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Jeffrey Deslisle-former RCN, convicted of spying

Oldgateboatdriver said:
A small P.S. for those who raised the death penalty: It still exists in Canada, but only for one crime: High Treason, which is only for attempts on the life of the sovereign or a member of the Royal family.

No, there is no death penalty in Canada, not even for high treason.

Or for photographing young Royals as they prance about in the nude in Vegas or on a friend's balcony.


EDIT: Per the Criminal Code of Canada:

47. (1) Every one who commits high treason is guilty of an indictable offence and shall be sentenced to imprisonment for life.

 
Just an extra thought here ....  The war on drugs and terrorism in today's world has raised the bar on surreptitious activities. Large money transfers, short trips to drug exporting countries in South America and carrying large physical amounts of cash past customs  are red flags to the authorties. And of course the abilities of various government branches to monitor the internet.
All these measures must be taken into account if one is to avoid detection.
 
Journeyman said:
I can't help but notice that in every thread where government operations and bureaucracies are involved -- CF recruiting, aircraft acquisition, veterans' payments -- it's a complete and utter goat rodeo. But if it's a set-up or conspiracy, damn those various agencies pull together in an amazing fashion.  :nod:
In this case, I would suggest that there was really only one agency that did the leg-work on all of this... and it wasn't the RCMP or DND. Customs will pull over anyone with a red flag on their file, and any agency in Public Safety can place one.

Oh, and I suspect that large, repetitive draws on foreign bank holdings get noticed too, so the foreign account/debit card plan may not work quite so well either.  ;)
You can get anonymous (i.e. no name associated with them) debit cards drawn on foreign banks quite easily - these guys used to issue them, until some recent unpleasantness involving a Russian oligarch looting their deposits: www.snoras.com. Obviously this will raise red flags somewhere... but used carefully it's the closest thing to untraceable you can get. Only wire transfers over $10K get routinely examined, unless originating from suspicious locations.
 
On another note we really need a system to make these guys forfeit their pay, allowances and pension on conviction.
 
fraserdw said:
On another note we really need a system to make these guys forfeit their pay, allowances and pension on conviction.
Pension has been paid into, so that might be tricky not to give back, but in a fairly recent, ugly case, they have docked pay/benefits collected between arrest & dismissal, and no severance, either.
 
Among the comments to today's CBC report, "Delisle spy story elicits shrugs from allies"

DeweyOxberger
2012/10/12 at 6:39 AM ET

"Five Eyes" is designed to facilitate domestic spying on the participant countries own citizens, Britain spies on Canadians and reports the result to Canada's spy agency, Canada spies on Americans and reports the results to the Americans, there by skirting the ban on domestic spying, it's a clever end run around the law. As long as it's main task domestic spying isn't challenged, and the status quo is maintained it sees no cause for alarm..

With a like:dislike ratio of 3:1 from readers, tinfoil stocks are apparently still trading well.  :Tin-Foil-Hat:
 
Journeyman said:
Among the comments to today's CBC report, "Delisle spy story elicits shrugs from allies"

With a like:dislike ratio of 3:1 from readers, tinfoil stocks are apparently still trading well.  :Tin-Foil-Hat:
Consider the source of the comment.  That poster has a history of heavy tin foil usage.  Everything's a conspiracy with that one, especially if it involves the Harper administration.  ::)
 
The traitor keeps his pay and rank till Jan.  >:(

Navy spy to keep rank, salary until sentencing
Sub-Lt. Jeffrey Paul Delisle to be sentenced in January for selling military secrets
CBC News Posted: Oct 15, 2012 1:01 PM AT Last Updated: Oct 15, 2012 12:54 PM AT 

Sub-Lt. Jeffrey Paul Delisle, who has pleaded guilty to selling military secrets to Russia, will keep his pay, rank and benefits until he is sentenced in January, the Department of National Defence confirmed to CBC News.

"The Queen's Regulations and Orders for the Canadian Forces provide for the forfeiture of pay for the period during which a member is in civil custody awaiting trial by a civil tribunal, if the civil tribunal subsequently finds the member guilty of an offence," a spokesman for the department said in an email.

"As the matter is still before the court, it would be inappropriate to further comment on matters relating to his service at this time."

Delisle, 41, pleaded guilty in a Halifax court last week to breach of trust and two counts of passing information to a foreign entity between July 2007 and Jan. 13, 2011. The offences happened in Ottawa and Kingston, Ont., and Halifax and Bedford, N.S., where he lived.

Although Delisle entered the guilty pleas and the pleas were accepted by Justice Patrick Curran, the Department of National Defence said the court "has not yet found him guilty of the offences." It's possible the defence department will attempt to recover back pay once Delisle is sentenced.

Delisle's sentencing has been set for Jan. 10 and Jan. 12.

The only time a Canadian Forces member was stripped of his Queen's commission was in the case of convicted murderer Russell Williams, who was stripped of his rank as colonel and denied severance pay.

Williams was also stripped of his medals, with his pay terminated and recovered from the date of his arrest. That did not happen until after he was sentenced for his crimes.

Only the Queen or her representative in Canada, the Governor General, can strip an officer of his or her commission.

Delisle walked into the Russian Embassy in Ottawa in 2007 and offered to sell secrets to that country's military intelligence agency, beginning an espionage career that lasted almost four years.

Delisle was posted to the security unit HMCS Trinity, an intelligence facility at the naval dockyard in Halifax. It tracks vessels entering and exiting Canadian waters via satellites, drones and underwater devices.

While there, he worked on a system called the Stone Ghost linking the "Five Eyes" allies: the United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Delisle downloaded information onto a floppy disk and uploaded it to an email address for his Russian handlers.

He was paid between $2,800 and $3,000 a month by the Russians for the information.

The maximum sentence for communicating information to a foreign entity is life in prison.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/story/2012/10/15/ns-delisle-pay-rank.html
 
Given that he plead guilty, he likely got a bargain.  But I hope it is as severe as possible. not so much to punish him but to set a strong precedent and example.
 
Given the brazen way it all started, I can't see the crown going for anything but close to the max. I see his lawyer has already started the "it wasn't for the money" spiel to mitigate that.

WRT the pay/rank issues, until he is found guilty and sentenced, the CF's hands are pretty much tied. Given that we have a start date for his second career it will be interesting to see just how much pay we will try and recover. After all, he never asked his CO for permission to have a second job did he?

Like to see that memo.  ;D
 
Article on the ipolotics webpage by a "Mr. Black" who "[W]orked in the intelligence and security sector for more than 20 years prior to his retirement from active service. His government service included time as a liaison officer in international postings." Mr Black gives his views on the Delisle case. Re-produced under usual caveats of the Copyright Act.

Spy case raises troubling questions for Canada’s security community  
By Mr. Black | Oct 16, 2012 5:05 am | 0 Comments

The case of Sub Lt Jeffrey Delisle, the Canadian Naval Intelligence Officer who pleaded guilty in a Nova Scotia provincial court last week to selling Canadian and NATO intelligence to Russia for $3,000 a month, raises several issues for the government and it’s security staff.

The first issue will be the effect of this case on Canada’s relations with its intelligence partners. Canada is one of the “Five Eyes” Community, along with the U.S., the UK, Australia and New Zealand. Although, rightly, exactly what Delisle sold to the Russians will never be revealed to the general public, it is likely that it included material which one or all of the partners would have considered sensitive.

However, this is unlikely to cause any major rift. The truth is that no one can get very sanctimonious about this kind of case. To name just the most famous, the U.S. have recently had the Wikileaks scandal and before that the Robert Hanson and Aldridge Ames cases. In the 1980s two UK intelligence officers, Michael Bettany and Geoffrey Prime were separately convicted of selling secrets to the Russians.

Delisle was caught after only a four year spying career, Hanson’s duplicity lasted 22 years and he was paid over a million dollars. The West’s intelligence agencies know that no security system is perfect and, to mix metaphors, sooner or later a bad apple slips through every net.

It is also unlikely that any lasting damage will have been done to Canada’s relations with Russia. Sometimes these events are ritually ended with a diplomat being expelled by the aggrieved country, which is usually followed by a tit-for-tat response by the second party. The most extreme form of this came in 1971 when the British expelled 105 Russian Diplomats in one fell swoop.

These events are usually just minor bumps in the diplomatic road. Every country spies and, occasionally, someone gets caught. C’est la vie.

The second issue which Canada will have been addressing is the practical aspects of how Delisle accessed the information and how he passed it to the Russians. As a vetted Naval Intelligence officer he presumably had a legitimate right to access the intelligence in the first place. That he then managed to pass it on to the Russians so easily will have raised concerns about the physical security of the systems to which he had access.

The sort of systems on which Delisle was working will have been on either a stand alone PC or an intranet. They will not have been connected to the Internet. This creates an “air gap” between the sensitive information and the outside world. This means that it is impossible for the material to be sent to someone by accident. Any leak of the information will therefore require deliberate action.

Delisle reportedly copied the material on to a thumb drive which he then passed to the Russians. This is a clear weakness in the system. It is common practice for both private companies and government departments to disable disc drives and USB ports on PCs in sensitive areas. If an employee has a valid reason to copy some classified material on to a disc or any external drive, this is done by a central IT unit and the action is recorded, together with the contents of the disc and reason why it has been copied. This provides an audit trail for IT security to follow. When the disc or drive is finished with, it is returned to the central point for either wiping or destruction. As well as information security, this also provides a defense against computer viruses invading the internal systems.

It is very surprising that the USB port on Delisle’s computer was not disabled and that he was able to copy it so easily. Once the material was on the thumb drive it would have been easy for him to get it out of the building. Thumb drives are very small, and, even in buildings where random exit searches are carried out these are normally perfunctory.

Delisle was reportedly caught after he returned from a short trip to Brazil to meet his Russian handler. He then apparently flashed large amounts of cash and this came to the attention of the security authorities. We don’t yet know how they caught on to him, whether it was one of his colleagues who noticed something unusual or whether it was the security authorities themselves. (If it was the latter, then kudos to them.) As an aside, this seems remarkably stupid on his part, $3,000 a month is not exactly a lottery-winning amount and if he had just carried on his normal life just paying for bits here and there with cash, I suspect no-one would have noticed.

Which brings us to the subject of vetting. When a case like this occurs, someone always puts it down to a failure of the vetting system. And to some extent it is. Vetting systems are designed to do three things, firstly to establish that the person is who they say they are, by checking ID, looking at recent employment history and addresses over the last 10 years. Secondly, to find any personal weaknesses that might open them to blackmail or duress, such as a gambling problems, debts, sexual peccadilloes, lack of discretion etc. Lastly, it attempts to try and gauge their loyalty to their country.

There is also the polygraph, or lie detector. There are major doubts in the scientific community about their efficacy. In a 1998 U.S. Supreme Court case (United States vs Scheffer) the majority commented, “There is simply no consensus that polygraph evidence is reliable.”  Aldrich Ames passed two polygraphs whilst spying for the Russians, and, from his prison cell, described it as “junk science”.

Delisle seems to have decided to become a spy on a whim. All other things being equal, it is difficult to see how any vetting system could cope with that. People are extremely unpredictable and no vetting system will be infallible. Which makes it all the more important that the physical security precautions are right.

Apart from a couple of minor quibbles, I think, Mr. Black, whoever he is, has pretty well covered all the bases.



 
I was going back over the time line that CBC put out based on the court documents and there seems to be some inconsistencies somewhere (yes I know CBC and inconsistencies go hand in in hand).

Two things jump out. It was assumed that Delisle had access to information from his first contact in 2007 to the time of his arrest in 2012. But during that time, he was studying at RMC from 2008 to 2010. Would he have continued to have access to sensitive material during this period aside from non-academic summer sessions?

What is even less clear is that the CBC timeline seems to indicate that the trip to Brazil was in 2009, so he was on the radar for more than a year prior to his arrest. If that was the case, it's quite possible that the information was passing never reached its final desination, or at least in a form that would result in an actual breach in security.

Also, the broad focus by the media seems to be on his time at HMCS Trinity, which according to the time line started in August 2011 roughly 5 months before his arrest. From Sept 2010 to Aug 2011 he was posted to LFAA. It would seem that his time at Trinity would fall under the period of investigation. His arrest in January 2012 would have brought things to an end regardless. But it is also interesting that they didn't lock down Trinity for at least a week after Delisle's arrest.

So, having said all of that, it wouldn't be surprising that the other allies aren't overly concerned, as perhaps the breach of security may not have been as serious as it has been portrayed, and may well in fact have been allowed to run to see how much they info they could gain on methods, means, people and extent of the situation. And maybe send a little disinformation for good measure.

Hopefully the traitorous bastard is given a life 25 year vacation, preferably not the segregation unit but rather in general population.
 
cupper said:
But it is also interesting that they didn't lock down Trinity for at least a week after Delisle's arrest.
Can you credibly say what actions were taken within Trinity before/during/after this event?

Me neither.
 
Journeyman said:
Can you credibly say what actions were taken within Trinity before/during/after this event?

Me neither.

As I pointed out, there are inconsistencies in the time line. And it could well have been screwed up on dates and such.

I also pointed out that it seems that they had control over the info coming out for at least the period he was at Trinity.

Just speculation on my part. Not much to do when you are stuck in a hotel north of Philadelphia and all that is on the TV is the 5 hour pre debate punditry  :boring:

(they don't even have this much pre game for the superbowl  :facepalm: ).
 
cupper said:
So, having said all of that, it wouldn't be surprising that the other allies aren't overly concerned, as perhaps the breach of security may not have been as serious as it has been portrayed, and may well in fact have been allowed to run to see how much they info they could gain on methods, means, people and extent of the situation. And maybe send a little disinformation for good measure.

If as some say, he was already watched, then one could presume that his handlers and contacts were being watched as well.  At the same time, intelligence does not have to always be sensitive information.  The enemy may already have that sensitive information, and are only looking for bits of unclassified information to confirm what they already know.

For instance; they know that a Canadian Battle Group from Edmonton's 1 VP is going to Afghanistan.  Some soldiers, spouses, girl/boyfriend posts a "I'll say goodbye at the airport on Tuesday 31 Feb" and they have a tidbit more to fill in gaps.  Then they simply check Flight times, and other mundane things to paint the larger picture.  Remember this:  http://forums.army.ca/forums/threads/71137/post-678628.html#msg678628 

Spying does not always entail the Nation's/NATO's/whatever alliance's most secret information.
 
Totally agree with George. Open source is invaluable.  A curious and patient researcher can yield a treasure trove of information from the internet and social media. You may try to practice good PERSEC while utilizing the internet/social media, but there is a good chance that someone within your social network does not. Their poor practices can give up your own information.

Sometimes all you need is one piece of information to lead you to the rest, and conversely as George said, sometimes all you need is that piece to complete the picture.

Anyone who would ignore the power of open source is foolish IMHO.
 
Just cleaned up some polygraph back & forth so we can keep the thread dealing with the court case - the polygraph chat can continue here:
http://forums.milnet.ca/forums/threads/65788.0/all.html

Thanks.

Milnet.ca Staff
 
CTV is reporting that U.S. Ambassador to Canada, David Jacobson, has confirmed that Delisle not only sold Canadian secrets but also American secrets. Re-produced under the usual caveats of the Copyright Act.

Ambassador says Canadian spy sold Russia U.S. secrets too

Read more: http://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/ambassador-says-canadian-spy-sold-russia-u-s-secrets-too-1.1004250#ixzz29yH6NDI0

CTVNews.ca Staff
Published Sunday, Oct. 21, 2012 7:40AM EDT
Last Updated Sunday, Oct. 21, 2012 11:35AM EDT

U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Jacobson is revealing for the first time that Sub-Lt. Jeffrey Paul Delisle sold both American and Canadian secrets to Russia. In comments during an interview to be broadcast on CTV's Question Period Sunday, Jacobson said Delisle sold confidential U.S. government information as well as Canadian secrets.

"We don't talk a lot about national security information like this, for obvious reasons," Jacobson told host Kevin Newman.

"I will say this: he pleaded guilty to selling secrets of the United States and secrets of Canada to the Russians. That is obviously not good. We've had these problems in the past and we want to make sure and the Canadians want to make sure that nothing like this is going to happen again."

When pressed to explain further what U.S. secrets were passed on, Jacobson refused to reveal details.

"Well, I'm not going to get into exactly what he passed. But there was a lot of highly classified material," Jacobson said.

Earlier this month, Delisle admitted he had regularly passed military secrets to Russia over a five-year period in exchange for payments of approximately $3,000 a month.
But he didn't apologize. Instead he said people need to move beyond their ideas drawn from Cold War 'spy novels.'

In his Question Period interview with Newman, Jacobson said that, after the Delisle case, the U.S. stands behind the Canadian intelligence system.

"And we have confidence that Canada is a trusted ally and that we can continue to work with them," he said.

Delisle, who was arrested last January, stunned observers on Oct. 10 when he pleaded guilty to three espionage-related charges.

The 41-year-old had been employed as a threat assessment analyst at Trinity, a highly-secretive military facility in Halifax. His position gave him access to intelligence shared by the "Five Eyes"group, which includes Canada, Great Britain, the United States, New Zealand and Australia.

Delisle is due to be sentenced in January, 2013.

So far, the Canadian government has not publicly condemned Russia for the incident.


Article Link   Link also includes an video interview with the Ambassador.

I figured the fact that Delisle sold U.S. secrets was pretty obvious considering that one of the systems he comprised was a "Five Eyes" system. He also, in all probability, sold U.K., Australian, N.Z. and NATO secrets.
 
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