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.
CBC News has also learned Lt.-Col. Dmitry V. Fedorchatenko, assistant defence attaché, was scheduled to leave in November.
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.”
Lt.-Col. Kay Kuhlen, defence attaché for the German Embassy and head of the Ottawa Service Attachés Association, an organization that helps military diplomats, said he was advised in September that Fedorchatenko was leaving. His farewell event was Nov. 10. He also said he is “surprised” by the reports of spying.
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. Read More
Six former and current employees of the Food and Drug Administration say the federal agency spied on their private e-mail correspondence after they attempted to blow the whistle on agency practices of approving medical devices that posed a risk to patients.
The employees, all of them scientists or doctors, filed a complaint in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., seeking an injunction to halt the surveillance, according to the Washington Post.
The plaintiffs say the agency spied on correspondence they sent through personal Gmail accounts that they accessed from government computers and took screenshots of their computer desktops after they began corresponding with congressional staffers about their concerns.
Six intelligence agencies have been independently reviewed for the first time since 2004. Above, Robert Cornall, one of the review’s leaders and a former senior public servant. Photo: Andrew Taylor
AUSTRALIA’S spies now cost more than $1 billion a year to run – and they are increasingly involved in frontline operations, according to a landmark review of the country’s intelligence community.
Not only is the report the first time Australia has provided a headline figure for expenditure on its six intelligence agencies, the inquiry – the Independent Review of the Intelligence Community – is the first time since 2004 that the agencies have been independently scrutinised.
”Australia has seen the dramatic expansion of … intelligence in the last 10 years,” the review’s leaders, a former senior public servant, Robert Cornall, and a management consultant, Rufus Black, state in their report, issued yesterday.
“Australia has seen the dramatic expansion of … intelligence in the last 10 years” … the Independent Review of the Intelligence Community.
The six agencies are the domestic security agency ASIO, the foreign intelligence service ASIS, the electronic intelligence agency DSD, the analytical Office of National Assessments, and the Defence Intelligence Organisation and its geospatial partner DIGO.
Tens of thousands of video conferencing setups, including some in corporate meeting rooms where the most confidential information
is discussed, are vulnerable to spying attacks, researchers said this week.
After spending months rooting around top-end video conferencing hardware and software, and taking tours through meeting rooms
himself, HD Moore said the danger was a “perfect storm” brought on by lazy habits and sloppy security settings.
“Many of these are naked on the Internet,” said Moore, the chief security officer at Rapid7.
Using scanning tools, Moore surveyed a small fraction of the Internet to find hardware that used the H.323 protocol — the
most widely-used by video conferencing equipment — and discovered that 2% were at risk of hacker infiltration because they
were set to automatically answer any incoming calls and were not protected by a firewall.
On the Internet as a whole, Moore estimated that more than 150,000 video conferencing setups were vulnerable to eavesdropping
using the hardware’s microphone and spying via the remote-controlled camera.
The biggest gaffes in video conferencing are the auto-answer feature and the positioning of the hardware sans a firewall,
or outside the organization’s usual defensive perimeter, said Moore. And even when they seem to be protected, some firewalls
fail to properly handle the H.323 protocol, and in fact expose the hardware to infiltration.
Other issues range from known vulnerabilities in some video conferencing software to used hardware sold via outlets like eBay
that have not been scrubbed of their pre-set connections to other conferencing locations.
Moore was able to access video conferences held in corporate boardrooms, and at meetings in research facilities, law offices,
and venture capital firms.
“You see these very nicely-appointed conference rooms where they’re having their most important conversations,” said Mike
Tuchen, chief executive of Rapid7 in the same interview. “Often, where video conferencing equipment gets located are the same
places where the most sensitive meetings take place.”
Disabling auto-answer is the easiest way to block this spying, said Tuchen.
“Most of Polycom’s equipment defaults to auto-answer, but disabling that is pretty straight-forward,” Tuchen said, citing
the video conferencing maker that Moore found with the most systems set to automatic answer.
In one case, Moore was able to dial into an ongoing conference, then operate the camera — zooming in on one individual to
see him enter a password on his laptop — for more than 20 minutes, all without the participants noticing the moving camera.
Exposing video conferencing hardware on the Web was the other major gaffe that Moore exploited. “Too many people take a shortcut
by putting their equipment on the Internet,” said Tuchen.
Moore is an accomplished vulnerability researcher and hacker — he is also the creator of the popular open-source Metasploit
penetration testing toolkit — but he said others could duplicate his work if they had “some moderate level of technical sophistication.”
U.S. Army officials could decide in February when to schedule a court hearing for an Alaska-based soldier charged with attempted espionage.
Army officials say 22-year-old Spc. William Colton Millay of Owensboro, Ky., transmitted national defense information to someone he believed was a foreign intelligence agent.
Officials have declined to say what country Millay believed the so-called agent represented. Millay, who faces life imprisonment, was being observed during the espionage investigation and no damage occurred, officials said.
Millay, a military police officer, also is charged with communicating defense information, issuing false statements, failing to obey regulations and soliciting a fellow service member at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage to get classified material.
The Army’s equivalent of a preliminary hearing is anticipated to be scheduled next month and could lead to a general court martial, similar to a criminal trial in the civilian court system. But it’s too soon to know when the preliminary hearing actually will be held, Lt. Col. Bill Coppernoll said.
Millay’s October arrest at the base stemmed from an investigation by the Army, FBI and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. He is being held at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state. Coppernoll said that’s where the closest military confinement facility is located.
When Millay was charged, Army officials said he “had access to the information through the course of his normal duties both stateside and on a previous deployment, and although the information was unclassified, Millay believed that it could be used to the advantage of a foreign nation.” Officials are not saying what time period was involved, but Millay’s attorney, Steve Karns of Dallas, said the allegations cover 2011.
Millay was assigned to a combat tour in Iraq from December 2009 to July 2010, and he served in Korea, according to information provided by the Army.
Asked if the investigation involved a sting operation, the Army is not calling it that, said Lt. Col. Jimmy Bagwell, the deputy staff judge advocate with U.S. Army Alaska.
Millay has not entered a plea in the case, but he says he is innocent, said Karns, who just returned from a visit with the soldier.
“He’s not depressed. He’s very cordial, polite and relaxed,” Karns said Thursday. “He doesn’t act like he has a guilty conscience.”
The upcoming preliminary proceeding is called an Article 32 hearing. An investigating officer will make a recommendation to Col. Thomas Roth, commander of the Second Engineer Brigade, which includes the 164th Military Police Company to which Millay was assigned. Options possible are to dismiss, alter or change the charges, or proceed with the original charges, likely through a general court martial, Bagwell said.
“It’s highly unlikely that charges of this significance would go to anything but a general,” he said.
Roth would then make a recommendation to Major Gen. Raymond Palumbo, commander of U.S. Army Alaska. Palumbo would have the final say in whether to prosecute the case or drop the charges.
If Millay is court-martialed, he would get to choose whether the case is handled by a military judge or a military panel consisting of five to 12 members.
Officials have said there is no connection between Millay’s case and one involving Army analyst Bradley Manning, who is accused of disclosing secret intelligence to WikiLeaks.
Millay began his Alaska assignment last May. Most members of his company were deployed to Afghanistan in March, but Millay was in the company’s rear detachment that stayed behind.
