Iran Acknowledges Espionage At Nuclear Facilities

wiredmikey writes "Iran acknowledged Saturday that some personnel at the country's nuclear facilities were lured by promises of money to pass secrets to the West but insisted increased security and worker privileges have put a stop to the spying. The stunning admission by Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi provides the clearest government confirmation that Iran has been fighting espionage at its nuclear facilities."

Comments

Obviously

[mr100percent]

Iran is being spied upon. And in other news, horoscopes are fake and pie is delicious.

Re:Obviously

[The_mad_linguist]

My horoscope says that delicious pies are spying on Iran!

Who can I trust?!

Re:Obviously

[pspahn]

The secret to a good pie crust is 1/4 cup of vodka in place of some of the water. Of course, it burns off in the oven, so if you have an alcoholic at turkey dinner this year, you really don't have to tell them.

Re:Obviously

[thijsh]

I wonder what else you put in the food and don't tell the relatives... Your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:Obviously

[somersault]

In that case every single country should spy on US because no other country has been that dangerous to human kind!!

Except that there's no need to spy - it's not like they're being very covert about their actions and intentions. It's more like "Fuck you, I'll do what I want - I'm America! Americaaaaa, FUCK YEAH!!!".

Re:Obviously

[mwvdlee]

Iran is being spied upon. And in other news, horoscopes are fake and pie is delicious.

Horoscopes aren't fake, they're a real thing. They're right there in the back of the newspaper every day, it's the predictions that are fake. The horoscopes themselves are perfectly real, why you'd think otherwise confuses me.

The predictions aren't fake either. They're right there in the horoscope section of your newspaper. They may never come true, but they are real predictions. I may predict that nobody is going to respond to this post and that prediction may end up being true or false, but the prediction in itself is a real prediction. It's the believe horoscope predictions become true that is fake. Why you'd think otherwise confuses me.

Re:Obviously

[nacturation]

Of course, it burns off in the oven

This is a dangerous myth (Mythbusters, here's some new material) that it all burns off. Especially in an oven, where is the alcohol gonna go? Into the food!

It's dangerous for diabetics, pregnants, and young children (studies show it inhibits brain development) mostly though. 1/4 cup of vodka is a blip to everyone else.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooking_with_alcohol

That 1/4 cup in a pie crust typically gets cut into 8 slices. So each slice has 1/32 of a cup or about 7.4 mL. According to the wikipedia article, if you cook the pie for only 15 minutes 40% of the alcohol remains which means 4 mL per pie slice. I suppose that could still be dangerous to some, but it's nothing like serving 1/4 cup straight to a person.

Re:Obviously

[georgeb]

It's the believe horoscope predictions become true that is fake. Why you'd think otherwise confuses me.

You're all wrong. Nothing is fake. The belief is real as well. Unfounded by all means, most probably false, but not fake. Very few people fake their belief in horoscopes, most likely the authors (as long as they get their paycheck). But the target audience does genuinely believe there's some truth to the predictions in their horoscopes.

Re:Obviously

[roman_mir]

Well clearly, you can trust these people: Ahmadinejad, Bush, Putin, Obama, Cheney, Limbaugh, Krugman, Bernanke, Geithner, Beck and such.

Re:Obviously

[hamburger lady]

lol, the guy mentioned obama in the list (and krugman), and you're all 'you forgot obama, you partisan hack'.

someone's a partisan hack here, and it aint the guy you were replying to.

Re:Obviously

[TheRaven64]

You are comparing dishes with alcohol in the sauce (which forms an azeotrope and so does not all evaporate off unless all of the sauce evaporates), with alcohol in a dough. If you are worried about the trace amounts left after this, then you shouldn't eat bread, which also contains alcohol before it is baked.

Re:Obviously

[ffreeloader]

Especially in an oven, where is the alcohol gonna go?

For those people, like you, who have never used an oven, air circulation is designed into all ovens. There is no door seal around the bottom of the oven door, and there is a vent built into the roof of the oven that exits, in the vast majority of cases, under the right rear burner. If there were no air circulation in an oven nothing would brown on top, such as cookies, cakes, turkey, chicken, etc... and nothing would cook evenly.

Turn on your oven and let it warm up. Then put your hand over the right rear burner and you will feel the warm air rising. For those of you with glass top ranges the oven will vent elsewhere, usually out the back.

So where does the alcohol go? It evaporates into the air in the oven and exits the oven through the vent, as the wiki article only mentions cases where the alcohol is NOT stirred into the mixture or the dish is removed from the heat as soon as the alcohol is added, and if you had ever made a pie crust from scratch you'd know that the water used is part and parcel of the dough of the pie crust itself. That alone removes it from the wiki list of examples. Furthermore, a baked pie crust is very dry without the filling, meaning the liquid used to make the dough has been evaporated during the baking process, and alcohol evaporates faster than water so it is the first liquid to evaporate. And, yes, you bake the crust before you add the filling.

Re:Obviously

[doctorfaustus]

Have you never opened an oven after baking, say, a frozen pizza, and had the escaping moist heat cloud up your glasses? That's where it goes.

Re:Obviously

[Lord Ender]

in other news, horoscopes are fake and pie is delicious.

Our intelligence shows that it is actually yellow cake which is delicious.

Re:Obviously

[Nyder]

lol, the guy mentioned obama in the list (and krugman), and you're all 'you forgot obama, you partisan hack'.

someone's a partisan hack here, and it aint the guy you were replying to.

Give him/her a break, probably public school, and you know how bad the public education system is.

Re:Obviously

[IICV]

Also you're serving them pie, which is already dangerous to diabetics and children.

Seriously, Americans are way too fearful of alcohol. A little bit now and then really won't hurt anyone more than some sugar would.

Re:Obviously

[Muad'Dave]

Fresh orange juice can have as much as 380mg/L of ethanol. That's a lot higher than your piece of pie. Grandparent poster, do some basic research before you give out health 'advice'.

Setting the bar low

[Dachannien]

It's amazing how little we require of foreign powers these days, in order to believe that they're making some sort of tremendous admission. I blame the Iraqi Information Minister for causing us to set the bar so low.

"Acknowledges" ...

[Angostura]

... seems a rather odd word for a news source to use in this context. I probably would have gone with "claims" unless the Washington Post has concrete sources saying that such espionage has occurred.

Re:Famous last words

[couchslug]

"He died because they killed him!!!"

"Natural Sharia causes".

Just reading the headline

[Kjella]

"Iran Acknowledges Espionage At Nuclear Facilities"

From the headline, I thought Iran had admitted to espionage at foreign nuclear facilities which would have been more newsworthy.

Four reasons

[Sycraft-fu]

That can be summed up as MICE:

Money. This is an easy one to understand. People are greedy. You find the right kind of person and toss the right amount of money (surprisingly too much can be as ineffective as too little) at them, they'll do it. Yes it is dangerous but then people get in to drug trafficking all the time and that is dangerous even if you don't take jail in to account. The money makes it attractive to some.

Ideology. Some people disagree with the ideals of their government. Some REALLY disagree. This is true in any nation, but Iran probably has more problems than most. If you've not noticed their government has been having a bit of a popularity problem lately to the point of massive protests and fixed elections. So someone may decide it is worth the risk to help a nation they see as having the proper ideology, a nation that can maybe help against the government in Iran.

Conscience. Most humans have one, even if it sometimes has a rather strange calibration. When someone's conscience is offended enough, they may go and do things like espionage despite the risks. Perhaps some people are really worried, they suspect that the reactors will be used for weapons, and they think the government is crazy enough to use them. They don't want to see their country destroyed, so they try and help other nations to put a stop to the nuclear program.

Ego. Some people will do it just for pure ego, just for the thrill basically. They figure they can get away with it, they are smarter than the government, whatever, just pure ego drives them. Stupid? Sure, but then think about how many cases of pure ego pushing people to do stupid things you've seen.

That is just how it goes. Punishments don't matter. The US managed to spy on the Soviet Union successfully plenty, and the punishment there was death after torture basically (torture wasn't official, just a part of the interrogation basically). Spying has been going on forever, and will probably continue to do so. It is generally dealt with very harshly (death is an extremely common sentence in history) but it still happens.

Re:Four reasons

[antifoidulus]

Doing something for money doesn't mean you are doing it out of greed. Debt(and often times not even your own debt) drives people to do things they would never ever have considered otherwise. Just look at Van Tuong Nguyen. The guy smuggled drugs through Singapore to help repay his BROTHERS debt even though he knew he was risking serious penalties if caught. Well he did get caught and it ended up costing him his life.

Thats why the number one cause of people getting denied/losing their security clearance in the US is debt(the second being criminal history). It's just too easy to gain leverage over that person.

Re:Four reasons

[The Yuckinator]

At least cite your source!

Tom Clancy, Red Rabbit. Chapter 15

Re:Four reasons

[Sycraft-fu]

You think he made it up? This has been an intelligence maxim for far longer than Clancy has been an author.

They'd damn well better

[jmac_the_man]

With all the spying the government does on Americans, they'd damn well better be spying on our enemies. Isn't this EXACTLY what the CIA and friends are for?

What if the information the spies supplied ....

[grandpa-geek]

... was the details of the PLC applications being targeted by the Stuxnet worm. Hmmmm.

Re:keeping an open mind

[murdocj]

The US isn't interested in technical innovations. They're interested in just how close Iran is to building a nuclear weapon.

Yes, yes, I am so sure that is true.

[davev2.0]

insisted increased security and worker privileges have put a stop to the spying.

And, there are no homosexuals in Iran either.

Re:Something to think about

[elrous0]

The same reason it's illegal to pass secrets about U.S. reactors to Russia and other countries...because it could be used for sabotage.