Imagine how much information they could get on these engineers, who, as foreign nationals, are free game to warrantless surveillance. Facebook photos, emails, Android phone location history, MasterCard records. It would be easy to find something incriminating such as "You were at a hotel room for 4 hours in the middle of the day, how about you help us or we'll tell your wife?" or "You've got $25,000 in credit card debt and we can make that disappear if you change a few config files."

This isn't crazy movie stuff, this is exactly how people are recruited.