ANCHORAGE — 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 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 may 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.
Liew attorney Thomas Nolan maintained in court that Liew had only possessed publicly available information.
“There is nothing at all illegal about that conduct,” Nolan said. “What is illegal is if he uses trade secrets.”
Liew paid at least two former DuPont engineers for assistance in designing chloride-route titanium dioxide, also known as TiO2, according to the indictment. DuPont is the world’s largest producer of the white pigment used to make a range of white-tinted products, including paper, paint and plastics.
The United States has identified industrial spying as a significant and growing threat to the nation’s prosperity. In a government report released last November, authorities cited China as “the world’s most active and persistent perpetrators of economic espionage.”
A search of several Mexican lawmakers’ offices turned up recording equipment, leading legislators to believe they have been spied on for years, a congressman said Wednesday.
Congressman Armando Rios said security personnel found microphones and other devices that seemed to have been installed years ago.
“Some of the equipment has newer technology, but other devices are from a long time ago, which leads us to believe they were installed years ago,” said Rios, a member of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD.
Rios said the offices of key committees and of several lawmakers from different political parties were bugged.
“What is at stake is the vulnerability of the legislature, of one of the powers of the union,” Rios said.
Congress president Guadalupe Acosta, also of the PRD, on Tuesday filed a complaint with federal prosecutors, who opened an investigation.
Acosta wouldn’t identify the lawmakers who were being spied on or who he thinks was behind the espionage. Rios blamed the government of President Felipe Calderon, who belongs to the conservative National Action Party, or PAN.
Interior Secretary Alejandro Poire denied Rios’ accusations and said the government has done nothing illegal.
Mexico’s main intelligence agency allegedly spied on the government’s political opponents during the 71 years of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.
After PAN candidate Vicente Fox won the 2000 presidential election, he announced that the agency, the Center for National Security and Investigation, would no longer spy on political opponents. But in 2008, under Calderon, the agency hired a private company to monitor the activities of legislators.
Legislators complained they were being spied on but the government said it was simply collecting public information.
Several secretly recorded telephone conversations of government officials or politicians have been made public in Mexico in the last few years.
In 2006, the former governor of Puebla state, Mario Marin, was implicated in a revenge plot against a journalist after Mexican news media released a recorded telephone conversation. In it, he allegedly speaks with a businessman about punishing Lydia Cacho, who had written a book that accuses one of their acquaintances of being a child molester.
In 2010, a radio station broadcast a telephone conversation between then federal lawmaker Cesar Godoy and alleged drug trafficker Servando Gomez, known as “La Tuta.” In it, Godoy and Gomez express support for each other and discuss bribing a reporter.
Shortly after the recording was released, Godoy, who is now a fugitive, was charged with aiding drug trafficking and money laundering.
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.
