HAVANA (AFP) – Cuba has requested a 20-year prison term for US contractor Alan Gross who was arrested in 2009 on spying charges, a government statement has indicated, as Washington slammed the move as an “injustice.”
In a statement released through the Communist Party newspaper Granma, Cuba said Gross was being charged with violating Cuba’s “independence and territorial integrity,” and said a trial date will be fixed “shortly” in a case that has created a new diplomatic tension between Washington and Havana.
The charges against Gross, 61, are in the category of “crimes against state security” and suggest that Havana is taking a hard line in the high-profile case.
“The US government has been informed of this and duly notified through the diplomatic channels that its consular representatives, Mr Gross’s relatives and his family lawyers will be allowed to attend the trial,” the statement said.
Washington swiftly criticized the action.
President Barack Obama’s spokesman Robert Gibbs said Gross “has been unjustly detained and deprived of his liberty and freedom for the last 14 months.”
But instead of releasing him, the White House said the decision Friday “compounds the injustice suffered by a man helping to increase the free flow of information, to, from, and among the Cuban people.”
US State Department spokesman Charles Luoma-Overstreet said: “We deplore the Cuban government’s announcement… (Gross) has been held without charges for more than a year, contrary to all international human rights obligations and commitments regarding justice and due process.
“He should be home with his family now,” he said.
The contractor’s wife Judy Gross told AFP that she would spend the weekend processing the possible implications for her husband and their family.
“I’m trying to digest the news myself,” she said, declining further comment.
US authorities have argued that Gross worked for a non-government organization contracted by the State Department to supply computer and communications material to civil society groups on the island, and that he should be freed.
Washington officials said that Gross, an international development worker, visited Cuba to help members of the Jewish community in Havana link up with other Jewish communities throughout the world.
In December, a State Department spokesman said Gross had “languished in a Cuban jail for a full year” with no explanation or charges filed against him and that the actions “violate international standards of due process and judicial procedure.”
On Friday the company that contracted Gross to work in Cuba, Development Alternatives Inc., described the threat of a 20-year prison sentence as an “outrage.”
The company said in a statement released to AFP that it called on “principled leaders within our government and in the international community to stand up for Alan and step up their efforts to bring him home to his family.”
The United States and Cuba have not had formal diplomatic ties since 1961, though Washington is represented by a US interest section in Havana.
On January 13, Cuba allowed a senior US diplomat to visit Gross, whose incarceration had become an obstacle in efforts to work towards normalized relations.
Arturo Valenzuela, the top US State Department official for Latin America, said recently that Washington had made it “very clear” to Havana that it will be difficult to reach any major agreements as long as Cuba is holding Gross.
Cuba has been pressing meanwhile for the release of five of its nationals held in prison since 1998 in the United States on espionage charges.
On January 15, Obama eased restrictions on visas, remittances and travel under the US embargo on Cuba, saying it would “increase people-to-people contact,” and “enhance the free flow of information” to the communist-ruled island.
PORTLAND, Ore., Jan. 19 (UPI) — A former CIA agent has received extra prison time after admitting he continued to spy for Russia while jailed for espionage.
Harold Nicholson, 59, was sentenced Tuesday to eight years by U.S. District Judge Anna Brown in Portland, Ore., the Justice Department said. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government and commit money laundering. The term will be served after the 24-year sentence he’s already serving for his 1997 espionage conviction.
He is the first convicted spy to be convicted of new crimes involving the same country while jailed for espionage, the government said.
Nicholson admitted giving his son, Nathaniel, spying instructions when he visited him at federal prison in Sheridan, Ore., from 2006 to December 2008.
Nathaniel met with Russian agents in San Francisco, Mexico City, Lima, Peru, and Nicosia, Cyprus, to pass information from his father and collect money for him, the government said.
Nathaniel Nicholson was sentenced in December to five years probation.
China’s President Hu Jintao promoted the emerging spirit of American-style entrepreneurialism during his visit to Washington D.C. this week for the highly-scripted U.S.-China Summit.
Jintao has not yet commented on the status of Chinese government’s home-grown brand of “shadow innovation,” which began nearly 30 years ago and is evolving today into an insidious and dangerous trend called “entrepreneurial espionage.”
In 1986, Deng Xiao Peng established “Program 863,” a sort of academy of sciences and technologies charged with closing the scientific gap between China and the world’s advanced economies in a very short period of time. The 863 program and its institutional derivatives not only sponsored actual research, they also promoted the acquisition of advanced technologies from other countries legally or illegally.
Today, counter-intelligence activities in the United States that have a nexus with China typically involve the illegal acquisition of U.S. technologies. Unlike Russian intelligence officers looking to exploit ego, greed, or other personal weaknesses, China has not normally paid agents for classified documents or engaged in clandestine activity like ‘dead drops.’
While some of the recent espionage cases brought against China have ties to China’s intelligence services, the vast majority are linked to other state organizations, particularly the factories and research institutes of China’s military-industrial complex. Multiple Chinese state entities are engaged in an active effort to acquire restricted U.S. technologies. Unlike other foreign governments, China has a history of encouraging and rewarding private individuals to obtain technology on its behalf.
Chinese intelligence practices rely on nonprofessional collectors motivated by profit, patriotism or other factors and acting either independently or on behalf of the Chinese government to gather science and technology intelligence.
Nonprofessional intelligence collectors—including government and commercial researchers, students, academics, scientists, business people, delegations, and visitors—also provide China with a significant amount of sensitive U.S. technologies and trade secrets,” according to reports by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “[I]n many cases, the collection efforts of these private-sector players are driven entirely by the opportunity for commercial or professional gain and have no affiliation with [PRC intelligence].”
This practice has led to a vast amount of ”entrepreneurial” economic and industrial espionage conducted by Chinese students, trade delegations, businessmen and educational and research institutions, according to reports by the U.S.-China Economic And Security Review Commission.
The Chinese government encourages such efforts and has benefited from them. In 2009, the Commission quoted testimony provided by former FBI Special Agent I.C. Smith that:
the Ministry of State Security sometimes places pressure on Chinese citizens going abroad for educational or business purposes and may make pursuit of foreign technology a quid pro quo for permission to travel abroad. However, this phenomenon of ”entrepreneurial espionage” appears to be particularly common among businessmen who have direct commercial ties with Chinese companies and who seek to skirt U.S. export control and economic espionage laws in order to export controlled technologies to the PRC. In such instances, profit appears to be a primary motive, although the desire to ”help China” can intersect in many cases with the expectation of personal financial gain.
”Espionage entrepreneurs” are not focused solely on obtaining state-of-the-art, high-tech data and equipment. In many cases there is no obvious direct state involvement in the theft or illegal export of controlled technology. These entrepreneurial efforts frequently take the form of ”mom-and-pop” companies—many of them nothing more than a titular business registered at a residential address—that legally purchase older military technology from U.S. manufacturers or through a secondary market of defense industrial equipment auctions, or even from the Internet, and then look for customer institutions back in China.
“There are pieces of technology . . . that the Chinese are trying to acquire that are 20, 25 years old, [and] that are mainstays of existing U.S. defense systems but come nowhere close to being considered state-of-the-art, and yet a means-ends test would correctly identify those as critical gaps in the Chinese system,” said Dr. James Mulvenon, a specialist on the Chinese military at the Defense Group, Inc., stated during testimony before the Commission in 2009.
* Espionage aimed at investment plan, not technology-Ghosn
* Renault chief says has ample proof in spying case
* Lawyer calls on Renault to provide evidence of wrongdoing
By Daniel Flynn
PARIS, Jan 23 – The chief executive of French carmaker Renault RENA.PA said on Sunday that a case of suspected industrial espionage at the company would not affect the rollout of three electric car models this year.
In his first television interview since the case erupted, Carlos Ghosn said the suspected espionage appeared to have been aimed at uncovering Renault’s investment model for its electric vehicles rather than copying the technology.
Renault, which conducted its own internal investigation into the case for several months before alerting French authorities, has fired three senior executives in connection with the case.
A lawyer for one of the three men, who strongly deny any wrongdoing and say they will sue the company for damaging their reputations, had called on Ghosn to use Sunday’s interview to present some details of the case against them.
“We have certainties. If we did not have certainties, we would not be doing this,” Ghosn told TF1 television. He declined to provide specifics of what proof Renault held, saying simply: “They are multiple and that’s exactly why we started legal procedings.”
The scandal had threatened to harm improving relations between France and China after a government source said intelligence services were looking into a possible connection with China as part of initial checks before the official probe.
The French government has played down the possibility of a link to China, saying it is not accusing any one country of involvement, while China has denied any link to the case.
Asked whether there was indeed a Chinese connection to the case, Ghosn said it was now in the hands of judicial authorities and it was up to them to decide. “We are going to cooperate and be very discrete about this affair,” he said. “What is important is that we continue to advance in a cutting edge technology in which we have an advantage of two to three years over our rivals,” he said. “We have no evidence that it was technology itself which was the objective of this procedure.”
Renault is staking its future on growth in the electric car sector and Ghosn said that “under no circumstances” would the suspected spying case affect this.
MINISTER SAYS RENAULT TOO SLOW
Industry Minister Eric Besson had told French radio earlier on Sunday that Renault should have notified authorities much sooner, rather than pursuing its own investigation to its end.
Ghosn has said he was first notified about the case in August but the company did not formally present a legal complaint until mid January.
The Renault CEO said, however, that the company had its own internal procedures which needed to be respected. He earlier told the Journal du Dimanche newspaper that the carmaker had not broken any laws by conducting its own lengthy internal inquiry into the affair before making it public. [ID:nLDE70L0CS]
Pierre-Olivier Sur, one of the lawyers defending Renault’s former vice president of advanced engineering, Michel Balthazard, said sources close to the investigation had said payments to offshore bank accounts in Liechtenstein and Switzerland had been uncovered.
“These financial flows are traceable,” Sur told Reuters, arguing that Renault as the plaintiff was not obliged to keep its evidence secret under French law.
“Let someone indicate these traces and we’ll see it doesn’t stand up, because my client has never had any offshore accounts. So there’s a mistake.”
BY ERICA VIRTUE Sunday Observer writer virtuee [at] jamaicaobserver [dot] com
Sunday, January 09, 2011
In the face of increasing claims by local law enforcement officials that criminals are using cellular phones to assist in the commission of serious crimes, controversy continues to swirl around whether the police should have more far-reaching powers to bug the phones of suspected criminals.
Although more reliance is now being placed on telecommunications technologies, long used by other jurisdictions to trap suspected wrong-doers, wiretapped evidence remains excluded from Jamaican courts unless it is being used to corroborate evidence already in place.
Wiretapped evidence is also inadmissible in Jamaican courts if permission to place the bug was not given by a High Court judge.
In contrast, state-sanctioned eavesdropping on phone conversations is a facility widely used by the United States in its pursuit of wrongdoers.
Information in the possession of the Sunday Observer showed that between January 2004 and March 2005, ‘Big Brother’ eavesdropped on 4,000 phones calls into and out of five different countries — one of them being Jamaica — in an effort to trap suspected drug-traffickers, including five Jamaicans. These were calls made to 94 different suspected drug dealers’ phones.
Executive director of local human rights lobby group Jamaicans For Justice (JFJ), Dr Carolyn Gomes, accepts law enforcement officials referencing telephone conversations in order to corroborate evidence in a criminal matter.
“The simple answer is no, I do not have a problem with them checking for usage rather than listening in. Even with that there are some questions of privacy, but that may be easier to live with for the time being,” Gomes told Sunday Observer.
However, she is vehemently opposed to anything making it easier for the police to bug the phones of average Jamaicans. According to Gomes, being able to hold private conversations is a fundamental and constitutional right, and “everyone should be able to hold their personal and private conversations without law enforcement listening in”.
“I support the use of more and better technology, but no to more bugging,” Gomes insisted.
Former police commissioner-turned-politician Lucius Thomas, while supporting citizens’ right to privacy, said the police must be given the necessary means available to fight crime.
“There is a huge volume of work involved in intercepting telephone calls. So you would want to target the individuals involved in crimes such as murders and drug trafficking, which itself has led to murders,” Thomas told Sunday Observer.
“But I am one of those who support the information flow that you need to use the technology to enhance the investigative skills of the police officers. So I would want the police to have greater access to individuals suspected of being great security risks to the country,” Thomas said.
He complained that the process of securing the warrant was tedious and once acquired, the document carried an expiry date.
“Given what law enforcement is all about; given the advancement in technology and given the criminals’ access both local and otherwise, and with the advent of the Internet and cyber-crimes, I believe that police should have easier and greater access to the phones of those individuals,” Thomas insisted.
On the other hand, Assistant Police Commissioner Les Green said the police have adequate powers to wiretap and he was satisfied with what currently existed.
“I do not see the current process involved in securing the warrant for wiretaps being too onerous,” Green told Sunday Observer. He also said that recent amendments to the existing laws have made it easier for the police to tap the phones of suspected criminals.
“I dare say what we have needs a bit of fine tuning, but it’s for us to use the powers that we have,” he said.
The wiretap law, which was passed by the Senate in February 2002, allows the security forces to apply to a Supreme Court judge for an order to intercept the electronic communication of people suspected of involvement in drug trafficking, terrorism, murder, treason, kidnapping or abduction, gun-running and money laundering.
Twenty-eight days after permission is obtained, the police must re-apply for the wiretaps to continue being used.
Prior to that, there was no legislation regulating wiretaps and the authorisation for bugging people’s phones came from the prime minister after a submission from the national security minister, following a request from the security forces.
The then administration moved to change the system after a scandal in 2000 when a civilian-led intelligence group that operated within the police organised crime unit apparently went on a freelance wire-tapping spree. A number of politicians were alleged to have been among the people whose phone conversations were intercepted.
The intelligence group’s head, Roderick ‘Jimmy’ McGregor, having first denied it, later admitted to the illegal wiretaps, which led to the downfall of some police officials and the unit being disbanded.
Former Police Commissioner Rear Admiral Hardley Lewin is supporting the position offered by Green.
“We can only use wiretapped evidence to corroborate other evidence in the hands of investigating authorities. It cannot be used as ‘stand-alone’ evidence. And there is really nothing stopping the local police from using wiretap evidence in regular policing duties,” Lewin said in a Sunday Observer interview.
“But, if the current system isn’t busted, then there is no need to fix it,” he suggested.
When the United States used wiretap evidence to make the case against former Tivoli Gardens don, Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke, it led to a quarrel between Kingston and Washington and a refusal by Jamaica to extradite Coke, who the US had indicted on drug-trafficking and racketeering charges.
Prime Minister Bruce Golding later insisted that the police officer who had access to wiretaps from Coke’s phones, illegally passed the evidence on to the US, instead of to local authorities.
Golding said that the US was not on the list referenced on the court order allowing local law enforcement to tap the accused former area leader’s phone and should not have been allowed to access the information obtained via the bug.
Lewin, in an earlier interview, dubbed the policeman at the centre of the issue ‘Constable Red Herring’ implying that he was just a scapegoat. He also told the Sunday Observer that the prime minister’s claim that wiretap evidence gathered in the Coke case illegally changed hands, was unfounded.
Former Attorney General A J Nicholson, who was Jamaica’s chief legal advisor at the time when the request came from the United States, said the use of the information was permissible under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty which Jamaica signed with its northern neighbour.
Former National Security Minister Dr Peter Phillips said this Treaty set the policy.
“This is not a pact, which I believe is the word the prime minister used at the Area Council 1 meeting in August (2010),” Phillips said. “It is a memorandum of understanding which settled on what access people would have. Prior to that, there had been no formal arrangement. People would get access, but there was nothing that would provide a basis for an agreement. But these arrangements existed before me, and so it was just a matter of formalising a tradition which had long existed.”
It was that tradition that led to the bugging of the phones of Jamaican Norris ‘Dedo’ Nembhard, who former US President George W Bush designated a drug kingpin, as well as those of Leebert Ramcharan and Donovan Williams.
Nembhard was extradited to the US in July 2008, while Ramcharan and Williams were handed over to US authorities in 2007. The three are currently serving time in US prisons.
Phillips said as far as he could recall, that anti-drug operation spanned several countries including Jamaica, Colombia, The Bahamas, the United Kingdom and the United States, and wiretapping was not an issue anywhere else.
“No, I don’t recall it being an issue by anyone,” said Phillips. “But I wasn’t directly involved, it would have been the director of public prosecutions on our end. But in all of this, if you look at the cases, I don’t think anybody raised the matter of the use of and even the exchange of wiretapped evidence.
“The law is clear as far as I am advised. The commissioner of police and the chief of defence staff have access to it, and they can use it for law enforcement purposes and that includes co-operating with other states,” added the former security minister.
In late November 2010, the prime minister said legislation would be brought to Parliament to amend current provisions in the Interception of Communication (Wiretapping) law.
He is attempting to close a loophole in the current system to make it mandatory for wiretap information secured in Jamaica to be handed to designated local authorities before it is passed to anyone outside of the country.
