Many people are scratching their heads or Laughing Out Loud about the Gang That Couldn't Spy Straight from Russia, posing as illegals but then getting caught by the FBI. I think what in fact is happening is that the Kremlin has worked a pretty good set-up that has ricocheted with the intended effect — the FBI has salivated like Pavlov's dog and made obvious arrests; the media has set up a dynamic that enables Right-Thinking People East and West to come to one Kremlin-dictated conclusion:

There is absolutely no reason why the greatest American tech transfer in history can't commence — indeed is already under way — over silly archaic concerns like "state secrets".

There aren't any — or so this theory goes. Geeks East and West can bond — as they get paid top dollar shuttling back and forth between Moscow and Palo Alto — over their sense that they have embarked together on a magic quest to defeat evil cold-war bureaucrats bent on jamming the reset button — and they can feature themselves gloriously as beating the boss of backward superstitions and suspicions. Indeed, tech types around Skolkovo and Silicon Valley who might have been a bit wary of each other before this spy story can now get together and laugh uproariously at bumbling spy cliches and pat each other on the back with how savvy and urbane they are in the ways of the world — even as some of them are quietly deleting Anna Chapman from their Facebook friends queue.

If American IT companies, independent of the state (even if they had a big part in getting Obama elected and now own the FCC) want to risk doing business with Kremlin.ru — that's their business. Let them pony up the billions to underwrite Russia's new Silicon Valley clone, and let the two communities of geeks — who are actually intimately connected already by a huge colony of Russian programmers and entrepreneurs in America — decide how they'd like American-Russian relations to run — which is mainly a self-interested notion not unlike General Electric's notion — "what's good for Skolkovo/Silicon Valley is good for both countries."

All this would be part of a normal and healthy normalization of relations — people doing business with Russia the way they would with Italy or India or Indonesia — with varying degrees of difficulties but without pathologies.

The problem is that the pathologies continue — Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer for a large American firm dies in prison; Khodorkovsky remains in jail; a lawyer working on human rights a cases in the North Caucasus is beaten by police and liberal human rights activists pull their punches, even as talented journalists write articles where a frank headline can cover for the fact that inside the article, there's no real criticism of the Kremlin.

As has been the case since Gorbachev's glasnost, a process that is in fact still under way, a bruiting about of intentions, such as to change a law, can have as much effect as actually passing and implementing the law — and trying to follow up on the failure to implement after so much good will was garnered can even look churlish.

The Russian media and the American and liberal tech media are mainly describing this episode – which seems to have already been diminished by the White House as not relevant to the White House — as some kind of aberration. The spies were greedy or clumsy. Or the FBI set up innocent Russians who are just engaged in legitimate business. It's mainly covered for its humorous content — the cloak-and-dagger techniques, the sultry redhead, the fabulous rich and famous — and the actual espionage that could have occurred utterly played down — indeed, the media mentions time and again that these people are not charged with *espionage* but merely working for a foreign power without having registered as lobbiests — as if a pesky bit of paperwork and some filing fee is what causes you to make encrypted communications with Russian government officials, as Chapman was caught doing by the FBI.

Even more conservative media is trying to figure out — but what's in it for Russia here? This is all open-source data. Do they really have to spend all this money and make people do all these goofy tradecraft stuff just to find out what Obama thinks about nuclear weapons? Of course, Obama doesn't give press conferences, but he doesn't have to — he has the Huffington Post and a lot of the lefty blogosphere and the establishment liberal Sovietology/Russianology circuit to applaud his moves with Russia.

Of course we can go on trying to parse what the FBI and SVR were up to with this strange, where people trained and hardened in spy activities are suddenly tripped up by a ginger running to the police with a fake passport after calling her KGB dad. Chapman's lawyer Robert Baum has seized on this incident as the chief piece of exonerating evidence for her — a real spy wouldn't panic, and wouldn't rush into the arms of the enemy – but if she felt she had been "made" or discovered, would fail to show up, of course, but also try to leave town. Funny that the FBI could pick up her fake nonce cell phone bag and receipt with "99 Fake Street," yet the Brooklyn detention center apparently couldn't remove her cell phone so that she was still using it and speaking to her ex-husband (so he claims). That doesn't track — the NYPD routinely take all your belongings when you are arrested and you are simply not allowed to use a cell phone even if you were in court waiting to be arraigned — a guard would be all over you immediately.

All these mysteries can be gazed at forever, along with Anna's Facebook and Linked in links, especially if some real news agency applies basic journalist skills to this task, but the trail is growing cold, and the friends are obviously in defensive mode now and not going to say much (unless paid to do so by the tabs).

So it's important to look at this from another "hidden in plain sight" sort of angle, which is this: Mission Accomplished. The intended effect was had, and now we will see it play out in spades.

It's sometimes useful to say about Russia that the actual effect of something might be the reason why it was done, even as people look for all kinds of crafty and cunning motives and switchbacks and maneuvers.

Steven Shenfield the British Russian specialist was one of the very few who explained that the Litvinenko poisoning case was about a simple matter: the Kremlin saying to the UK, "Look, we are going to use a method that is so big and bad to kill this guy that it will leave you with absolutely no doubt as to who did this because only we could have the plutonium, even though of course it will be endlessly speculated about — but you'll know, won't you."

So what is that *actually* happened with this case so far aside from the head-scratching and ogling of the pictures?

o The New York Times City Room has ridiculed the entire thing and other reporters have found it all to be like a sitcom; the political coverage has said there are "no secrets to share" and stopped covering it; they shut down comments on the articles pretty fast, too, after accepting a bunch and highlighting those that hew to the line that this is merely a coldwar throwback that won't bother the reset, is ridiculous, or a sign that we need to actually feel sorry for Russia.

o The Russians are absolutely furious and insisting that this is all a set-up by certain cold-warrior remnants still clinging to power in the U.S. who want to undermine Obama (the U.S. liberal media says this too)

o Or the Russians have been absolutely furious and said this is bumbling and incompetence by their own creaking spy agency which is out of touch with the modern realities

o Mike Arrington, the leading American tech blogger with the most or one of the most trafficked tech publications on the Internet has made an enormous joke out of the spies and completely discounted that they are anything serious whatsoever — there's nothing to see here, move along. He's even LOL'd at my comment urging him to go further.

o Peter Lavelle, the odious pro-Kremlin propagandist has said this is a distraction, a blip that won't bother the reset, and hinted that Russia will come up soon with a case that will show U.S. espionage

o millions of Americans posting on web forums and news sites have laughed at the incompetence of the Russians and/or the pointlessness of the FBI — they all believe absolutely fervently that there is nothing to get from our country that isn't already on the Internet in open sources. The old "the secret is there is no secret" story.

o Anna Chapman's Facebook friends, near or far, see this as unfair, unjust, irrelevant, or even sinister on the part of the FBI.

o AMBAR founder and president Anna Dvornikova (and Anna Chapman FB friend) who led the $60 billion delegation to Russia from Silicon Valley has said nothing. I'll be she knows more than a lot of people about this story, which she probably hopes fervently will blow over.

So what is the "message" that all this *intended effect* shouting to us, like a big slogan on the Moscow River by the Kremlin, in place of that old sign that used to say 'COMMUNISM IS SOVIET POWER PLUS ELECTRIFICATION OF THE WHOLE COUNTRY"

The sign now could say:

'EURASIANISM IS SKOLKOVO (SILICON VALLEY) PLUS INTERNETIZATION OF THE WHOLE COUNTRY"

See how much more effective the Russian tech city will be when multiplied by the top American companies who are buying into Skolkovo?  Cisco has announced a $1 billion, MIT is in, Intel is in, others in the "$60 billion delegation" will be following suit.

And this will be a deal that is based on what both the Kremlin as well as our own Silicon Valley's fast social media empire both like best: modernization without democratization. Technical progress without political freedom (except for themselves). It's a conscious deal by the Obama administration to help Russia modernization — but without any preconditions or quid pro quos except…Russia's supposed support in sanctions against Iran.

The 30,000 plus Russian programmers and coders and tech start-up help sprinkled throughout California and other tech states are like a Russian colony in America. But unlike the past emigre communities of mainly Soviet Jews who experienced discrimination (the math faculties had quotas limiting Jews) and did not feel a kinship to the Russian government when they left — and were forced to adapt to their new homeland because they couldn't easily go back — this colony moves back and forth easily, tends to be Russian Orthodox or secural-leftist in views, and supportive of the Russian state. They don't view themselves as having emigrated or as particularly having suffered. And Medvedev, in fact, when he met with their leading representatives, doesn't see his job as wooing them back, but as having them and Russians in Russia participate in a global economy through the Skolkovo project — that is of course dominated by the Russian state. That's in fact how he describes it (contrary to some U.S. media portraying him as "trying to woo them back" — in fact, when pointedly asked by one Russian expat in Palo Alto whether the nanny state could help her with expenses she incurred already shuttling back and forth between countries, Medvedev demurred and said that by investing in companies, companies themselves will have the means to make decisions about who they want to hire and fund.

Medvedev in fact was at great pains to show that programmers earn the same in Moscow or Palo Alto, and some of his fanboyz in the cafe meeting in Palo Alto were on hand to say that they went back to Russia now, that it had become a better place to live. (The English-language version of the president's page carries only this truncated account, but still highlights the role of the 30-35 year old programmers in Silicon Valley out of the 500-600,000 Russians living in California.)

Mike Arrington can be as cynically outrageous as he is on the moral question of Russian espionage not only because he thinks it's all absurd, and there's nothing to spy on, but because he likely sees a strategic advantage in Silicon Valley making common cause with the Kremlin for the sake of big IT's agenda.

Ultimately, this is Snowcrash, the futuristic novel of a virtual world which inspired the makers of Second Life, and which features the United States as something diminished and weak, that is sort of like a glorified post office with some roads still under its control, as huge chunks of it have been broken off by mafias and transnational corporations. Neal Stephenson, the author, doesn't seem to have considered that California could be broken off and joined to Kremlin, Inc. but that's the kind of scenario one can see as a defacto if not de jure reality in decades to come.

The transient nomadic class of geeks in Russia — or anywhere — India, China, Brazil, the U.S. — don't feel loyalty to companies or countries, they only feel loyalty to their tribe of technologists. These people are hugely arrogant and feel themselves immensely superior to the laymen who don't know how to work the insides of code and computers. If this class of people are an unbearable bunch in the U.S., they are tempered by various structures of civil society that bring some accountability to them (like the court system attempting to adjudicate Limewire or Google in the Viacom case.) In Russia, the amalgam of vlast' — state power — and the state-owned industries or semi-state-owned companies involved with IT is unbeatable; merged with big American IT, they are a megaforce that could potentially control what in fact are now the "countries" of Facebook or Twitter. DST, the Russian oligarch's firm, owns a big chunk of Facebook, that's only the start.

The question is whether the human rights community and others concerned about the appalling human rights issues of Russia — suppression of media, killing of journalists, deaths in detention — can persuade any of these new media and IT giants and their new Russian friends to care about these issues. Of course, you can't look to Arrington for this kind of morality — such geeks acquired it on China only after Google set the tone standing up the Chinese government when its own technical interests — encroachment on its servers — became at issue — and it's already showing signs of caving.

I do think that judging from the Russian tech del (#rustechdel) in which the Twitter devs and ebay founders and such took part, there will be found people of conscience who will try to find a way to raise the appalling human rights problems
of Russia with their counterparts. But like other business moguls who made common cause with the Soviet Union and the men in the Kremlin, they will believe that commerce itself and prosperity that it is supposed to bring will be the tide that raises the democracy boat.