Emptywheel over at FDL has some coverage of this.

Also, how long have they known and been feeding back disinformation? In which case, why bust them now?

My money is on the existence of these 10 being a bone thrown by Russia to the US in light of the new, poultry-importing glasnost between the two nations. As to the 'why now', the only explanation I can think of is that the disinformation opportunity would be worthless if their spymasters already knew they were compromised, because, uh, they did the compromising...

I'll take my tinfoil hat off now.

They said one of the 11 was preparing to flee the country and they needed to act to arrest everyone or the remainder would know their cover was blown (not necessarily, but the FBI's claim.)

Regardless, the FBI's job is upholding federal laws. Counter-espionage would fall primarily to the CIA who legally isn't supposed to operate inside the USA. Presumably they were talking to each other, but, given the excesses of the lettered agencies over the past decade, it's unsurprising (to me at least) that the CIA wasn't given the OK to interfere in this case.

If the information they were interested in sending back to Moscow wasn't discrete, disinformation would be impossible. Plus, if I was one of the target's of the spies, I'd tell the FBI to get them the heck out of my organization or I'd just fire them or bring it to the attention of those who would.

No, the FBI is responsible for counterintelligence work inside the USA. They don't just do law enforcement, and they aren't required solely to work to build a criminal case against someone. They could have sat on the spies forever, even if they had enough to charge them, had they thought it would be more useful to continue to let the spies operate.

Although I don't know if I buy the "flight risk" theory. The one that was heading back to Moscow, "Anna Chapman", was actively involved in a cover business with international real estate holdings.

Jumping because she was about to travel, which she did regularly, seems suspicious. Either they were intending to wrap everything up quickly, in which case you nab everybody quickly; that's the interpretation that assumes American intelligence is competent.

More traditionally, somebody fucked up surveillance, and she actually WAS running, in which case this is an attempt to spin this as a success. The FBI has successfully infiltrated groups for multi-year periods, usually drug gangs, but the theory of running a long con is not alien to their operations, so it's not impossible that running a disinformation campaign WAS one of their original goals.

A better perspective might be this: With our economy in ruins, financial sector ready to run rampant, the southern half of the country covered in oil, and almost all manufacturing gone overseas, what secrets (worth stealing) are left?

I suspect the calculus on this is personal, not political. Any bets?

I wonder what the equivalent of disinformation and double agents would be for the Laundry?

Yes, they'd have the example of WW2 British counter-intelligence in front of them, which seems to have led to totally controlling what intelligence the Abwehr was getting, but it's a totally different sort of enemy. For all the talk about bin Laden as the super controller, modern terrorism is less organised than the Cold War threats, and maybe more organised that what the Laundry is facing.

bin Laden might have a system of fire-and-forget terrorist cells, but he recognises the FBI as an enemy organisation. Does the threat the Laundry faces even have that perception of the Laundry?

It could be posturing.

The US and Russia are still pretty much in a state of cold war and it absolutely doesn't look like it's about to end. E.g. There was that curious incident of the satellite collision over Siberia - just after Chinese and American demonstrations of their ability to shoot down satellites.

The Russian satellite had a defective payload and was deactivated. The rest of the satellite was not affected, its solar panels are glued on the outside of its cylinder shaped body - no careful alignment was required to get power to them. Premature deactivation also means that plenty of fuel is available. See also:

http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_11/Krepon (Especially: "A Better Alternative: Space Assurance")

The problem with not exposing caught spies is that you can't brag about it and that you can't deter your enemy if all your counter-intelligence happens in perfect secrecy.

It adds insecurity to the whole situation. After all, they were able to catch some of their spies, why shouldn't they be able to catch more? It undermines the trust that the Russians can have in all the reports of their spies, which might even be more effective than just feeding some of them with false information.

just after Chinese and American demonstrations of their ability to shoot down satellites

I'm not sure why anybody thinks that's much of an accomplishment. Any idiot can build a rocket that gets up to satellite altitude (which is really low), and satellites are made of paper and tinfoil so it doesn't even need a warhead; a good solid smack will destroy most. Terminal rocket guidance to a defenceless cardboard target in a known location is a long-solved problem. The main challenge is finding the satellite you want to shoot at amidst all the junk up there.

what secrets (worth stealing) are left?

The embarrassing political ones that the government has been trying to conceal from its own news media. That's about all they have to defend these days.

One theory I saw by way of The Economist is that it’s a favor for Medvedev to strengthen his hand against the Soviet-era spooks.

In the Cold War disinformation might be useful, but nowadays I imagine it'd be pretty mundane -- at best make some Russian company overbid on a contract or something similar.

Doing this gives the FBI some nice publicity (and it is their job) and will deter such large operations in the future.

And there may also be some attempt to marginalize Putin and strengthen Medvedev. I imagine the operation was put into place by Putin. By having it blow up like this, Putin and his intelligence services look clownish.

In the meantime, Medvedev keeps getting photo ops with Obama, negotiating big treaties, and the U.S. keeps treating Medvedev as the legitimate leader in Russia. This is a far cry from a couple years ago when everyone just assumed Medvedev was Putin's puppet.

Personally I think this is good for everyone. It makes for a more democratic Russia. And tensions between the U.S. and Russia have quietly reduced over the last 18 months so that they're lower than they have been in over a decade.

It all seems rather sad. They don't seem to have collected much in the way of secrets. In fact, the US Justice Dept has charged them with being unregistered agents of a foreign government (but not espionage). They've also been charged with money laundering (which I suppose they were doing, but it's pretty weak beer). If the government really wanted to put them away for a long time they would have charged them under RICO statutes (because they were "organized" and they were criminals).

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/30/world/europe/30spy.html?ref=europe

"Unregistered agents of a foreign government" is much easier to prove... and therefore much easier to get an indictment for. And once they've got an indictment, they can spend a lot more time investigating, and later add charges based on further evidence.

I keep thinking about the timing -- Medvedev was just out here last week -- and wondering if that's one of the factors.

Nonserious conspiracy theory: The spies were becoming loyal to the US, and Russian moles inside the FBI engineered their arrests.

Secret worth stealing: The secret of stealth? Which, apparently, the chinese stole a while back.

why did the FBI decide to arrest them, rather than continuing to monitor the (now compromised) spy ring?

They're out of practice. It's been too long since the days of James Jesus Angleton and his ilk, and too many on this side of the conflict took the end of the cold war as The End, period. Therefore, the FBI as well as most of the news media, analysts, etc., have taken this incident as a holdover, a relic of bygone days, instead of a continuation of the conflict by less overtly aggressive means.

Oh, and one of the spy couples, the one in Montclair, NJ, lived just a few blocks away from me!

Technology "secrets" don't stay secret for long, once somebody else knows the trick is do-able in the first place.

Despite their atom bomb spies, the Soviets basically invented the A-bomb for themselves -- that is, Kurchatov had access to classified intel, but Beria would have shot him as a security leak if he'd disclosed its very existence to the Soviet scientists. So he was able to give the nod to known-to-be-productive R&D avenues, but wasn't able to actually say "this is how the Americans do it". Without his passive guidance -- and without the intel -- the Soviets might have taken 12-18 months longer to get a working bomb, but that's all.

Similarly, once everyone knew that stealth was possible, they were all up for re-inventing it for themselves. Arguably it was Russian published research on antenna design that got the original stealth ideas going in the USA in the first place. Probably what stopped the Soviets going for it as a technology was a combination of (a) the ferocious cost of doing it right, and (b) the usual thing about all military organizations tooling up to fight the last war: in the case of the Soviet Air Forces it was all about having more maneuverable fighters and better fighter pilots (weaknesses which cost them heavily during WW2).

Wasn't one of them a tax advisor, in Arlington? I can well see how that could be an outstanding intelligence asset, especially if the aim was to recruit other sources.

The TV news said one of the suspects who was out on bail has disappeared and the Cypriots are looking for him.

What little I read said that their job was to make political contacts and influence policy. The only value I can see in leaving them in place would be if you could corrupt their controllers and give them different policies to push.

In fact, leaving them in place would just allow them to do more damage, and compromise people who weren't disloyal before they were approached. It would make farm more sense to sweep them now, before they could ruin more potentially productive people.

What Charlie said about technological secrets. It's usually less effort to reproduce the research and development than it is to steal the finished product and reverse engineer it.

I always wondered why the Soviets (there I go, dating myself) never started up an analysis & consultancy group, like Rand. Tell a bunch of defense consultants that you need a readiness report on the XQ-37 or whatever and pay 'em their usual rates. Who ever asks to see their bosses' security clearance?

This network doesn't appear to have been generating much in the way of useful data. Suddenly feeding them high-grade disinformation would look fishy to their handlers. I suspect their value as headline fodder outweighed their counterintelligence usefulness.

There's a middling novel by Donald E. Westlake (compared to other DEWs) about the predicament of someone who suddenly finds that someone at the KGB has had them on the books as deep cover for decades; the trick being rather along the lines of Our Man in Havana's (or Tricycle's) inventing agents to impress home base. And of course the Avengers were always wandering into English villages which were made up exclusively of Soviet agents...

Probably what stopped the Soviets going for it as a technology was a combination of (a) the ferocious cost of doing it right, and (b) the usual thing about all military organizations tooling up to fight the last war: in the case of the Soviet Air Forces it was all about having more maneuverable fighters and better fighter pilots (weaknesses which cost them heavily during WW2).

I'd add in chance and bureaucratic politics; stealth was lucky enough to get picked up by Ben Rich at the Lockheed Skunk Works in the mid-seventies, who was one of the very few people in the US at the time in a position to actually do something about it. Five years earlier, it would have fallen onto the gunmetal desk of his predecessor, Clarence "Kelly" Johnson, who might well have ridiculed and ignored it. Five years later, Rich might have been too involved in other projects, like the Lockheed bid for the ATF, to have time for stealth.

It is interesting that these spies are accused of a lot of things except, well, spying.

A good comment is available here:

Quote:

The only reason I can imagine for sending such a message would be to compromise their security deliberately, by handing evidence on a plate to the enemy counter-intelligence service.

I'm not convinced by that argument; Kelly and Ben both worked on the A-12 / SR-71 programme, and they fully realised that was stealthy (sources including their biogs, and various books about the Skunk Works).

Pre-Cambrian fossils found? http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/60696/title/African_fossils_suggest_complex_life_arose_early

Isn't that fun.

is not the whole "Decrypted russian intelligence message" bit fishy as hell in and of itself? I was under the impression the Russians were, and are, big fans of one time pads...And were that is impractical, does anyone use anything but PGP encryption in this day and age?

Wait - if they actually decrypted a message and then mentioned it in the press, haven't they just told the Russians "Hi, we've compromised at least one of your encryption tools. And we don't care if you know it."

The other implication is that they've turned someone higher up than these spies that gave them the scheme and password to open up the communications. Which means the Russians are going to be turning their apparatus upside down and shaking vigorously for a bit here. And that someone just blew a source in a big way.

Plus they may revert to the one time pad for a while.

Let's watch and see if there are any sudden recalls to Moscow or fast and furious defections in the next few weeks.

Interesting comment about the spies using steganography. Remember how this was an Al Qaeda bugbear about eight years ago?

I wonder if part of this is about budgetary politics for FY'11 (which starts today, July 1). The article above says that the FBI figured out that they were using steganography by going through their hard drives, which suggests that the spies were compromised the old fashioned way. However, there was that fuss about steganographic communications by terrorists, and I wonder if this ring was broken in part to justify agents "analyzing" lots of porn (and other) pictures to try to find steganographic messages inside them?

This may have been set up as a win-win for the US and Russian agencies. It's unclear whether the spies were turning up anything useful, and it's unclear whether they'd want to move back to Russia and get real jobs. So this could be a warning to Russian moles to produce or else. Similarly, the FeeBs haven't broken any foreign national plots on American soil in a while (before the bombs fizzle, I mean), and they get kudos when their budgets are being finalized, and right before the Fourth of July. Looks good for everyone. Except the spies, that is.

Charlie @21, et alia:

If I'm paraphrasing correctly from Richard Rhodes' excellent books about the cold war arms race, "Dark Sun" and "Arsenals of Folly", a large proportion of Soviet espionage was industrial espionage, BECAUSE the intelligence agencies did not trust native Soviet R&D. Sort of the opposite of "not invented here" syndrome, where foreign tech was invariably considered better.

There are far more Russian spies in the USA right now than at any time during the Cold War. I wonder if the timing of the current hendecabust is designed to distract from the far greater number of Chinese spies in the USA?

I've been re-reading and thinking deeply about Stross suggestions for "closure" and continuity. When I get this novel done, and if it gives readers closure both intellectually and emotionally, I shall thank Mr. Stross yet again.

I've been reading declassified CIA documents as part of the research for my latest novel, 38 chapters done, 6 to go, where the 5,500 words I wrote yesterday was from a very technothriller subplot which begins:

The Aurora scrambled from Area 51 and screamed into the desert sky above Groom Lake.

The Lockheed Skunkworks hypersonic Aurora had an airframe like a flattened American football, about 110 feet long and 60 feet wide, smoothly contoured, and the Nevada sun glinted off the covering of ceramic tiles similar to those used on the Space Shuttle, which were themselves coated with a crystalline patina indicative of sustained exposure to high temperature. A burnt carbon odor exuded from the surface.

At the same time, Professor Dave Bacon, nursing a knee still sore from a skiing accident at Whistler, was briefing the Joint Chiefs and heads of the intelligence directorates, especially the NSA’s Interstellar Intelligence Directorate, in the War Room deep beneath the White House.

Climbing at subsonic speed, power came from conventional jet engines in the lower fuselage, fed by inlet ducts which opened in the tiled surface, and the primary rocket engine at low thrust. Once at supersonic speed, the Combined Cycle Ramjet Engine kicked in, crushing the pilot’s chest for long hold-your-breath seconds. At that point the rocket nozzles withdrew and the engines ran as ramjets up to Mach 6. A few minor modifications to the shape of the combustion housing, developed over the past decade of secret flight tests, the Skunk Works had souped the power plant up to a scramjet, which could see speeds up to and beyond Mach 8. The fuel for this power plant was methylcyclohexane, plus liquid oxygen as an oxidizer in the primary rocket stage. The slush hydrogen fueled version was still having production problems, even though the costs had been hidden in the X-33 program.

The crack of the shockwave cone, followed by thunder, trailed across the salt flat 25 miles south of Rachel, Nevada, and headed toward Los Angeles. Protected by almost a thousand square miles of restricted airspace, surrounded by the Nevada Test Site, lay the secret airbase where the government has tested advanced technology aircraft for the past forty years. Known to most people as Area 51, the facility also has been referred to as Groom Lake, The Ranch, Watertown strip, and within the government “the Directorate for Development Plans Area.�

{and then I had to ask myself -- didn't I claim that the Aurora was hydrogen fueled in some earlier chapter? And then I emailed the chapter to Dave Bacon, double B.S. in Physics and English at Caltech, for permission to quote his latest Quantum Computing paper from arXiv}

"The FBI said it had intercepted and decrypted a 2009 message from "Moscow Center" -- Russian intelligence headquarters -- which read, in part: "You were sent to the USA for long-term service trip. Your education, bank accounts, car, house, etc. – all these serve one goal: fulfill your main mission, i.e. to search and develop ties in policymaking circles in US and send intels [intelligence reporters] to C[enter.]"

Not to denigrate Charlie's opinion on this one, but spymasters have been sending these kinds of messages to (paid) agents for as long as spying has existed.

Most of the time most agents just take the money and send complaints home about how hard their job is, just like any other set of low-ranking operatives in a corporation. This particular set appear to have been doing the absolute minimum to keep the golden goose laying the eggs, and also appear to have been investing the money in businesses they could have cashed out of at minimal notice.

Hm. I was going to suggest that the FBI made the catch at this point because some management type needed a big win to make his next promotion. However it could be that they had to pick them up before one or more decided to cash out and "retire" themselves into a new identity.

Please don't publish chunks of your fiction here in future.

The conventional wisdom is that the Soviets never lost an agent because of a crypto-breach of Moscow Central traffic. There were failures, but not with systems the professionals provided.

The one-time-pad is still mathematically unbreakable. And awkward for modern volumes of traffic.

One report I've seen claims a warrant for a covert FBI search, which copied hard drives, and some very sloppy handling of passwords, which made it easy to get at the contents. So a Russian cryptosystem may not need to have been broken to read the message quoted.

I'm pretty sure I can write better than that.

The one-time-pad is still mathematically unbreakable. And awkward for modern volumes of traffic.

I see people knocking OTPs regularly, but have a bit of trouble understanding that in the human espionage context. A pathetic 1 GB thumb drive OTP would keep an agent going with text and still pictures for a long, long time. Conveying the OTP and keeping it physically secure seem doable in many cases of interest.

Sorry, Mr. Stross. I failed at thanking you by showing your influence on my work, in theme and strategy. I'll wait until some of it is published for money, otherwise you are right to see it as narcissistic demented amateur annoyance. Roebert A. Henlein didn't much like being praised by Charles Manson. [returns, abashed, to lurking]

I'd have been better off saving that for Westercon, which started today 5 miles south of my home, and I was impatiuent, waiting for me wife to get back from teaching, so that I could borrow her car and go there.

Really sorry.

Yes, but are they Russian fossilized spies multicellular life forms?

• CJ "It's a Russian water tentacle!" H / esper

For what it's worth Charlie, Jonathon won't be selling me any of his "techno-thrillers" after I read that piece of male bovine faeces! I could see several glaring technical errors in it, and suspect you could too.

Decrypted? So, does this mean that pgp is finally out of date, or did they have the passcodes?

I figure that with 30 million immigrants, we are already completely infiltrated by spies. Get over it, guys.

Fiction? I thought it was an over-long Bulwer Lytton Prize entry myself.

Christopher, you asked for tentacles?

"Similarly, once everyone knew that stealth was possible, they were all up for re-inventing it for themselves"

ObClassicSF: "Noise Level" by Raymond F Jones.

As for the message from Moscow Central reminding the agents what they were doing, you'd think unnecessarily, part of the setup of 1991 comedy-drama series Sleepers was that after 25 years "two agents have become integrated into British society so well they themselves have forgotten the reason they were sent there in the first place" - until reminded by a radio transmission.

One of them is a playboy city financier played by eternal posh boy Nigel Havers, a most unlikely Soviet sleeper (and thus, presumably, a good choice).

Back in the real world, the glam social-networking member of the ring, Anna Chapman, doesn't seem that much of a long-term deep sleeper: often in Moscow, daughter of some kind of a Russian diplomat, she got her surname through marrying a Brit called Alex Chapman, who met her in Moscow and has been in the papers today.

At the Origins games convention in Columbus Ohio they have the War College seminars and a few all day sessions of diplomatic-military simulations. These are unique because the people involved are real world military intelligence types who run these simulations for the State Department.

One of the seminars I was able to attend was about the intelligence services in the United States. The hows and whys, what the Presidential Intelligence Briefing was and what it was for, and that yes, we spied on our allies as much or more than our enemies. That way we could be sure that they were still allies, and they did the same to us.

Not only that, but the intelligence services in the US were intentionally fragmented and isolated from each other. They spied on each other (sort of) so that no one agency got a death grip on all the information.

I strongly recommend the War College to anyone who has the opportunity to attend.

The recent official history of MI5 details the VERONA decrypts, which were of one-time pad messages. They were apparently fairly significant in the Philby/Blunt/Burgess matter.

Needless to say, people reuse one-time pads. And sometimes people send messages you know the content of via one-time pads.

Needless to say, people reuse one-time pads.

That's bad, as in violating the "one-time" bit. Don't do that.

It's kind of amazing how often people grossly violate the protocols for using strong and even absolutely secure encryption systems. NSA and such are grateful for such lapses, of course.

"And sometimes people send messages you know the content of via one-time pads."

That may be foolish, but it's not a violation of the OTP protocol, because you knew or could deduce from the circumstances the content regardless of the encryption protocol used. Traffic analysis gets into this sort of stuff.

It's usually less effort to reproduce the research and development than it is to steal the finished product and reverse engineer it.

I agree with that statement, but IIRC the Soviets didn't always agree: their 3 standard digital computer models in the '80s were:

• Mainframe: an IBM System 370 clone
• Mini: a DEC PDP-11 lookalike
• Micro: an Intel 8080 copy

That may be foolish, but it's not a violation of the OTP protocol

It makes the repeated use much more problematic, because, if you know the plaintext, you can easily calculate the pad. Then, when the pad is reused for unknown plaintext, well, you're done.

If I understand correctly, simply sending known messages by OTP is fine, as long as the pad is not reused or compromised.

Bruce: If you clone a computer then you can run the same software, which makes things a lot easier. Really it's why the i386 architecture with it's severe register shortage is STILL popular with some people refusing to run 64bit OSs that run on the same hardware.

As for the theories about how the spies were discovered, what if one of them betrayed the Russians? Imagine that you were a deep-cover spy who had got comfortable in your new job when suddenly your controller started yanking your chain, demanding results that you couldn't give, and threatening a return to the homeland you'd rather forget. It would be tempting to walk in to the local spy agency, turn in your colleagues, and provide evidence to suggest that codes were broken.

I presume that when offered an epic win like that at a time when it's sorely needed the US authorities would be prepared to pay well. I'm tipping that at least two of those ten will soon have their charges quietly dropped and then win some lucrative contracts with defense organisations.

Allen Thomson writes: "It's kind of amazing how often people grossly violate the protocols for using strong and even absolutely secure encryption systems."

No, it's not at all amazing; it's expected. Anybody competent at designing systems intended to be reliable understands that the human parts of these systems will not always do what it should. There has been a huge amount of research into techniques for handling inevitable human error. (Probably the most fertile area to look is in the realm of safety systems intended to prevent accidents from killing people, since the literature there tends to be quite open.)

Rudy Rucker spoke very highly of "Accelerando" by name, and other Charles Stross fictions, at Westercon 63 in Pasadena this past weekend. He'd been asked in one of his 3 90-minute presentations about "The Singularity" and first dismissed it as "a cool idea 20 years ago" and then explained the key works of Postsingularity fiction. This doesn't directly tie to Spying as such, as he covered that in his discussion of why he didn't want to be drafted to fight in Vietnam. His talks will be on his blog soon.

First thing I've seen in unclassified Media about the timing of the recent USA and Cyprus bust:

Steps Point to Possible Swap of Spy Suspects With Russia New York Times - Andrew E. Kramer, Valentin Ivanov - ‎1 hour ago‎ MOSCOW - The mother of a Russian scientist convicted of spying for the United States said Wednesday that her son had been moved to Moscow from a penal colony in preparation for a possible trade involving the Russian spy suspects...

@58 -- Dang, beat me to it, I was just coming here to post that.

Guess as excited as we all got trying to pick out deep conspiracies, the reality may turn out to be the mundane, obvious answer.

Here's some conspiracy-fodder for you - our friend MV Arctic Sea.

http://www.informationdissemination.net/2010/07/stranger-than-fiction.html

Interesting note in the discussion of the spy swap -- every news story I've heard or read talks about trading the [i]Russian spies[/i] for individuals with [i]alleged connections to western intelligence organizations[/i]. While it's quite likely a justified double standard, given the current Russian government's tendancy towards politically motivated intelligence arrests, but still telling.

Some were, some weren't.

My take as to why they were grabed as opposed to mushroomed is simple. They were not targeting the Us government or its resources, and were instead targeting private corporations and/or individuals. This makes keeping them in place more expensive and less useful as it is unlikely that the businesses will feel happy about exposing their trade secrets in order to feed false intel....