If he was offering instead of being asked it's a very different story and that's the sort of crime that part of the FBI is there to deal with.
If someone was shopping for secrets and asked him and he responded then that's also a real crime.
What we see here is a fabrication done with care to make it look more acceptable and lower risk. Egypt got billions of dollars worth of F16 aircraft this year as a gift to a military ally FFS! That's the sort of thing that make the fantasy more acceptable to the target than selling to China, and it's also makes the fantasy something that's never going to come up in reality. Do we really want to catch people that are only going to commit crimes in situations that never happen? Only if the aim is numbers and not catching real criminals.
If you can't tell the difference between the three situations, which appears to be the case, then you are certainly in no position to lecture others about "grasping this concept" unless you wish to be disparaged and laughed at.
Now you've added how I think to the list of fantasies. "How I think" was in the post way above and others in this thread. A pointless waste of resources that should be used chasing crimes that have actually happened. A process prone to abuse that has been used to inflate arrest figures for those seeking promotion. A precursor to Soviet show trials. Other stuff you've added which I have not written is your strawman that you just happen to have put my name on. Society is full of people that will commit crimes if offered the right inducement and a chance to get away with it. We put up with them because most of them will never get that trigger and never actually become criminals. Stings almost always work because there are plenty of gullible and greedy people around, but it's very lazy policing with little or no benefit and a lot of potential downsides. Free will does not vanish but far more people than either of us like would use their free will to choose a large sum of money or a convenient opportunity if they see little personal risk. I'm sure you work with several like that and given enough time you will be able to identify a few of them. So long as they don't get that chance they are not criminals.
So many people here do not seem to grasp the concept that people who are willing to sell their own grandmother are disturbingly common, even in classified positions, and that carefully crafted stings can easily catch people that would otherwise never commit a crime due to lack of a specific opportunity where they think they can get away with it. We should be catching the people making the offers not just fishing for greedy people, because one less greedy person makes almost no difference.
Lem is a very good example of that, as is Phillip K. Dick for other consequences of risk. Lem may have been executed if his satire had a contemporary setting. Phillip K. Dick couldn't sell his contemporary novel "confessions of a crap artist" but publishers accepted his style when he wrote SF.
The late George Turner had a few things to say lik
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Overly Familiar Sci-Fi
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The late George Turner had a few things to say like that too. A technology that is a major game changer is going to alter society a great deal so that someone kept in suspended animation or returning from an extended time in space is going to dealing with an increasingly alien society. He was writing in his late 80s though and had seen a great deal of societal change first hand. However, the reader needs "somewhere to stand" to understand the idea the writer is putting forward, so the far future can be represented Asimov style as a combination of little 1930s Russian towns and 1960s New York only in space if the story isn't about societal change due to future events. Just like something you know but with robots brings the robots into focus. A totally changed society where few people are over 20 doesn't being robots into focus.
From that, it's obvious to everyone that you don't mind having people working in sensitive positions who are willing to sell our defense secrets.
Now THAT sounds like the ridiculous copout to me. By not swallowing a stupid fantasy I somehow allow a goalpost shift to being a commie traitor or something? How childish when it's very obvious that I suggested nothing remotely like that. THERE WAS NO FOREIGN BUYER OF SECRETS IN THIS CASE. There is only a fantasy that the target fell for. Surely you don't expect me to fall for it as well?
The FBI merely provided the opportunity, he committed the crime.
Which raises the question of whether the crime would have happened at all without the carefully tailored fantasy of selling to a friendly party. If we were worried about the Egyptians bombing our carriers we wouldn't have given them F16 fighter-bombers this year. This sting stinks on multiple levels. Such pointless games in the Soviet Union provided fodder for many show trials to show the strength of the State. Why are we doing it?
A border runs through the lake. It's a real navy not just pining for a coastline. See also the actions of the US Navy on the lakes in the war of 1812 and earlier.
This page is obviously only a minor subset of the wider discussion in various media and it's very annoying that you have pretended to be stupid enough to misunderstand that.
Doesn't seem to work with those idiots that keep clicking on links in spam when they know they should not so why do you think this will be any different? The "special snowflake" will think they can get away with it this time even if others who are not so special did not, and they'll sell out just the same if given an opportunity. Instead of filling jails with idiots how about going after those giving them an opportunity?
Take it up with the poster above that wrote "targets a person and convinces that person to do something he would not normally have done" if you disagree with such a definition. It certainly fits that definition if you hold the definition to be valid.
Such an excuse would have been in the press release if it existed to prevent accusations of entrapment such as the ones on this page. The FBI likes to get good press so would not have left it out.
You seem to be bending over backwards to defend this guy.
No. I'm bending over backwards to point out that this is a useless waste of money that is resulting in rewarding lazy policing. The fool is a fool. However if the FBI tries to lock up every fool just for being a fool they won't get anything else done.
presuming all this damning evidence is true
It isn't. It's a fantasy of being paid to give military secrets to a military ally. We gave Egypt F16 fighters as a gift FFS. I'm sure the fantasy was crafted with that in mind so that it could catch a wider range of fools than a fantasy of selling secrets to China.
India is one of the countries where the US sends batteries to be recycled so it's almost certain that they are better at it than we are. If not, we didn't care before when we sent them our batteries so why should caring about it be an issue now when it can get in the way of an improvement?
Was a real answer what you were looking for or was it just a petty flag waving exercise that makes us all look bad?
Since he thought he was trying to deliver them to the Egyptian government, that makes him a scumbag
Not so much a scumbag since the US is not only allied with them but gave them $19billion in military aid. I'm sure that was a major reason why Egypt was chosen as part of the fantasy used in the sting. It's not so different morally as selling stuff to Israel so it's going to catch more people than if Russia or China was used in the fantasy.
Look at it another way - what if he thought "these guys want to give me money for some secret they can never use?" Doesn't sound like betrayal in those terms, after all Egypt is a major non-NATO ally (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt%E2%80%93United_States_relations#Military_cooperation). I'm sure the sting was deliberately intended that way. I'm also sure that most posters here work with people that would fall for similar things. There's no shortage of greedy people out there that can twist things enough that they can convince themselves that it's OK to take the money in similar circumstances. It's not China or Russia they'd say, we give them $19billion in military aid, so it's not going to hurt if I profit a bit? It's a complete waste of time to catch such people since something like that sting is not likely to happen to them in reality. It's just a carefully crafted fantasy designed to show progress by increasing arrest figures. The Soviets did that sort of thing a lot. Why are we doing it?
It's still a simple case of locking up some guy whose crime was being a greedy idiot. There is no real criminal who was seeking out the plans - now that would be a person worth catching instead of setting up a fake crime.
I'm not suggesting it as a defence, I'm suggesting that it's very lazy policing to fabricate a false crime and charge for that in the first place instead of going after a real crime. Would the guy have done it otherwise? How the hell would we ever know? Going after real crime is harder, but the objective is not supposed to be to fill prisons, it's supposed to be to prevent or solve crimes instead of adding to the list with faked up ones.
targets a person and convinces that person to do something he would not normally have done
Since the guy doesn't have a history of such a thing it very firmly ticks box number two for entrapment. I suspect someone's taking the lazy way up the promotion ladder and this guy is part of the way of doing it. Such bullshit is disturbingly common.
They've got a very big lake and military boats on it with professional sailors working on them. That's enough to call something a Navy even if it's tiny.
The plans are just the McGuffin. They do not matter. Nobody was buying the plans apart from the lazy sting to catch someone who is greedy. You've been fooled into equating this with catching the agent of a foreign power who is going around looking for people who have access to aircraft carrier plans. Nothing so useful has happened, they've only caught some guy that will sell out in very specific circumstances. With the right circumstances they could probably lock up half of Virginia, all without preventing or punishing a single real crime.
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If he was offering instead of being asked it's a very different story and that's the sort of crime that part of the FBI is there to deal with.
If someone was shopping for secrets and asked him and he responded then that's also a real crime.
What we see here is a fabrication done with care to make it look more acceptable and lower risk. Egypt got billions of dollars worth of F16 aircraft this year as a gift to a military ally FFS! That's the sort of thing that make the fantasy more acceptable to the target than selling to China, and it's also makes the fantasy something that's never going to come up in reality. Do we really want to catch people that are only going to commit crimes in situations that never happen? Only if the aim is numbers and not catching real criminals.
If you can't tell the difference between the three situations, which appears to be the case, then you are certainly in no position to lecture others about "grasping this concept" unless you wish to be disparaged and laughed at.
Now you've added how I think to the list of fantasies.
"How I think" was in the post way above and others in this thread. A pointless waste of resources that should be used chasing crimes that have actually happened. A process prone to abuse that has been used to inflate arrest figures for those seeking promotion. A precursor to Soviet show trials. Other stuff you've added which I have not written is your strawman that you just happen to have put my name on.
Society is full of people that will commit crimes if offered the right inducement and a chance to get away with it. We put up with them because most of them will never get that trigger and never actually become criminals. Stings almost always work because there are plenty of gullible and greedy people around, but it's very lazy policing with little or no benefit and a lot of potential downsides.
Free will does not vanish but far more people than either of us like would use their free will to choose a large sum of money or a convenient opportunity if they see little personal risk. I'm sure you work with several like that and given enough time you will be able to identify a few of them. So long as they don't get that chance they are not criminals.
So many people here do not seem to grasp the concept that people who are willing to sell their own grandmother are disturbingly common, even in classified positions, and that carefully crafted stings can easily catch people that would otherwise never commit a crime due to lack of a specific opportunity where they think they can get away with it.
We should be catching the people making the offers not just fishing for greedy people, because one less greedy person makes almost no difference.
Lem is a very good example of that, as is Phillip K. Dick for other consequences of risk. Lem may have been executed if his satire had a contemporary setting. Phillip K. Dick couldn't sell his contemporary novel "confessions of a crap artist" but publishers accepted his style when he wrote SF.
The late George Turner had a few things to say like that too. A technology that is a major game changer is going to alter society a great deal so that someone kept in suspended animation or returning from an extended time in space is going to dealing with an increasingly alien society. He was writing in his late 80s though and had seen a great deal of societal change first hand.
However, the reader needs "somewhere to stand" to understand the idea the writer is putting forward, so the far future can be represented Asimov style as a combination of little 1930s Russian towns and 1960s New York only in space if the story isn't about societal change due to future events. Just like something you know but with robots brings the robots into focus. A totally changed society where few people are over 20 doesn't being robots into focus.
Now THAT sounds like the ridiculous copout to me. By not swallowing a stupid fantasy I somehow allow a goalpost shift to being a commie traitor or something? How childish when it's very obvious that I suggested nothing remotely like that.
THERE WAS NO FOREIGN BUYER OF SECRETS IN THIS CASE. There is only a fantasy that the target fell for. Surely you don't expect me to fall for it as well?
Which raises the question of whether the crime would have happened at all without the carefully tailored fantasy of selling to a friendly party. If we were worried about the Egyptians bombing our carriers we wouldn't have given them F16 fighter-bombers this year.
This sting stinks on multiple levels. Such pointless games in the Soviet Union provided fodder for many show trials to show the strength of the State. Why are we doing it?
A border runs through the lake. It's a real navy not just pining for a coastline.
See also the actions of the US Navy on the lakes in the war of 1812 and earlier.
This page is obviously only a minor subset of the wider discussion in various media and it's very annoying that you have pretended to be stupid enough to misunderstand that.
Doesn't seem to work with those idiots that keep clicking on links in spam when they know they should not so why do you think this will be any different? The "special snowflake" will think they can get away with it this time even if others who are not so special did not, and they'll sell out just the same if given an opportunity.
Instead of filling jails with idiots how about going after those giving them an opportunity?
Take it up with the poster above that wrote "targets a person and convinces that person to do something he would not normally have done" if you disagree with such a definition. It certainly fits that definition if you hold the definition to be valid.
Such an excuse would have been in the press release if it existed to prevent accusations of entrapment such as the ones on this page. The FBI likes to get good press so would not have left it out.
I do not know what you mean. I must have missed something. Care to explain?
No. I'm bending over backwards to point out that this is a useless waste of money that is resulting in rewarding lazy policing.
The fool is a fool. However if the FBI tries to lock up every fool just for being a fool they won't get anything else done.
It isn't. It's a fantasy of being paid to give military secrets to a military ally. We gave Egypt F16 fighters as a gift FFS. I'm sure the fantasy was crafted with that in mind so that it could catch a wider range of fools than a fantasy of selling secrets to China.
Yes, if you had made it to the second line before posting you would have noticed that I addressed that.
India is one of the countries where the US sends batteries to be recycled so it's almost certain that they are better at it than we are.
If not, we didn't care before when we sent them our batteries so why should caring about it be an issue now when it can get in the way of an improvement?
Was a real answer what you were looking for or was it just a petty flag waving exercise that makes us all look bad?
Not so much a scumbag since the US is not only allied with them but gave them $19billion in military aid.
I'm sure that was a major reason why Egypt was chosen as part of the fantasy used in the sting. It's not so different morally as selling stuff to Israel so it's going to catch more people than if Russia or China was used in the fantasy.
Look at it another way - what if he thought "these guys want to give me money for some secret they can never use?" Doesn't sound like betrayal in those terms, after all Egypt is a major non-NATO ally (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt%E2%80%93United_States_relations#Military_cooperation). I'm sure the sting was deliberately intended that way.
I'm also sure that most posters here work with people that would fall for similar things. There's no shortage of greedy people out there that can twist things enough that they can convince themselves that it's OK to take the money in similar circumstances. It's not China or Russia they'd say, we give them $19billion in military aid, so it's not going to hurt if I profit a bit? It's a complete waste of time to catch such people since something like that sting is not likely to happen to them in reality.
It's just a carefully crafted fantasy designed to show progress by increasing arrest figures. The Soviets did that sort of thing a lot. Why are we doing it?
It's still a silly fantasy and it's pathetic he fell for it. What's even more pathetic was the sting in the first place instead of real police work.
It's still a simple case of locking up some guy whose crime was being a greedy idiot. There is no real criminal who was seeking out the plans - now that would be a person worth catching instead of setting up a fake crime.
Mainly because it doesn't matter. You are discussing the fantasy sold to the target of the sting instead of anything related to real espionage.
I'm not suggesting it as a defence, I'm suggesting that it's very lazy policing to fabricate a false crime and charge for that in the first place instead of going after a real crime. Would the guy have done it otherwise? How the hell would we ever know? Going after real crime is harder, but the objective is not supposed to be to fill prisons, it's supposed to be to prevent or solve crimes instead of adding to the list with faked up ones.
Since the guy doesn't have a history of such a thing it very firmly ticks box number two for entrapment. I suspect someone's taking the lazy way up the promotion ladder and this guy is part of the way of doing it. Such bullshit is disturbingly common.
They've got a very big lake and military boats on it with professional sailors working on them. That's enough to call something a Navy even if it's tiny.
The plans are just the McGuffin. They do not matter. Nobody was buying the plans apart from the lazy sting to catch someone who is greedy.
You've been fooled into equating this with catching the agent of a foreign power who is going around looking for people who have access to aircraft carrier plans. Nothing so useful has happened, they've only caught some guy that will sell out in very specific circumstances. With the right circumstances they could probably lock up half of Virginia, all without preventing or punishing a single real crime.