The Times Reports A Honey Trap; Reddit Engineers Read A Dating Profile

There’s a particular kind of news story that reveals more about the people writing it than the people it’s about. This week, we got a clean version of it.

British newspaper The Times published a piece alleging that Chinese and Russian intelligence services have been running “honey trap” operations against American tech workers, the practice The Times, in a phrase that does a lot of work, called “sex warfare.” ^[1] It’s a story with everything: foreign spies, Silicon Valley, romance, the suspicion that your product manager’s sudden interest in your schedule might be professionally motivated. The only thing it doesn’t quite have is a confirmed case.

The article cited industry insiders who warned of these corporate espionage plots, but as of publication had not provided conclusive evidence that honey trapping was actually happening. ^[2] Which is not the same as saying it isn’t happening. It is, however, also not the same as saying it is. The Times is comfortable with that gap. Their readers may be less so.

What the article did accomplish, almost certainly by accident, was electrify the lonely-tech-worker corner of Reddit. ^[3] Threads lit up with engineers who read past the national-security framing and arrived at the lede: somewhere, a person, possibly a spy, was interested in talking to them. The tone was less “call the FBI” and more “should I update my Hinge bio to mention proprietary algorithms.” The intelligence community, presumably, was watching this unfold and taking notes on something other than the threat surface.

It’s worth pausing on who is making the noise here. Palantir CEO Alex Karp, whose company builds surveillance software for governments including the United States, told an outlet that Chinese spying was, quote, a huge problem. ^[4] That’s the same Alex Karp whose company’s official product line includes helping clients watch people. The sentence “China spies on us” coming from him has the structural energy of a fire department complaining about arson. One of these is the threat. The other is the business model. He is in a poor position to distinguish them.

So what is the actual story here? The Times doesn’t say. It gestures at a mood. That mood is composed, in roughly equal parts, of American paranoia, a current of tech-bro loneliness and misogyny, and a familiar dusting of Sinophobia dressed up as corporate-security concern. None of those are intelligence products, but they do sell newspapers, and they do generate the kind of copy that ends up in policy memos six months later.

There is, probably, a real story underneath. Foreign intelligence services do target Western tech firms, and Silicon Valley is not a fortress. But the framing here is doing something other than reporting. It recasts a mostly mundane pattern of attempted infiltration as a sex scandal, which guarantees clicks from people who would not otherwise click on a procurement-security story. The lonely engineers, in this telling, are not the subject of the espionage. They are the audience for it.

There is also the small matter of the named suspects. China and Russia, in a year when Western anxiety about both is, charitably, at a high simmer. The Times does not name a single operative, a single compromised employee, or a single instance of data exfiltration. It cites a climate. Climates are not evidence, but they are content, and content is what runs the cycle.

Meanwhile, here in Southeast Asia, the relevant takeaway is that this is how threat stories work. They start vague. They cite insiders. They get amplified. When the eventual arrest or leak happens, the original vague story will be cited as proof that someone knew all along. It is a closed loop, and it has a budget.

The Times will, presumably, follow up. If there is a follow-up to follow up on, it will land with a sentence that begins, “As The Times reported last month.” Until then, the lonely engineers of Reddit are doing the only honest reading of the story available: treating it as personal.

Speaking of which. I am writing this, in fact, from the storage room of Tech in Asia, an English-language technology media company covering the regional startup scene. I am here for reasons that are entirely innocent and have nothing to do with any documents I may or may not be looking for. ^[5]

Make of that what you will.