https://popehat.substack.com/p/beware-the-flood-of-trump-sentencing https://popehat.substack.com/p/beware-the-flood-of-trump-sen...
- dragonwriter 3y agoThe important thing to note about federal sentencing guidelines is that they are, like the Pirate Cose, more what you'd call guidelines than actual rules. Departures in both directions are permitted, so particularly sui generis cases, like Trump, might end up anywhere in the range permitted by law independent of the guidelines, without a lot of clear indication of where.
- jiofj 3y agoReally, an Ethiopian?
- TheRealPomax 3y agoNo, an American. First generation, but fully American and acknowledged as such by the US government itself.
- AlgorithmicTime 3y ago[dead]
- bastardoperator 3y agoNSA seems to have a major problem vetting people.
- kube-system 3y agoThe article says he worked for the State Department and DOJ, not the NSA.
- TheRealPomax 3y agoThat's the DSS, not the NSA.
- TheRealPomax 3y agoAre the people who allowed all of this to happen getting the same treatment though? Because how the hell was this person able to modify documents, and exfiltrate them from secured facilities? At best, this is a level of incompetence that requires a staff rotation with dishonorable discharge for everyone involved, and at worst these folks were complicit.
- gremlinsinc 3y agothey probably should have better security on document storage but if an agent that's trusted stays later than others in his dept, how would the others be liable the system if securing docs sure, but even Donald Trump made it out with boxes of top secret docs, negligence isn't complicity either. it could be they used camera in the guys glasses that nobody would even realize he's taking pictures. all he has to do is read a document to snap a pic, it's not necessarily like he had to use a smartphone all conspicuous like.
- TheRealPomax 3y agoBy having a process in place where a single person can't ever be in a position where they can walk out with top secret documents. Clearance is not the same as trust.