Microsoft Employed Alleged Russian Spy

You're probably heard about the Russian spies lurking around American suburbia, doing their best impersonations of Joe and Jane Six-Pack while stealing U.S. intelligence secrets with all the professionalism and grace of the Keystone Kops on a hefty dose of Thorazine. What you probably didn't know--until today, at least, when the story found its way into seemingly every newspaper in the western world--was that one of the alleged spies worked for a few months as an entry-level software tester at Microsoft.

The suspected spook's name is Alexey V. Karetnikov, and his Facebook page can be found here. He has 40 friends (sad!), lists his current city as Redmond (but at this point it should say, "Back in the (former) U.S.S.R."), and features Microsoft and a company called Neobit among his employers. According to Bloomberg, via The Wall Street Journal, Neobit is a software company that lists the Russian Ministry of Defense and the FSB among its partners (warning sign, anyone?)

For Microsoft, this is a prime opportunity. No longer does the company need to endure the humiliation of saying it discontinued the Kin due to poor sales--now they can say the phones' inglorious demise was the result of sabotage from the inside! That sounds a lot better. And best of all, Karetnikov's not exactly going to say anything about it, because it's probably a good bet he's halfway to Siberia by this point.

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