espionage

Famous Author Sent Man To Stalinist Labor Camp

Ryan Tate · 10/14/08 03:57AM

Milan Kundera, who wrote such novels as “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and “The Joke,” turned in a supposed spy amidst the Stalinist terror sweeping Czechoslovakia in 1950, resulting in the man's 14-years imprisonment and hard labor in a uranium mine. Supposedly, Kundera was a fervent communist true believer at the time, 18 years before the anti-authoritarian's work was banned and 35 years before he said "indiscretion is a capital sin... We live in an age when private life is being destroyed. The police destroy it in Communist countries, journalists threaten it in democratic countries, and little by little the people themselves lose their taste for private life and their sense of it." Now he's implying these accusations will lead to his own death:

Julia Child Was A U.S. Spy

Ryan Tate · 08/14/08 07:14AM

TV chef and cookbook author Julia Child was secretly more awesome than you already thought, because she was part of a very exciting World War II-era U.S. spy ring, government files revealed this morning. It was already known that Child had worked in an administrative capacity for the Office of Strategic Services, the less evil precursor to the CIA. And anyone who knew her biography had to wonder about her long career at various U.S. stations abroad. And about that recipe for "poached secrets."

Is Yahoo's David Sobeski a Microsoft spy?

Owen Thomas · 11/21/07 01:39PM

I'm hearing an incredible rumor about David Sobeski, the former Microsoft general manager now opening a Seattle-area office for Yahoo, and I'm not sure whether to believe it. Whispers from well-placed Yahoos are that he took the job under "false pretenses." Translation: They think he's a spy for Microsoft, planted at Yahoo to learn the company's secrets. The new office is to work on something called "DataOS," the technical underpinnings for Yahoo's large-scale Web operations. Microsoft is playing catch-up with Google in Web-based software, and getting hold of Yahoo's technology would be one way to take a massive leap. There may be nothing to the allegations. But if Microsoft hasn't placed a corporate spy at Yahoo yet, I'd have to say I wonder what's taking them so long.

Cheatsheet: What is pretexting?

Nick Douglas · 09/11/06 03:15PM

This week's tech news is all about "pretexting," the method that investigators hired by Hewlett-Packard used to get the personal phone records of reporters and HP board members. But what is it? You'd better know, because it's about to blow up the business world.