Two Russian Embassy staff in Ottawa have left Canada in the wake of spying allegations against a Canadian naval officer in Halifax, but there’s little else that’s clear about the murky espionage case.
Intelligence experts and those in close contact with the embassy disagree on whether any Russian diplomats engage in spying, leaving Canadians to try to piece together what bits are public.
Initial media reports said up to four Russian Embassy staff had been removed from a list of embassy and diplomatic staff recognized by Canada. CBC News has confirmed that two have had their credentials revoked since news broke of the naval officer’s arrest, while two diplomats left the country a month or more before the arrest this week of Canadian Sub.-Lt. Jeffrey Paul Delisle.
Another report pointed to two other staff who are no longer accredited to be in Canada. It’s not clear which of the staff have been expelled over the spying allegations.
Konstantin Kolpakov, a former aide to the ambassador, was scheduled to leave Canada on Dec. 25 because his posting was over, and had a send-off attended by diplomats in Ottawa mid-month.
Kolpakov and Fedorchatenko were known to circulate around the diplomatic scene in the capital, attending functions with other foreign representatives, Canadian diplomats and journalists.
Two others, Mikhail Nikiforov and Tatiana Steklova, were listed as administrative and technical staff until Jan. 19 but are no longer on a list of accredited diplomats on the website of the Department of Foreign Affairs.
A report in the Russian media Friday quoted the country’s foreign ministry as saying it was surprised to see Canadian media reports about the expulsions. The report says the embassy staff left at the end of 2011 because their rotations were ending.
A woman who answered the phone at the Russian Embassy in Ottawa refused to comment on the departures.
Public Safety Minister Vic Toews refused to comment on a national security matter, but did say: “I’m not aware of why those individuals left Canada.”
Russian diplomatic staff usually do two- or three-year postings at the embassy before returning home or going on to a posting in another country.
Delisle, 40, was arrested in the Halifax area last weekend. He faces two charges under the Security of Information Act that deal with communicating information that could harm Canada’s interests, according to court documents.
Doug Thomas, a former defence official who now represents a Russian military equipment exporter in Canada, said the vast majority of diplomats collect information, while a small number may pick it up “through alternative means.” Thomas doesn’t believe anyone at the Russian Embassy, with whom he’s worked since 2006, is involved in spying.
“If you were going to run one of these operations, the last thing, personally, I’d think you’d want to do is run it out of the Russian Embassy on Charlotte Street in downtown Ottawa. You’d want to run it remotely,” he said.
But the Russians “are among the world’s biggest spies,” said Wesley Wark, an expert on security and intelligence at the University of Ottawa. “Spying is just in the DNA of the Russian state.”
Wark said the Russians are known to be aggressive, flooding their diplomatic missions with intelligence personnel posing as diplomatic personnel. He said the country, if it uses spying effectively, could close research and development gaps. They may also want access to Canadian communications with the U.S. and the U.K. or other allies.
“We [Canadians] tend to underrate ourselves as an intelligence target. We’ve long been an intelligence target, partly because of who we are. We’re a NATO country, we’re a Western country, we’re a high-tech country, we engage in a lot of military operations and we’re close to the United States and close allies,” Wark said.
Geoffrey O’Brian, a former director general of counter-intelligence at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, said there’s so little information available that it’s hard to assess the situation.
“Because the government has chosen not to talk about this, it’s frankly in some ways a recipe for speculation,” O’Brian said.
Many questions remain, particularly from a counter-espionage angle, O’Brian said.
“Are there more [people gathering information]? How was he recruited, if indeed he was? How was it run? Who else was involved in quote-unquote handling him? All of those questions.”
Two of the charges against Delisle are for breach of trust and communicating to a foreign entity information the government wants to safeguard, and cover July 7, 2007, to Jan. 13, 2012. A third charge is for trying to communicate to a foreign entity information the government wants to safeguard, and covers Jan. 10 to 13, 2012, after at least one of the Russian diplomats left Canada.
Defence Minister Peter MacKay described the case Tuesday as a matter of national security because of the charges involved, but would not discuss specifics at that time, including whether the foreign entity in question was Russia.
“Given the early stages of the proceedings, there is really nothing more that can be said,” he told a news conference in Ottawa.
The minister sought to reassure Canadians that allegations of espionage revolving around the Halifax naval intelligence officer would not affect the country’s reputation among other NATO members.
“Our allies have full confidence in Canada, full confidence in our information,” MacKay said.
Carrier IQ, the controversial software company suspected of spying on over 150 million smartphone users, is opening its kimono and admitting to some mistakes. However, it’s also pushing back hard against the most aggressive allegations of privacy violations, including but not limited to a recent speculation that the company has been supplying the Federal Bureau of Investigation with confidential user data. In a 19-page-document riddled with bullet-points and book-ended by charts, the company provides it’s most comprehensive apparently honest explanation of exactly what Carrier IQ software collects, stores and sends to mobile carriers. In a corresponding QA with AllThingsD’s John Paczkowski, two of the company’s top executives trudged through the alleged privacy violations — they blamed the carriers for the worst ones — and sounded hurt by the scrutiny. “Our world has been turned upside down,” Â Carrier IQ’s chief executive Larry Lenhart said. “We love what we do, and we have a lot of passion for it. And to see it misunderstood like this has been painful.”
Related: The Latest in the Widening Carrier IQ Phone Spying Scandal
Let’s start with the good news.
Carrier IQ is not an F.B.I. operative. Carrier IQ is denying haven given data to the F.B.I. after a report from the government transparency site MuckRock about the agency’s potential involvement drummed up a decent amount of anxiety this week. Long story short, the Feds denied a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for information about Carrier IQ. The F.B.I. denied the request with a letter explaining that the  “material … requested is located in an investigative file which is exempt from disclosure.” The letter points to a section of the United States Code that exempts the Bureau from disclosing information that might be “used for law enforcement purposes.” This led the somewhat misleading headline: “FBI: Carrier IQ files used for ‘law enforcement purposes'” Not so, the company says. “We have never provided any data to the FBI. If approached by a law enforcement agency, we would refer them to the network operators because the diagnostic data collected belongs to them and not Carrier IQ,” a company spokesperson told The Atlantic Wire in an email.
Related: Reasons Not to Panic About the Carrier IQ Controversy
Carrier IQ collects data but mobile carriers use it. A number of the specific denials Carrier IQ makes in its explainer were already mounted about a week ago, when the controversy was really infuriating privacy advocates. Coward explained to The Atlantic Wire that his company does gather a lot of data but doesn’t actually log keystrokes, as was alleged in the YouTube video by Trevor Eckart that blew the lid off the scandal at the end of November. Carrier IQ apparently consulted with Eckhart for the new document and explains in depth what the code that showed up in Eckhart’s video does:
We cannot comment on all handset manufacturer implementations of Android. Our investigation of Trevor Eckhart’s video indicates that location, key presses, SMS and other information appears in log files as a result of debug messages from pre-production handset manufacturer software. Specifically it appears that the handset manufacturer software’s debug capabilities remained “switched on” in devices sold to consumers.
In other words, if you’re being spied on, it’s Carrier IQ’s customers, the mobile carriers, who doing the spying. If anybody is storing your data and potentially sharing it with law enforcement agencies, it’s them, Carrier IQ says. The report does add, “Carrier IQ is not a keylogger and no customer has asked Carrier IQ to capture key strokes.”
Related: Yes, Even iPhones Can Spy on You, Too
Now for the bad news.
Carrier IQ did accidentally collect a bunch of text messages. Thanks to the scrutiny, Carrier IQ realized that it was collecting some data that included “collection of layer 3 radio messages in which SMS messages may have been embedded.” This contradicts what Coward told us recently. The exact quote: “We would not record or transmit the contents of that SMS.” The report details how a bug caused the collection of text message data and a spokesperson told us that “a fix is in place.” Carrier IQ also claims that the text messages “were not decoded or made available in human readable form to Carrier IQ, its customers or any third party.”  While we appreciate the transparency, privacy champions will find it a little unsettling to hear Carrier IQ admit to collecting private data — even if it was happening accidentally.
Related: Your Smartphone Is Spying on You
This certainly isn’t the last we’ll hear from Carrier IQ. The company’s executives are set to meet with Senator Al Franken this week, to review the document (embedded in full below) and answer more questions. Meanwhile, Congressman Edward Markey has called for a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) probe into the matter, and an investigation is already getting started in Europe over the company’s data collection practice. Again, it does sound like Carrier IQ’s executives are pretty sorry for all of the confusion and controversy. Still no word from the mobile carriers, but it looks like they’ll have their day in court, too.
HORRIFIED: Judith Beck was alarmed to find out she was under surveillance when awaiting compensatiojn for an injury. Picture: Annette Dew. Source: The Sunday Mail (Qld)
A PRIVATE investigation firm has been branded “Scrooge” after offering to spy on compensation claimants over Christmas.
Surveillance Central at Toowong in Brisbane has emailed law firms offering “festive season surveillance” on injury compensation claimants.
The offer is aimed at lawyers representing insurers or firms sued for compensation. “It’s Scrooge-like,” said personal injury lawyer Ian Brown of Maurice Blackburn.
The Surveillance Central email says: “The holiday period often provides some tremendous surveillance opportunities.”
The investigator has offered to get footage of claimants putting up Christmas lights, going shopping and to parties and doing yard clean-ups.
Camping, fishing and beach trips, excursions to theme parks and holiday preparations also offered great opportunities for surveillance, according to the firm.
Mr Brown said often the footage was never shown in court because it proved that people were telling the truth about the physical effect of their injuries.
Sunshine Coast woman Judith Beck felt horrified after she found she had been under video surveillance over several years in the lead-up to an injury compensation case after a car accident.
When Ms Beck’s lawyer forced an insurer to reveal the video footage of her, which showed her claim was genuine, she saw she even had been filmed while walking inside her home.
Rod Trevor of Surveillance Central declined to comment.
Investec LOYAL’s thrilling Sydney to Hobart line honours win is under threat after its crew was accused of using an ABC helicopter pilot to spy on rival Wild Oats XI.
The race committee, and not the runner-up, has lodged a protest against the stunning victory – the fourth closest in race history – under a rule which polices outside assistance to boats.
LOYAL was on Wednesday night declared the provisional winner after its captain Anthony Bell was handed the protest documents on crossing the finish line in Hobart.
But the news, delivered by Cruising Yacht Club of Australia Commodore Garry Linacre, stunned the thousands lining the shore around Constitution dock as LOYAL lingered for close to an hour before docking.
A hearing will take place at the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania at 10am (AEDT) on Thursday.
The race committee, chaired by Tim Cox, alleges the incident occurred at 6.30am on Tuesday, 30 nautical miles south of Merimbula on the NSW south coast.
The protest papers described the incident as: “Audio recording of conversation between ABC helicopter and Investec LOYAL.
“Crewman from Investec LOYAL seeking information from the helicopter of the sail plan in use on Wild Oats XI.
“In particular, information as to whether Wild Oats XI was flying a trysail.”
Linacre said the helicopter pilot would be a witness at the hearing, to be heard by an international panel, and if the protest was upheld the sanctions could include time penalties and even disqualification.
Bell attempted to explain the situation on reaching the shore, saying it was a misunderstanding involving an ABC interview with crewman Michael Coxon, who is also the chief executive of a company that supplies the sails to Wild Oats.
“It was the ABC who actually asked for the interview off us, it wasn’t actually the other way round,” Bell said.
“It was just a question by Michael saying, `oh geez, are they all right and I hope they haven’t broken their mainsail’.
“These things cost a quarter-of-a-million dollars and of course he would be concerned as to his business reputation.”
Bell said he was confident the victory would be confirmed by the panel.
“Michael (Coxon) is probably one of Australia’s most decorated yachtsman and he’s never had a skerrick in his whole career of any protest for improper behaviour,” he said.
“It is a bit anti-climactic.
“One thing that can’t be taken away from us, no matter what happens, no matter what’s said, is we sailed one hell of a race out there.”
LOYAL fought off a thrilling, last-ditch attacking onslaught from Wild Oats on the Derwent River to claim what would have been a first line honours victory for the boat.
Still eyeballing each other as they hit the river, LOYAL saw off some desperate manoeuvring from the five-time winner and race record holder to cross the finish line at 7.14pm (AEDT).
In one of the tightest finishes in the race’s history, LOYAL won with a margin of 3 minutes 8 seconds in a time of 2 days, 6 hours, 14 minutes and 18 seconds.
The ABC posted audio of the conversation between Coxon and its helicopter crew on its website.
Coxon is heard to say: “Can you confirm, does Wild Oats have their trysail up? … What colour is the mainsail they’ve got up?”
He is answered that both sails are grey and replies: “Copy that. That’s great news. Thanks, bye.”
The result of the Sydney to Hobart yacht race is in doubt amid allegations of spying by the winning team.
Supermaxi Investec Loyal beat the favourite Wild Oats XI by just three minutes but the result was immediately placed under protest by the race committee.
It is alleged Investec Loyal used a television helicopter to spy on Wild Oats XI and thus contravened rule 41, which refers to the use of outside assistance.
The protest will be heard at 2300 GMT on Wednesday and centres on an audio recording of a conversation between Investec and an ABC helicopter.
A crewman for Investec can apparently be heard requesting information from the helicopter about Wild Oats’ sail plan.
Investec ovetook Wild Oats mid-afternoon on the final day and crossed the winning line first 2 days, 6 hours, 14 minutes and 18 seconds after leaving Sydney.
It was one of the closest finishes in the race’s history but the seven-second gap between Condor of Bermuda and Apollo in 1982 still holds that title.
