Canada’s spy agency sent multiple warnings to the Canadian Space Agency about Wanping Zheng, a former engineer now accused of negotiating on behalf of a Chinese aerospace company — and even refused to give a presentation at the CSA because it knew Zheng would be there, according to new court documents.
The RCMP charged 61-year-old Zheng last December with breach of trust in a case police say is tied to foreign interference.
The lawyer for an RCMP official accused of preparing to leak sensitive information is seeking to have at least part of the case against him stayed.
Cameron Ortis, who served as director general of the RCMP’s national intelligence co-ordination centre, is charged with violating the Security of Information Act. He was arrested in September 2019 and is accused of trying to share sensitive information with a foreign entity or terrorist organization. He’s also charged with sharing operational information in 2015.
We’re never going to know what happened here and no one aside from Ortis will lose their job.
The UK government is reportedly seeking a gagging order to prevent the BBC airing a news segment that apparently identifies a spy working overseas. A secret High Court hearing is expected to be convened next week to listen to arguments on the “highly sensitive case,” according to The Telegraph.
While the broadcaster insists the story is “overwhelmingly in the public interest,” Attorney General Suella Braverman is expected to claim that airing it would present a “risk to people’s lives” and would impact overseas British intelligence activities, the paper reported on Friday.
Government House leader Mark Holland is urging the Conservatives to reconsider their rejection of a compromise proposal that would allow MPs to finally see unredacted documents related to the firing of two scientists at Canada’s highest-security laboratory.
In a letter Tuesday to his Conservative counterpart, Gerard Deltell, Holland reiterates his proposal to allow a special all-party, security-cleared committee to review all the documents, aided by three former senior judges who would decide whether or how any disputed material could be released publicly without jeopardizing national security.
WASHINGTON — The C.I.A. has found that most cases of the mysterious ailments known as Havana syndrome are unlikely to have been caused by Russia or another foreign adversary, agency officials said, a conclusion that angered victims.
A majority of the 1,000 cases reported to the government can be explained by environmental causes, undiagnosed medical conditions or stress, rather than a sustained global campaign by a foreign power, C.I.A. officials said, describing the interim findings of a comprehensive study.
‘I’m ready to risk everything’: Documents from failed prosecution detail GTA engineer’s alleged offer to spy for China
“I’m willing to be of paramount service to the Chinese government,” disgruntled naval engineer Qing Quentin Huang said during one of two calls to the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa, unaware the line had been wiretapped by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).
Those phone calls in November 2013 led the RCMP to arrest Huang in Burlington, Ont., for allegedly attempting to spy for China. At the time, the Mounties told the public his actions were “a threat to Canada.”
While mercenaries have long played a role in warfare, the prevalence of private companies in modern combat has grown more pronounced than ever. Private military companies (PMCs) and private security companies (PSCs) provide policymakers with attractive ways to project power, including low-profile alternatives to uniformed military deployment and significant cost savings. Moreover, in the current era of strategic competition among the United States, China, and Russia, the struggle for influence is playing out deliberately at a level below the threshold of armed conflict, and such companies are a useful instrument to expand regional and global influence and to create new dilemmas for competitors.
Nearly 200 professors have signed a letter demanding Joe Biden’s Department of Justice terminate a Trump-era initiative targeting Chinese Communist Party-linked academics exploiting American universities for intellectual property theft and espionage.
As the People’s Republic of China (PRC) emerged from war and revolution in 1949, it became apparent that the Chinese economy lacked the capacity to compete with the U.S. or the U.S.S.R. in the production of advanced military technology. Transfers from the Soviet Union helped remedy the gap in the 1950s, as did transfers from the United States and Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. Still, the Cultural Revolution stifled technology and scientific research, leaving the Chinese even farther behind.
Thus, China has long supplemented legitimate transfers and domestic innovation with industrial espionage. In short, the PRC has a well-established habit of pilfering weapons technology from Russia and the United States. As the years have gone by, Beijing’s spies have become ever more skillful and flexible in their approach.
A Harvard University professor charged with hiding his ties to a Chinese-run recruitment program has been found guilty on all counts.
Charles Lieber, 62, the former chair of Harvard’s department of chemistry and chemical biology, had pleaded not guilty to two counts of filing false tax returns, two counts of making false statements, and two counts of failing to file reports for a foreign bank account in China.
The jury deliberated for about two hours and 45 minutes before announcing the verdict after five days of testimony in Boston federal court.
OTTAWA — An investigation by Canada’s spy service concluded that money, ego and career frustrations were the likely reasons a veteran RCMP officer passed highly sensitive secrets to Russian intelligence for years, newly disclosed records reveal.
Molehunters determined in the mid-1980s that Gilles Germain Brunet was an agent of the Soviet KGB from the late 1960s well into the 1970s, a Cold War spy saga detailed in documents released to The Canadian Press by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service through the Access to Information Act.
Brunet’s betrayal has long been the subject of whispers, chronicled in news articles and books since at least the early 1990s. But until now Canadian intelligence officials have not publicly confirmed his exploits, nor divulged details of the probe that left them convinced he was a mole.
The Conservatives have lost their bid to resurrect a House of Commons order demanding the release of secret documents related to the firing of two scientists at Canada’s highest security laboratory.
Commons Speaker Anthony Rota ruled Thursday that the order expired, along with all other business before the House, when Parliament was dissolved in August for a federal election.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange can be extradited from the UK to the US, the High Court has ruled.
The US won its appeal against a January UK court ruling that he could not be extradited due to concerns over his mental health.
Judges were reassured by US promises to reduce the risk of suicide. His fiancee said they intended to appeal.
Mr Assange is wanted in the US over the publication of thousands of classified documents in 2010 and 2011.
A Maryland woman charged in connection with selling US nuclear submarine secrets to a foreign power wanted to flee the country because she despised President Donald Trump, not because she feared arrest, her lawyers said.
Diana Toebbe and her husband Jonathan were arrested in October and face espionage charges. Prosecutors have argued against freeing them on bail, citing a text message from Diana saying the couple would be “welcomed and rewarded by a foreign [government].”
At a hearing on Wednesday, her lawyers presented additional messages to argue she was motivated by disdain for the Republican president, not fear of being caught.
The iPhones of at least nine US state department officials were recently hacked by a government using NSO Group spyware, according to a new report that raised serious questions about the use of Israeli surveillance tools against US government officials around the world.
The claim, which was reported by Reuters, comes just weeks after the Biden administration placed NSO on a US blacklist and said the surveillance company acted “contrary to the foreign policy and national security interests of the US”.
