The office of Victorian Deputy Premier Peter Ryan is refusing to comment on reports an adviser to the minister has been under surveillance by the police watchdog.
A ministerial adviser to Mr Ryan has been named in reports in The Age and Herald Sun newspapers as a target of surveillance by the Office of Police Integrity (OPI).
Mr Ryan, also Police Minister, is on compassionate leave from parliament and was unable to be contacted on Saturday, but his spokeswoman said the OPI operated without influence by politicians.
“Matters to do with the OPI are strictly matters for the OPI,” she said.
“They have the powers they have, they do as they do, we are outside of that process,” the spokeswoman said.
The OPI on Friday admitted they had Sir Ken Jones, one of Victoria’s most senior policeman, under surveillance following complaints.
A media report had earlier revealed the surveillance was underway, and Sir Ken’s wife and supporters had also been targeted.
Sir Ken had a rocky relationship with the police Chief Commissioner, Simon Overland.
Mr Overland forced Sir Ken to go on leave three months early after Sir Ken announced his resignation in May.
Victoria’s Police Association has said Mr Overland used his friendship with OPI’s deputy director, Paul Jevtovic, to influence the OPI to commence the investigation.
It is thought the ministerial adviser allegedly bugged by the OPI was a supporter of Sir Ken.
Resurrecting a sleepy small-town newspaper is a tough job. But it’s even tougher when Fox News chairman Roger Ailes uses the News Corp. security detail to spy on you. According to Gawker’s John Cook and Hamilton Nolan, Ailes has been doing just that to his staffers at the Putnam County News and Recorder, one of two small Hudson Valley-area newspapers owned by Ailes and his wife Elizabeth, near where they planned to retire. Cook and Nolan write “more than 10 full-time and freelance staffers have left the Ailes’ Putnam County papers in the last 10 months,” including former News and Recorder staffer Joe Lindsey, a former Weekly Standard editorial assistant brought in personally by Ailes to turn the paper around. After Lindsey quit in January, he was driving to get lunch when he noticed a black Navigator following him. Suspicious, he eventually “got a look at the driver, who was a News Corporation security staffer that Lindsley happened to know socially. Lindsley continued on his way and later called the driver to ask if he was following him. The answer was yes, at Ailes’ direction.”
In addition to the car incident, there were other indications the Aileses were tracking the movements of their staffers. In March, Roger Ailes “confronted the three staffers and accused them of badmouthing him and Elizabeth during their lunch breaks” and multiple staffers told Gawker they had “reason to suspect that their e-mail was being read and that rooms in the News and Recorder offices were bugged.”
As if that wasn’t weird enough, try this on for size: per Cook and Nolan’s piece, the Aileses’ redesigned layout of the “single unisex bathroom in the papers’ headquarters features portraits of Elizabeth and Roger on the walls, watching you, while you poop.”
RIGA – The Prosecutor General’s Office is looking into the information that surfaced last week about the covert bugging of VIP suites and conference rooms at the Radisson Blu Ridzene Hotel in Riga, reports news agency LETA. The Prosecutor General’s Office said that no petitions have been submitted yet on this matter, and that the person making the allegation, Latvia’s First Party/Latvia’s Way leader and MP Ainars Slesers, has not provided any evidence on his claims.
Slesers announced in an interview on the LNT program ‘900 sekundes’ on May 5 that Latvian intelligence services have been bugging rooms at the Ridzene hotel for several years.
Foreign embassies have so far not reacted to or turned to the Foreign Ministry over the accusations about possible covert listening devices in several hotel suites. Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis’ (Unity) spokeswoman, Zanda Sadre, said that Dombrovskis was on vacation, and could not comment on the issue.
President Valdis Zatlers, after a meeting with Slesers, agreed that Slesers and the Norwegian owners of the Ridzene would have to officially request the Prosecutor General’s Office to investigate the suspected bugging of rooms there.
Slesers said that the president clearly stated that “this matter must be pushed forward.” Slesers added that the Norwegians are “disturbed at the developments, and that their reaction will be harsh.”
Employees at the prosecutor’s office have contacted the director general at Ridzene, said Radisson Blu Group spokesperson Aiga Lapina. She pointed out that management at Radisson Blu Group learned about the supposed tapping of VIP suites and a conference room from the mass media, and that no one had ever heard such a thing before. “We are open to all inspections, as such information is bad publicity for the hotel,” she added.
Slesers named several hotel suites that he said were tapped, where foreign and local high-ranking officials used to stay. He said several representatives from Latvia’s intelligence agencies were prepared to testify in the case, but they required political guarantees from the next president of Latvia.
This would certainly “cause major international pressure, and that several Latvian officials might have to step down now,” said Slesers. He went on to say that President Zatlers is the only politically neutral official at the moment, but he will have to prove in the time remaining until the presidential elections whether he is prepared to tackle serious political problems, which most probably means that he will have to “lock horns with several politicians.”
Zatlers will have to find out who ordered foreign officials’ conversations tapped, and foreign intelligence services will have to be involved in investigating the matter, stressed Slesers. “We have a situation where the state is run not by politicians but intelligence services,” said Slesers.
He also claimed that Latvia’s authorities had been tapping VIP suites and the conference hall “for several years.”
This, however, brings into question Slesers’ own motives, and possible previous involvement or knowledge, in the case and in why he’s bringing out this information only now, and not years earlier.
Saeima Deputy Chairman and National Security Commission Chairman Gundars Daudze (Union of Greens and Farmers) said “It is hard to comment on the matter, because I only know what the media have reported. If Mr. Slesers indeed has proof of what he said, he should turn to the authorities, as prescribed in the law,” Daudze said.
“I believe that the matter must be tackled legally, not politically. This means that the Saeima National Security Committee does not have to review it either,” said Daudze.
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A 27-year-old man was arrested for allegedly trying to pick up a 15-year-old middle school student, Salinas police said today.
The man, Andrew Gaytan, was allegedly following girls near La Paz Middle School as he cruised around in a charcoal colored Mazda, officials said.
A passerby called to report the incident to police at 9:22 a.m. Wednesday. The caller told officers that they were trying to follow Gaytan and last saw him on Moreno Street talking to the 15-year-old.
Officers said that when they arrived, they found Gaytan trying to talk the girl into his car.
Their investigation revealed that Gaytan had contacted the girl three different times, police said. Officers, believing Gaytan was drunk, gave him a field sobriety test, which officials said he failed.
Gaytan was three times over the legal limit, police said.
Police booked Gaytan into Monterey County Jail on suspicion of driving under the influence and three counts of annoying a child.
Internet phones sold by Cisco Systems ship with a weakness that allows them to be turned into remote bugging devices that intercept confidential communications in a fashion similar to so many Hollywood spy movies, SC Magazine reported.
The publication quoted consultants from Australia-based HackLabs, who said customers had lost $20,000 a day from exploits, which also included attacks that forced the devices to make calls to premium phone numbers. The consultants said the underlying weaknesses were present in the default settings and could be fixed only by making changes to the phones’ configuration settings.
“The book says to shut off web services,” HackLabs’ Peter Wesley was quoted as saying, referring to the manual that shipped with the phones. “Who’s going to read all that.”
SC Magazine said that a Cisco spokesman advised users to “apply the relevant recommendations in manuals to secure their systems. There was no explanation why phones are by default open to the attacks described in the article. A more sensible policy might be to ship the phones with the features disabled and allow customers who have a specific need for them to turn them on.
The magazine didn’t name the specific make of phone, which is also susceptible to denial of service attacks. The article is here. ®
