A federal judge in Omaha has ordered a woman and her father to pay $120,000 for bugging a teddy bear so they could spy on her ex-husband.
The judge ruled that Dianna Divingnzzo and Sam Divingnzzo violated wiretapping laws from January to June 2008.
Court documents say Dianna Divingnzzo put a recording device inside her daughter’s teddy bear in an attempt to gather information for the divorced couple’s custody case. A state judge has ruled the recordings couldn’t be used in court.
The ex-husband, William Lewton, and five others recorded by the teddy bear filed a federal lawsuit in 2009. A jury trial had been set for April, but the judge granted the plaintiffs’ request for summary judgment. Each was awarded $20,000.
CLEVELAND – The threat of foreign espionage seemingly disappeared with the Cold War. But there is a new spy game in town.
“Now you’re talking about economic espionage and that is one of the biggest threats to national security that we have,” said Brad Beman, head of the counter intelligence unit for the Cleveland branch of the FBI.
Beman warns that today’s spies are just as interested in the office computer as government secrets.
“Other countries that are not necessarily friendly to the United States are gaining out technology and gaining an edge potentially over us,” Beman said.
Some of the most dangerous spies don’t work for foreign governments, but for local companies. Employees motivated by revenge, money or patriotism are betraying company secrets, according to the FBI.
At Lubrizol in Brecksville, a disgruntled employee, Kyung Kim, sold trade secrets to a competitor in his native South Korea two years ago in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Another South Korean native, Kue Sang Chun, a former researcher at NASA Glenn, has admitted to using his credentials to acquire high tech infrared technology for another company to send to a company in his homeland.
Eric Vanderburg, an expert in information security at JurInnov, a Cleveland company that investigates corporate espionage, said theft of trade secrets is a more significant in Cleveland than most realize and happens more often than companies care to admit. Some foreign and domestic companies looking for an edge over the competition hire social engineers.
“A social engineer is a person who’s going to use persuasion to get you to divulge information or perform some action for them,” Vanderburg said.
Social engineers scour the Internet looking for someone to manipulate or even blackmail into divulging company secrets, making the coworker in the next cubicle or the neighbor next door a spy. But local companies aren’t the only targets of economic espionage.
“A lot of our research’s conducted at the university level and it’s unclassified research, which means that it’s much less protected and it’s easier for people to get access to it,” Beman said.
Copyright 2011 Scripps Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The deepening riddle over a break-in allegedly involving South Korean intelligence officials presents diplomatic embarrassment to the country and threatens to foil its attempt to seal an export deal.
It was reported earlier this week that three unidentified people who broke into a hotel room of visiting Indonesian presidential envoys last week were actually officials at South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS).
The intruders intruded into the hotel room in downtown Seoul in an apparent attempt to steal laptops and fled after being walked in on by a member of the Indonesian delegation.
The Indonesian delegation, led by Indonesia’s coordinating economic minister Hatta Rajasa, was visiting Seoul last week at the invitation of President Lee Myung-bak. The delegates, six of whom are ministerial-level officials, asked for support of the South Korean government and local firms for their major economic projects.
Lee pledged the country’s active participation in the Indonesia Economic Development Corridors (IEDCs), mostly focused on developing Indonesian industries and building infrastructure, saying he will seek a reciprocal, “win-win cooperation strategy.”
The attempted theft, however, presented an unexpected hurdle in the growing rapport between South Korea and Indonesia, with the NIS becoming a lightning rod for criticism for what appears to be its bungled intelligence project.
The agency also has become something of a laughing stock — the three intruders, if they were indeed NIS officials, were far from professionals. Police have said the suspects returned to the room to give back the laptops, and were filmed by a CCTV camera at the hotel.
The NIS has a history of causing a diplomatic row for its activities. Espionage attempts of a South Korean official based in Libya upset Libyan officials last year, leading Seoul to replace its top envoy to the country.
Despite the intelligence agency’s repeated denial, speculation runs high that the NIS head, Won Se-hoon, has already tendered resignation to the president for causing diplomatic embarrassment.
“This incident did an irreparable damage to South Korea’s international reputation. The country will be repeatedly embarrassed for this incident,” a senior official at the main opposition Democratic Party said Tuesday at a party meeting.
“The government should get to the bottom of the incident and immediately fire the head of the National Intelligence Service to restore its tainted reputation,” the official said.
Indonesia, on its part, has officially asked South Korea to look into the case. Nicolas T Dammen, Indonesian Ambassador to South Korea, visited the foreign ministry in Seoul Monday to ask for confirmation of the alleged involvement of NIS officials. The foreign ministry said it plans to notify Indonesia as soon as local reports are confirmed.
Dong-a Ilbo newspaper here reported the NIS will likely take disciplinary action against the three officials implicated in the incident and express regret to Indonesia to placate the country.
Local media also say the president’s efforts to clinch a major defense deal with Indonesia have met a challenge with the botched espionage attempt.
South Korea has been seeking to sell T-50 Golden Eagle trainers to Indonesia, after it failed to sell them to Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.
JoongAng Ilbo newspaper, another leading daily here, quoted an unnamed senior official as saying that the export deal with Indonesia looked poised to be sealed before the incident took place.
Ashton Kutcher, who traveled to technology conference TED this week, has been punk’d. That’s what happens when you hang out on the same wireless network as a bunch of technology geeks — who probably don’t even need hacking-made-easy-tool Firesheep to eavesdrop on Internet sessions on unencrypted Web pages.
Kutcher’s over six million followers are now going to be aware of Twitter’s lack of security thanks to these two tweets Wednesday night:
The hacker who likely accessed Kutcher’s account through a shared wireless network at TED2011 in Long Beach, California, tweeted, “This account is not secure. Dude, where’s my SSL?” followed by “This is for those young protesters around the world who deserve not to have their Facebook Twitter accounts hacked like this.”
This security problem with Twitter got widespread attention last year, due to the release of Firesheep — a program that made hacking a fellow wireless network user’s account on non-encrypted sites easy. Pressure was put on companies like Facebook and Twitter to make their websites “https” (or encrypted) by default. Facebook has since made it an option for users to enable that feature (though it’s still not a default). Twitter also has a https option, though it’s also not the default.
Back in November 2010 during the Firesheep controversy, Twitter told me: “Protecting users and providing a safe Twitter experience is incredibly important to us. We’re actively exploring avenues for increasing user safety that would address this issue.”
We’ll see if the hacking of a high-profile user’s account makes Twitter explore those avenues more quickly.
Update (March 3): Twitter’s PR account tweeted late Wednesday night, “Users can use Twitter via HTTPS: http://t.co/q84H6K3. We’ve long been working on offering HTTPS as a user setting will share more soon.”
(To avoid @aplusk’s fate, make sure you do your tweeting at https://twitter.com/.)
(CNN) — A Navy intelligence specialist was charged Thursday in an espionage sting in which he allegedly sold documents marked “Top Secret” and “Secret” to an undercover FBI agent, according to the Navy.
The charges against Spc. 2nd Class Bryan Minkyu Martinare are for attempting to forward classified information to a person not authorized to receive such information, according to the Navy statement.
A court-martial date has not been set.
Martin is charged with four specifications of attempted espionage and 11 specifications of mishandling classified information, the Navy said.
All charges stemmed from incidents that allegedly occurred while Martin was assigned to the Expeditionary Combat Readiness Center at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek – Fort Story in Virginia, the Navy said.
Martin was apprehended by special agents of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and the FBI on December 1, in Fayetteville, North Carolina, after he was suspected of attempting to sell classified information.
Martin is currently being held in Naval Brig Norfolk in Virginia.
According to an affidavit filed in U.S. District Court last December, Martin, 22, met with an FBI undercover agent posing as an intelligence officer of an unnamed foreign country three times at a motel in Fayetteville, near the Fort Bragg Army base, where he had been working since September.
The court documents alleged he was paid a total of $3,500 in cash, and he handed over documents marked “Top Secret” and “Secret” and signed receipts for two of the payments.
“Investigators have a high level of confidence that no classified information was actually delivered to any unauthorized persons,” an NCIS statement last December said.
The Navy did not release details of how Martin came to the attention of the investigators or how he allegedly made contact with the agent posing as a spy.
