Brazil may have been banned from bond work – but not from high-stakes politics. As vice president of field operations for the campaign of the former pizza- company chief executive and top-tier Republican White House wannabe, aides said the operative from northeastern Pennsylvania is part of Cain’s inner circle of five top aides. Another member of that circle, press aide J.D. Gordon, said Brazil is “essential.”
“This is an old and tired story,” said Gordon of Brazil’s ties to the Philadelphia probe. He said he had discussed inquiries from the Daily News with Brazil yesterday. “He was never accused of anything and never targeted.”
Gordon said the 2006 finding by the National Association of Security Dealers that prevented him from associating with its member firms was not important because Brazil never was a registered securities dealer – precisely the reason that the industry watchdog group was probing his work for two mid-Atlantic bond firms.
Brazil’s murky background is sure to add volume to complaints about the quality of Cain’s campaign staff, which has been reeling in recent days from its handling of sexual-harassment allegations, as well as from Cain’s seeming lack of knowledge of foreign-policy issues, including a disastrous, fumbling answer to a question about Libya. Cain, who had been leading in some national polls, has now fallen behind Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich in new surveys.
Brazil’s story is colorful. Until three years ago, the now-aide to a tea-party favorite was a Democrat, known for his ties to the family of that party’s stalwart Hillary Rodham Clinton, the secretary of state.
VANCOUVER
Canadian officials are attending the trial of a Canadian engineer accused of corporate espionage in Indonesia, though the government remains tight-lipped about the extent of its involvement.
In May, Rick van Lee, 63, was accused by his employers — a branch of Asia Pacific Resources International Limited (APRIL Group), one of the largest pulp and paper producers in Southeast Asia — of what they say was illegal copying of sensitive company information.
According to Timothy Inkiriwang, van Lee’s lawyer, the accused and his wife had their car confiscated and on May 31 were placed under house arrest for six weeks, guarded by APRIL’s private security staff in the company’s residential compound in Kerinci, Sumatra.
Inkiriwang believes his client was detained because he didn’t want to sign a new contract, preferring to take a job that would move van Lee back to Vancouver.
APRIL denies preventing the couple from leaving the compound, and say van Lee was collaborating illegally with a competitor.
According to his lawyer, van Lee was transferred July 5 into the custody of Indonesian authorities and charged based on an Indonesian criminal law that prohibits stealing or altering electronic documents belonging to others.
Inkiriwang told the Sun earlier this month that Canadian consular officials were not attending van Lee’s hearings. Since then, a pair of Canadian officials appeared in court on Nov. 14, Inkiriwang said Tuesday.
A spokesman for the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade wouldn’t comment on the matter, but noted Canadian officials in Indonesia are aware of the situation.
“The way we see it, Rick is not getting a fair trial,” Inkiriwang said. “(The injustice) shows by the lack of evidence and the awful handling of the case by the police investigators.” The judges, he said, act as if they are public prosecutors and take part in questioning witnesses directly, including van Lee. “We feel as if we’re opposing the judges, and not the public prosecutor, which we find very unusual and strange.”
The lawyer said police never performed digital forensics on van Lee’s computer, and the defence team fears evidence contained on van Lee’s laptop and external storage devices has not been handled properly by investigators.
“The laptop and USB (drive) . . . wasn’t confiscated from Rick, but from the company,” he said. “The right procedure . . . is that the evidence should be confiscated from the person that owns it,” he said.
APRIL spokeswoman Jamie Menon said they found evidence of several months’ worth of collaboration with a direct competitor by van Lee. That discovery triggered an internal company investigation, which led APRIL to involve the police.
At no point were van Lee and his wife prevented from leaving the compound or meeting with his lawyers, she said.
But, said Inkiriwang, “Rick was not allowed to leave the company’s compound, even during the time when we (his legal team) . . . came to visit him. They (APRIL’s security) escorted us to the hotel inside the complex, and brought Rick and his wife there to meet us. We couldn’t even meet outside of the complex until it (was) time to be interviewed by the police.”
Van Lee, who has suffered a minor stroke and lost 45 pounds while in custody, is slated to appear in court again Thursday, with a verdict expected sometime before Dec. 11.
If convicted, he could face up to eight years in Indonesian prison.
Legislation drafted by Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin to update the 1917 Espionage Act has angered public disclosure advocates who say the proposal would make it harder for federal employees to expose government fraud and abuse.
The bill would clarify a murky area of law to ensure that anyone who publicly leaks classified material could be prosecuted criminally, which is not necessarily the case today. The proposal also would make it illegal for government employees to violate nondisclosure agreements.
Watchdog groups say the measure would make it harder to uncover secret military programs — such as domestic surveillance — because it doesn’t provide protection for whistleblowers and ignores a broadly held view that the Pentagon and other agencies are overzealously classifying material.
“The truth is that not everything that is classified is deserving of protection,” said Steven Aftergood, who tracks intelligence issues for the Federation of American Scientists. “Moldy old secrets from decades past are still classified.”
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GATINEAU, Que. ” Corporate espionage ” ranging from Dumpster diving for industrial secrets to plying vulnerable employees of competitors with booze, drugs and sex in exchange for information — is a common tactic in Canada for companies to get ahead, says a former CSIS spy and private investigator.
Tuesday, at the Canadian Industrial Security Conference, Ron Myles said that Canadian companies often perceive corporate spying and infiltration as something out of Hollywood and insists the amount of cases that are exposed is but a mere fraction of the problem in this country.
“As Canadians, we undervalue our abilities in research and development, we’re a little bit naive in the sense that the rest of the world is doing this (but not in Canada),” Myles said in an interview after presenting to a packed room on the opening day of the two-day conference. “We carry that attitude into our business and I think it costs Canadian businesses quite a bit.
“I don’t think even the tip of the iceberg is showing. (Corporate espionage) is more prevalent in small- and medium- sized companies because they’re often just starting up and don’t have massive (security) budgets.”
Myles, who was a CSIS officer for 13 years before working another 13 years as a private investigator, said a number of methods are used by competing interests in terms of stealing ideas and other intellectual property — noting the technology sector is targeted most.
In addition to rummaging through another company’s trash with the hope of acquiring secrets, he said other, more involved techniques are employed.
Long-term infiltration, by which a person that is compensated by a competing company, lands a job with the target group and feeds information back as trust is gained.
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Android phones, or at least some of them, contain a serious glitch that an attacker could exploit to steal data, eavesdrop on your calls or even wipe your phone clean.
A team of computer science researchers from North Carolina State University discovered the flaw on eight smartphones from HTC, Motorola, Samsung and Google. In their paper, “Systematic Detection of Capability Leaks in Stock Android Smartphones,” the researchers explain that the issue stems from coding bugs, called “capability leaks,” within Android’s permission-based security system.
An attacker that exploits a capability leak on a targeted phone could also obtain a phone’s geo-location data and send premium-rate text messages, all without the victim’s knowledge.
“Several privileged (or dangerous) permissions that protect access to sensitive user data or phone features are unsafely exposed to other apps which do not need to request these permissions for the actual use,” the researchers wrote.
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