In addition, saying that

> someone approached a low level employee at the MEAF who turned over a USB stick with the governments org charts and payroll records in exchange for their kids getting a full ride to a prestigious foreign university

is an oversimplification on multiple levels:

1. Low-level employees typically don't have access to sensitive information.

2. With human intelligence, there is always a risk that the person you (e.g. Israel) are in touch with (e.g. an Iranian officer) who pretends to be a "double agent" (e.g. leaking info to Israel), is in fact a "triple agent" (e.g. actually working for Iran to mislead Israel).

3. You can send your kids to foreign universities but not your siblings, your parents, your wife's family, and so on... Some of your beloved ones are almost certain to suffer the consequences of your actions. High treason is no joke.

You would think, but when I was interning (well, it was a paid internship) for a company, I was fixing an excel spreadsheet with payroll information for an entire department of a few hundred people. Not the best piece of "opsec", but when you are in a hurry (pay was due in a couple of days) and most people are on vacations "hey the junior kid can probably fix it, he seems fine" is a way too common approach. And it is fine - sometimes for a long time. Until it isn't.

Snowden was a contract Sharepoint admin. He was on the absolute bottom of the org chart.

If there are spies in foreign countries going around offering life-changing sums of money for USB sticks, which people are accepting

is it not also plausible that folks at google/samsung/apple/aws/cloudflare/microsoft are getting offered life-changing sums of money for leaving their work-from-home laptop unattended for 5 minutes?

From what I've seen with bribes, it doesn't even take life-changing amounts of money.

One thing to keep in mind is those people are already paid quite well. What life can you offer them that they don't already have? Blackmail is a likelier angle.