Accused Russian Spy a Mac Evangelist

Nicole Martinelli ()

Accused Russian Spy a Mac Evangelist

Celluloid-worthy beauty Anna Chapman, arrested by the FBI for belonging to an Russian espionage network called “the illegals,” may also go down in history as the spy who loved Macs.

On January 25, the 28-year-old told her 175 Facebook friends: “My new Mac has been the buy of the year…Love it!”

Accused Russian Spy a Mac Evangelist

It wasn’t an easy relationship, though. According to the FBI documents, her spy job was plagued by network problems that made transmitting her weekly Wednesday intelligence reports via a private wireless network at Starbucks and Barnes and Noble in New York a major hassle. Documents didn’t mention which Apple laptop she used.

When asked how she was doing by another Russian agent, Chapman replied, “Everything is cool
apart from connection,” which the FBI investigator understood to mean the technical difficulties with the laptop-to-laptop covert communications. (See page bottom of page 9 of the complaint, here).

Alas, even today’s agents of espionage aren’t as tech savvy as one would assume. He responds:

“I know you are having some problems with the connections. I am not the technical guy…I don’t know how to fix it, but if you tell me, I can pass it up.”

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In addition to using tech to transmit messages — methods cited include steganography, communication using encrypted text embedded in online photos — they are accused of Cold War methods like “dead drops,” and transmitting messages over shortwave.

The 10 alleged secret agents are charged with following orders by Russian intelligence to become “Americanized” enough to infiltrate “policymaking circles” and report  back to Moscow.

The formal accusation of  “conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government without notifying the U.S. Attorney General” carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

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About the author

nicole_martinelli

Nicole Martinelli is a San Francisco native who has lived in Milan and Florence, Italy. She's written for Wired.com, The New York Times and Newsweek. You can find her on Twitter , Facebook and Google+.

If you're doing something new/cool that's Apple related, email her about it.

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Posted in Cult of Mac, News, Top stories |

  • Daniel

    The use of shortwave in the spy community is pretty well documented. Though to be fair, Russia’s not the only ones. I heard a station documented to be Cuba’s on Sunday, and both the US and the UK maintain shortwave spy stations. Of course, a small shortwave radio is much smaller and leaves less of a footprint (think IP address records, other records held by ISPs) than a laptop. That said, encrypted text in a photo? I gotta think there’s a better way to transmit encrypted communications, a more obscure document format or something. It just seems that sending a JPG or PNG over the net is more traceable than a txt.

  • Happy Hacker

    I thought all Mac users were Russian spys? Why is this news?

  • http://www.google.com Spy vs Spy

    All my mail and files are on Google/Gmail. Theu are not my country so, are they spys too?

  • http://none vczilla

    The guy who said he was not a technical guy was an undercover agent and he said that in order to convince her to surrender her laptop to him (to “pass” it along to the consulate to have it fixed) and it worked !