Canadian official found guilty of providing secrets to criminals

According to his lawyer, the stakes were high when Cameron Ortis took on a covert mission while working in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, where he was civilian director of an elite intelligence unit. “He protected Canada from serious and imminent threats,” lawyer Mark Ertel told a jury in Ottawa.

But prosecutors and witnesses at Mr. Ortis’ trial said no such mission existed and that he instead provided sensitive information to people under criminal investigation without the consent or knowledge of police.

“His story was nothing more than an attempt to make you believe that his criminal, self-motivated actions were aimed at some lofty and secret purpose,” Judy Kliewer, one of the prosecutors, told jurors, while acknowledging that the true motive from Mr Ortis. remains a mystery to researchers.

On Wednesday, Mr Ortis was convicted of four counts of providing confidential operational information to four men targeted by police investigations, breach of trust and unauthorized use of a computer.

Mr Ortis will be sentenced in January and faces up to 15 years in prison.

It was a remarkable downfall for Ortis, 51, who even prosecutors agreed was highly respected when he was arrested in 2020 and charged with providing classified information.

He rose from director of operations research, the position he held when prosecutors said he leaked secrets, to director general of the National Intelligence Coordination Unit. Both were unusually high positions for a civilian within the national police force.

The trial marked the first time charges were brought under Canada’s 1985 Information Security Act – which makes Mr Ortis “permanently bound by confidentiality” – have been tried in court.

Therefore, Mr. Otis’ testimony was held behind closed doors to protect security secrets, with only redacted transcripts made public.

Judge Robert Maranger of the Ontario Superior Court told jurors that Mr. Ortis “may be the first Canadian to testify in defense of himself without the opportunity to tell” the jury “the full story.”

That, combined with Mr. Ortis’s decision not to reveal several details, means that much of the case remains murky, even after his lawyers and prosecutors submitted 500 pages of evidence they both agreed on, as well as testimony from a dozen witnesses for seven weeks.

The case against Mr Ortis emerged from a US investigation into another Canadian, Vincent Ramos, following that man’s arrest in Washington state in 2018.

Mr. Ramos, whose company provided encryption services to drug cartels, was sentenced to nine years in prison on charges of racketeering and conspiracy.

His company, Phantom Secure, sold thousands of special cell phones that it claimed were impervious to wiretapping and other surveillance techniques to various criminal groups around the world.

Investigators found that emails on a laptop belonging to Mr. Ramos contained confidential law enforcement documents, including a police review of criminal activity linked to him, reports from the Canada Money Laundering Agency and a summary of information about Phantom Secure that was shared through a intelligence alliance between Canada. , the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Great Britain.

The documents were an example of what Mr. Ortis was offering for sale. In an email, agreed to by both parties, sent by Mr. Ortis: Using the pseudonym “See All Things,” Mr. Ramos is urged to set up a secure email account and receive more files in exchange for 20,000 Canadian dollars.

“I am in the process of acquiring hard-to-obtain information that individuals in uniquely high-risk businesses find valuable and selling that information to them,” said an email to Mr. Ramos, adding that the sender “received a number of documents relating have on your current efforts” and says, “some call this hacking, others cracking.”

During the trial, investigators said they found no evidence that Mr. Ortis received payments from Mr. Ramos or the two other men he was accused of providing secrets to or from a fourth man he was accused of trying to to provide information. He was also charged with breach of trust and unauthorized use of a computer.

But Mr. Ortis said in his testimony that the emails were part of a special, top-secret, international mission he launched while on leave to study French in 2015. He said what he called Project OR Nudge came to him from someone at “a foreign agency.”

An “undertaking” prevented him, he testified, from identifying that person or disclosing what threat to Canada prompted him to take on this task.

His agreement with the individual, he said, even prohibits him from telling anyone else in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) about the operation, because his foreign counterpart said there were “moles” within the Canadian National Police who were running the operation would sidetrack or undermine. the project.

Mr. Ortis said he used police reports and other intelligence about people under investigation as bait to get his four targets to open email accounts using Tutanota, a secure email service based in Germany now known as Tuta.

In his testimony, Mr Ortis said Tutanota was essentially a “shop window” for police and intelligence services. Instead of offering secure email, he testified, researchers were able to collect users’ communications, which were then distributed through the intelligence alliance of mostly English-speaking allies known as Five Eyes.

Although no one from Tutanota testified at the trial, Brandon Sundh, a spokesman for the company, said in an email that it has “never worked with a secret service as a ‘storefront’.”

He added: “We view these untrue statements as an attack on the broader privacy community and a more general attack on citizens’ right to privacy.”

Ms Kliewer, the prosecutor, told jurors that Operation OR Nudge is a “fiction” that “makes no sense”.

“He was not operating on behalf of the RCMP,” Ms. Kliewer told the jury. “This was his own doing.”

Several members of the mounted police, including Mr. Ortis’s superior, testified that the unit Mr. Ortis led had been ordered solely by identifying threats to national security and reporting them to top police leaders. They said he had no authority to conduct undercover operations or pass on classified information.

Other evidence showed that Mr. Ramos had set up a Tutanota account before Mr. Ortis could propose that move. That led to a flood of Internet searches about Mr. Ortis’s service, according to records filed with the court.

Other computer data found by investigators shows that Mr Ortis, who has a PhD in cybercrime, has researched how to transfer money anonymously, launder Bitcoin and avoid video surveillance.

There was no evidence of it either Project Nudge in one of the RCMP’s computer systems. In his testimony, Mr. Ortis said that because he did not collect intelligence, he did not need to record his activities.

The leaks that Mr. Ortis was convicted of providing or attempting to provide were limited to the four men and lasted only a short period, according to the agreed statement of facts.

During his extensive testimony, Mr. Ortis was asked by his lawyer whether he now regrets his actions.

“I don’t make decisions based on my career or career prospects, but I could not have imagined or imagined that any of this would happen,” he said. “Of course, in a way, I regret everything that has happened to everyone over the last four years. But what I did wasn’t wrong.”