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Probably wouldn't even need 5 Million. According the the PBS article about the 2 US Navy sailors arrested for spying around august of last year one of them was apparently only bribed $10k-15K for the year [1]. I was pretty shocked at first but it made sense that with the financial stress many face in today's market a 10K bribe would go along way and have a high return on investment especially if the potential payoff for a backdoor or zero-day is in the millions [2]

[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/2-u-s-navy-sailors-arr...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_for_zero-day_exploits



>2 US Navy sailors arrested for spying around august of last year one of them was apparently only bribed $10k-15K for the year

This is exactly why investigations for security clearances focus mostly on a person's financial situation: someone who has a lot of debt and shows a pattern of poor financial management, i.e. someone who'd jump at a chance to make an extra measly $10k, is the kind of person they want to avoid giving a high security clearance to, because of incidents exactly like this.

It's a common misconception that clearance holders who sell secrets make a lot of money doing so, and this just isn't the case: it's comparatively small amounts like this. For someone who's deep in debt and desperate, it doesn't take much to buy them.


Even politicians are cheap these days.

It astonishes me that for less than the price of a nice car, what people seem to be able to do.


After Abscam in the late 1970s/early 1980s, one of the quote going expressed surprise not that politicians could be bought, but that they were so cheap.

I cannot find that quote now.




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