Maria Butina, who was accused by the federal prosecutors of being a secret agent for the Russian government, was a graduate student at American University working on a sensitive project involving cybersecurity, Fox News informed.
Her college assignment was to gather data on the cyberdefenses of U.S. nonprofit organizations that champion media freedom and human rights. The collected data could help the groups plug important vulnerabilities, but also would be of interest to the Russian government.
Russians previously had in their sights at least two of the groups that she and other students interacted with.
Butina was part of the project under the tutelage of a respected professor who advised the State Department on cybersecurity issues. It was carried out for the nonprofit group Internews, which works with the U.S. government to boost the free flow of information in dangerous parts of the world and has drawn Russian ire with some of its programs in Russia and neighboring countries.
The group confirmed Butina’s involvement and a broad description of what the project involved. A lawyer for Butina did not respond to a request for a comment.
Butina’s project raised few eyebrows before her arrest, despite the fact that news reports already had posed questions about her rapid rise from selling furniture in Siberia and her ties with Kremlin officials.
As part of the project, a small group of students led by Butina was provided with a list of Internews partners working on human rights and press freedom issues for research purposes only, with the understanding that they should not be contacting some of the groups anyway, according to people involved in the project who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to describe their work.
An individual who has worked on U.S. programs in Ukraine told the AP that after Butina’s arrest he was briefed by U.S. officials who voiced their concerns that two Internews programs in Ukraine – dealing with media freedom and cybersecurity, and funded by the State Department – may have been revealed to Russian intelligence and may be at risk due to Butina’s student work.
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