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Comment by hmm320 | Hacker News Reader

I had each of them as a teacher in Denver when they taught there. Mr. Toebbe would tell me to stop “spinning my wheels” and try harder. I guess trying harder means selling nuclear secrets!

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This reminds me of a chemistry professor I had in undergrad in his 50's who repeatedly made vague remarks regarding his prior career in military intelligence (when students showed up late to class, he'd sometimes talk about the days when "Uncle Sam" would wake him up at 2AM to get on plane to an unknown destination.) It always struck me because I came from a military community and many of my teachers had served at one point or another, but nobody bragged about it like this guy did.

A couple years after I left school, he was arrested for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars in various microscopes and other lab equipment and selling it all online. It was so bizarre seeing his mugshot on the front page of the local paper.

At least he didn't end up producing meth to pay for his medical bills, lol

This couple just wrecked their lives and you have a story to tell. But regardless of their curent reputation, he may have meant what he said and wanted to genuinely help you but in the wrong way.

They wrecked their lives in the course of a crime, as criminals do when they get caught.

Yes but these prople weren’t really career criminals, they had respectable jobs and good lives. They got tempted with easy money and blew it all away

That makes them even worse.

Not just their lives, they have children who are still minors.

Ouch, I did not know about that. This makes their situation radically worse. I almost feel bad for their mistake, greed got the best of them. Hope many will think twice before going for easy money. It’s not that easy after all

So did the Rosenbergs.

If you had just worked a bit harder, you too could be under federal indictment

You know… It’s advice without context like this that isn’t helpful! Sometimes being under federal indictment is just as much luck and circumstance as it is hard work!

Wait for the jury trial because prosecutors lie and "national security" is the thing that gets lied about the most.

EDIT: The other thing to watch out for is an FBI sting where they convince a guy to do something he would never have otherwise done. It seems like every publicly touted victory from them ends up that way once the truth comes out.

I dunno, putting an SD card in a peanut butter sandwich for a dead drop seems pretty deliberate

You wanna wait to see additional context. Sometimes allegations are completely made up, sometimes there's an alternative explanation that isn't obvious.

What are some recent examples where they falsely accuse someone of espionage?

I don't know off the top of my head for a very recent one, but the case of Wen-Ho Lee in 1999 comes to mind.

https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/427738-guilty-u...

How about falsely accused of terrorism?

The Liberty City 7 A. Daoud Michigan Militia Assassination

und und und

They made multiple drops, one for $30,000, another for $70,000, following months of correspondence. There's plenty of context if you read the link -- unless you are for some reason accusing the FBI of wholesale fabrication of a story leading to the arrest of two relatively unimportant scientists.

E.g.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/09/the-case-of-scie...

Oh, and of course, US v. Reynolds, in which the state secrets privilege was invented, from whole cloth, based on fraudulent and perjurious claims of the US Government.

https://www.latimes.com/style/la-bk-barrysiegel22-2008jun22-...

It looks like Toebbe had no contact with an informant. He offered information to the French Embassy and the French government turned this over to the FBI. So there will be no entrapment defense.

But otherwise you are correct, more than one of these sensational cases were hatched by commission-earning FBI informants: the Liberty City 7 (a few acquitted and the others out now), the mentally ill 17-year old who was convinced to blow up a saloon near Wrigley Field (A.Daoud); the Michigan militia plan to kill the governor of that State, many many others.

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