Globalization and the internet have enabled countries to be all up in each other's business like never before. It might seem odd for the United States, who was caught snooping on German Chancellor Angela Merkel's text messages, to say boo about someone else spying on them. But let us not forget that stalking someone online bears the same relationship to regular stalking as watching someone strip online bears to being in a strip club: It's much more common and leagues away from the real thing.
Russia stalks us IRL like they're about to boil the nation's rabbits. Take, for example, the Illegals Program: a group of spies so incredible, their story inspired the second-greatest spy drama in recent memory, The Americans (the absolute top spy drama in recent memory is the fabricated fight between Taylor Swift and Kanye West). The Illegals were highly trained sleeper agents capable of living under deep cover for decades at a time.
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Some were in so deep they had children without breaking cover. Russia is so obsessed with us it sent people to live with us for so long that their own kids had no idea of their true identity.
The FBI arrested 11 alleged members of the program as recently as 2010. That means Russia had deep-cover spies lurking in the U.S. long enough to both be excited for 28.8k dial-up service and to be bored by The Social Network. That takes a crazy amount of dedication and resources. And when I say "crazy," I mean that literally, because it seems as though they weren't even gathering valuable information. Russia risked an international scandal and years in prison for its top operatives just to send them around to hang out and see what was going on with us.
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