Elliot Doxer of Brookline agreed this week to plead guilty to charges he tried to funnel information about trade practices and employees at Cambridge Internet company Akamai to the Israel government, in part to help Israel, in part to make money, and in part to get information on the whereabouts of his child, taken overseas by his ex-wife.
Doxer now awaits sentencing in US District Court for economic espionage.
According to an FBI affidavit in the case, Doxer used a "dead drop" somewhere in the Boston area to exchange information with what he thought was an Israeli agent for some 18 months, starting in 2007. Although Doxer, at the time a Newton resident, did not provide classified or detailed security information, he did turn over information a competitor could use to poach customers or employees of the Cambridge-based Akamai, which provides network services to speed up delivery of Web content, the FBI says.
Doxer initiated the process by sending e-mail to the Israeli consulate in Boston that began:
I am a Jewish-American who lives in Boston. I know you are always looking for information and I am offering the little I may have.
The FBI does not say how it came into possession of the e-mail, although the Washington Post had reported Israel might have ratted Doxer out, in part because it may have suspected he was actually an FBI plant.
The FBI did say it got involved in part because Doxer used his Gmail account and Google does not have e-mail servers in Massachusetts, which means Doxer's message had to cross state lines twice - into and out of Massachusetts - to get from his home or office to the Park Square consulate, in violation of federal
According to the FBI affidavit, over the course of the 18 months - Doxer made several requests for money and for information about his child and his ex-wife, about whom he wrote he would not mind if something bad happened to her.
