Marco light-heartedly writes:

But, guys: do you think you could get me one of these? I’d really like one!

He’s referring to the bugged Canadian coins that made the news last week. Apparently, the story was unsubstantiated, and that kind of weakens the point I was going to make, but I’ll post it anyway.

A while back Canada deported a real Russian Spy. Assuming that the allegations are actually true that he was a spy working for the Russian government/security service, it raises several questions in my mind.

Why on earth would Russia base a spy in Canada? I didn’t see any indication that he was doing corporate espionage (which would be understandable), just the regular geopolitical kind. Canada certainly isn’t diplomatically hostile towards Russia, and the Canadian military isn’t any sort of threat. Political strategy has never been more open; you could probably gain as much insight into the Canadian government through public sources as you could by spying, and do so with much less risk. Access to the United States is mentioned, but it seems to me that if you want to spy on the US, you’d be better off planting someone actually inside the country. Canadians have easier access to the USA than most other foreigners, but there are still lots of restrictions and oversight; getting someone into the USA permanently is probably easier than getting someone across the border frequently. So what the heck was this guy doing here? Are they just hedging their bets?

Lots of questions; I’ll probably never have answers to most of them.