I wish the tech media would do their job for once. Of course,
their primary role is to serve big IT, and so they may be circling the
wagons on this and keeping the spy story merely one of ridicule and
sympathy for the Russian underdog on purpose, but even so, I expect
better. The story particularly of Anna Chapman clearly relates directly
to Russia's Silicon Valley, to a high-profile trip to Russia by leading
tech California Silicon Valley CEOS "worth $60 billion" and leads
directly to President Dmitry Medvedev. Could we get a little more
curious about this, guys — and stop ogling the missing knickers and do
some basic journalistic work?

I've laid
this Silicon-to-Silicon connection out in my article on Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty here and I will keep posting additional
information as I find it.

My comments are languishing in the
moderator's queue as per usual at TechCrunch on this "exclusive"
story but I managed to get in a comment through the moderator sieve
on
Arrington's frivolous take on this 007-type story and it's maddening because of
all people, these Google-satured geeks should be out there using every
connection and gadget they have to figure out why Anna Chapman was so
embedded in their midst among their very friends — and who — and why
— is removing all her footprints from social media sites (at least in
the English language).

Her Linked-in account is now removed from
view and/or removed completely. Yesterday, I could still view, it as
could others, and find out the pertinent fact that I was one person
removed from her or in the second tier away from her circle — Nic
Mitham had friended her for some reason or she had friended him,
possibly after attending some start-up or entrepreneurs' event. I also
saw on Linked in she was one friend away from former Linden Lab
educational evangelist John Lester (the notorious Pathfinder whom I've
dissected in detail) but that's because he's friends with Nic or
somebody like Nic.

Who is removing this footprint? It's funny to
me to hear some people speculate that the FBI is doing this. If they
were, they'd have removed all the FB and other footprints of all the
spies — and they haven't. Mikhail Semenko's page is left untouched
(and, I might add, other than the son of some people I went to
university with, doesn't seem to have anything I can recognize, and no
Russian/Silicon Valley sort of connection — but then, this guy's field
was China.) So are some of the other spies. So my guess is either the
lawyer is doing it, having gotten the passwords during a jailhouse
visit; or the SVR, wanting to remove what traces they can of this sordid
and embarassing affair, especially on *this* particular spy that
reaches so close up to Medvedev and Skolkovo — or it might possible be
just a sister or the father, said to be KGB himself, who maybe worked
his connections to do an old-fashioned crack of the sites and a scrub.
I'm betting it's the lawyer or the sister in the U.S., because the
Russian sites have been untouched.

The group that's been useful to
watch for various clues has been
AMBAR, that seemed paralyzed into inaction after the news struck — with
one member urging everybody to cut cards with her because they might be
investigated as illegals by the FBI — then later posting a link to the
story about her sexual adventures. But then, it's not such an active
group in this particular manifestation of it — they'd hardly said
anything in the group since May, when they were
all impressed by the red-hot redhead startupshchitsa's video
on how to
get venture funding. Pro-tip — in the U.S. it might have been a good
idea to spell the word "ventures" properly in the name of your adventura
— Anna's project mentioned in the video is TIME Venchures. Of course,
Time Magazine was one of the open venues that the spies used to
communicate with each other, which we learn from one of the gee-whiz spy
tech articles — although it does not appear Chapman used this method.

The
Facebook account was hidden yesterday the pictures hidden or removed.
Now you can only see any friends you have in common with Anna Chapman.
I've kept the list and I've been researching the people on it. The
60-year-old rich guy she was dating is one of those who cut her out of
his list when he learned she was a spy — and can you blame him? He gets
what this is about. Not everybody is working to spin this story as a
plot of evil Amerika against everything-that-is-good-for-you, Obama, and
earnest innovation-seeking Russkis — like Peter Lavelle, Timothy Post
and Sean, the Guy who has a Blog Named Sean's Blog. They realize that
even a charge of "working for a foreign government" is a serious one,
and just because there haven't been espionage charges yet, doesn't mean
they might not appear — and they may not appear merely to protect work
that law-enforcement is doing in other areas.

When you get past
the Boris and Natasha stuff on the TechCrunch video, Paul Carr has a
good point — it used to be journalists were the spies, because they
could travel anywhere and ask any questions. Now, with media dying, and
the journalists' jobs and overseas budgets drying up, what figure in
society can play this role? And the answer is: the entrepreneur, the
start-up geek, because he has to aggressively push himself everywhere,
network with tons of people, ask questions constantly — especially in
the social media biz. Perfect cover.

For some reason, TechCrunch's
Erick Schonfeld
turned in a piece he called "an exclusive" which we'd all seen days
ago which is just her web page NYCrentals
(which also has a twitter account) and its "biznes-plan". It has that
same amateurish (or fake spy cover) feel — and TechCrunch didn't bother
to ask any of the 30,000 Russians living near its offices (or me!) to
translate the video which you can see here
(watch both parts, and read the comments, too) — the interview by web
entrepreneur and new media consultant Alyona Popova. Popova felt she had
a good example of someone benefiting from her "online school for
startupery" (as they are called in Russian, hilariously) in Chapman, but
her readers were skeptical — one former Facebook friend of Anna's
named Artur Velf raises an eyebrow and wonders who Chapman, who only a
few months previously, was seeking her own venture capital, was now
dispensing advise about how to raise it. In the AMBAR group, someone
comments that she hasn't supplied any real case studies.

Velf
takes the position, in
a huge long wall debate worthy of Dostoyevsky and several other
debates on Facebook with many participants, that she is innocent, the
victim of some kind of plot, and even comes up with a theory that the
FBI agent, whose last name is "Patel," is related to another "Patel" in
the Facebook circles of Chapman, and therefore it's all some kind of
sinister set-up. He says he met her at a venture conference in 2008 and
she's just a real-estate agent. Velf writes on social media and is
prominent in these circles; I'm trying to figure out why he feels such
compulsion to spin the story of Anna Chapman's arrest as a function of
evil Amerika and not her working for the SVR as the FBI maintains.

Here
he is giving
an interview to ABC swearing of her innocence:

Arthur Welt (sic), a 36-year-old Russian journalist living in Moscow
who first
met Chapman in 2008 at a start-up conference, said the idea that
Chapman is a spy is "nonsense."

"She was very professional in the real estate market," Welt said.
"Startup founders don't have time, especially not for espionage." 

Right.
Out of all the bloggers and friends in her list and commentators,
nobody seems to be working as hard as Mr. Velf to spin this story away
from looking like what it appears to be — a spy related to Skolkolov
and Silicon Valley. Why?

The lawyer is constantly quoted saying
this:

Chapman's attorney Robert Baum said, "The government's
case is very thin
against Ms. Chapman. There is no allegation that she ever met face to
face with any government official. No allegation despite constant
surveillane that she ever delivered anything to anyone or received any
money." 

As news accounts (and the complaint itself which you
can get online) say this, however:

The complaint charging
Chapman alleges that on 10 occasions between Jan.
2010 and June 2010, Chapman was observed on FBI surveillance
communicating covertly via a private internet wireless network with a
Russian government official including a coffee shop at 47th and 8th Ave
and other locations around New York City. On Saturday, the day before
she was arrested, the FBI used an undercover FBI agent, posing as a
Russian Consulate employee to approach Chapman to set up a meeting with
her to discuss problems she was having with her computer.

I guess "being in the same cafe as a Russian government
official and transmitting coded message over an encrypted line that the
FBI has identified" is equal to "not meeting face to face" and "not
deliverying anything" LOL.

Velf points out that Nur Rubini was
among Chapman's friends but he cut her.

I have to credit ABC for
so far being the *only* media outlet that is doing the investigative
journalistic job of searching through the Facebook and Linkedin lists
and trying to interview the subjects. They came up with only one name
with anything to say about, however:

Chapman was a
Facebook friend of well-known economist and NYU Stern Business School
professor Nouriel Roubini. Roubini, dubbed "Dr. Doom," has been credited
with predicting the global economic meltdown and is well-known on the
New York club circuit.

Chapman and Roubini were Facebook friends
until this morning, when the former Director of the Office of Policy
Development and Review at the U.S. Treasury Department removed her from
his friend's list.

Roubini, who is also the former senior
economist for international affairs with the White House Council of
Economic Advisors, told ABC News that Chapman had "befriended" him on
Facebook.

"I may have met her socially on one or two occasions in
a large party (not at my place) and never had a one to one conversation
or meeting with her," Roubini said. He added that he has no association
with Chapman nor would ever want to have one.

At one point,
listening to her second video, the thought crossed my mind that Chapman
was set up by Russians in the Skolkovo project, precisely because she
disses the venture capital prospects in Moscow so badly — or perhaps
because the SVR simply needed to have some scapegoats and a case that
would help galvinize that sort of indignant, protective, patriotic
feeling that Velf is so good at gushing on cue, and the sort of
sympathy-for-the-underdog and regrets at not helping Russian ventures
more that Sarah Lacey is also gushing on cue. At times thinking about
this case I wonder if it is an elaborate set-up (as in my favourite book
about Russia, "The Set Up" by Volkoff, in which the case was created to
elicit a series of other events indirectly — in this case, the bonding
of Skolkovo and Silicon people, and others in other relevant policy
fields, to feel as if they are victims of hardliners and hawks on both
sides, and can go questing together into the brave new future, smarter
and more special than everyone else, and of course, surrounded by
idiots.

In her video, Chapman basically says that unless you can
suck up to some big firm you can't get in — and the small businesses
are just too niche and don't warm to any outsiders so it's all
impossible. Yet she then miracuously cuts through all these difficulties
and gets her funding — in ways we never quite here in these two length
videos (she said she had 6 investors; I wonder if Dvornikova, the angel
investor of the American Silicon Valley, was one of them; they were FB
friends).

I've studied the website domdot.ru — it's fairly
sophisticated as far as its interface and coding and functionality. It's
not a craiglist because it isn't as cluttered and is more focused in
putting buyer and seller together and apparently running a side
consulting business in lead generation for sales agents. There was a
team of people coding this site, obviously — not Anna, who didn't study
computer science, isn't a programmer, and was in economics and finance.
The team is all listed in her social circle on Yandex — but they all
seem to have left in 2008 and 2009, and it's not clear who replaced them
— whether the team merely got sick, after the first flush of
enthusiasm, of recording their fabulous coding adventure on social
media, or whether some people removed themselves.

The young people
in this social circle don't seem to be Zolotaya Molodezh (Golden
Youth, privileged children of high-ranking government officials), but
if you go through their ranks, you find those kind of sturdy, solid
older men who built the BAM and run the industrial complex of the Soviet
Union and its successor state, Russia, Inc.

Someone on
TechCrunch who says he knows them says they couldn't compete in the
cut-throat start-up environment, and she took the technology and
business to New York. Yet the site still functions at domdot.ru

I'm
wondering if her TIME Venchures has anything to do with the
company of one of her Facebook connections but it might be purely
coincidence, as it may just be a cool-sounding name. (In the 1990s,
Russians would name their companies after their wives, mistresses, or
children — or small animals — so you'd get firms with names like
Belochka or Belka. Nowadays they seem to like to put a foreign word into
the mix like "Invest".)