re: #158 Targetpractice

The thing about sting operations is if you aren’t inclined to break the law, a sting will not catch you.

In such a putative sting by the NSA (which has no authority to collect intelligence on Americans unless they are incidental to a foreign target), if someone was presenting themselves as a foreign agent, the correct response is to say nothing to them and call the FBI.

When we lived in Oklahoma, my wife was approached via E-mail with an offer of a large sum of money to write a piece of software. They had a back-and-forth over that, and they even sent a cheque as an advance. Wary of this, she backtracked the E-mail to North Korea. After that, a call to the FBI.

We had the Feds at our house asking her all sorts of questions like “how did they choose you” and “what do you know about them.” The FBI collected the information she’d gathered, along with the letter and cheque.

Being as they’re the FBI, they don’t really tell you anything after they’ve interviewed you as a tipster or a witness, so we didn’t hear what came from that.