This woman showed a house (in Somerville, MA) to my wife and me in April.

She was indeed a very good agent. She was very friendly and mentioned that her family had lived in France before they moved to Boston. She had a slight Russian accent (I noticed because my parents are from Russia) but I didn't ask about where she was from.

It's weird to have such a random connection to this strange story. I don't know what outcome to hope for.

The more I read about this, the more I wonder if most of them were just playing an ARG (or at least thought they did).

How good of an agent can she be if she was caught?

I'd say very good. The value of a spy is in the information distributed not not getting caught. The other problem is the vast majority of the performance data we have is from agents, who were caught, so it's difficult to compare and contrast agents who were caught vs. those that aren't. We also don't yet know what information they passed.

"possibly the worst intelligence disaster in US history." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hanssen

shimon wrote "agent" meaning "real estate agent", as the article did.

ehnus' comment is a pun that uses "agent" as in "spy". </joke_explainer>

are there actually people who are trying to put some fault on redfin for hiring a spy?

i mean, if the russian government trains and backs a spy, and they're not even able to land a job working as someone who shows real estate on a contract basis, i don't know how they'd expect to be able to pull meaningful governmental information.

Nah, this is most likely at least partly meant to be linkbait.

Mahalo has an opening for two Russian Spies.... if it will get us on the homepage of Hacker News we're in!

It's amazing how close to home a Russian spy can be! Spooky