Which Is It, Then?

"This not only raises the level of difficulty of verifying appropriate security safeguards in the future, it will probably dramatically increase security costs and cause delays to reach full operational capability."
Memo to then-Minister of National Defence by CF security officers

Sometimes the public's right to know should be delayed, it would appear. When the announcement was made and the newspapers in Canada duly reported that the 370-acre site of the former Nortel campus, with its 11 interconnected buildings was available as a result of that Canadian communications giant's financial collapse and sale, and the government was interested in procuring it as a new, integrated site for the Department of National Defence, it left the area wide open for exploitation.

In the period between the site's government acquisition and the time when refurbishment and the securing of the interior could be accomplished, in other words, the opportunity was there for someone, some group, some country, to clandestinely engage in placing technological devices that would result in military espionage. Not that the site hadn't already been deeply infiltrated, with the issue then being industrial espionage.

Reputedly highly successful, at that, with the country or its surrogates successfully capturing data, technology blueprints and whatever, and ruining Nortel's future prospects, in the process. So, the buildings, presumably, were well bugged, and as was the technical equipment contained therein. To which said, Wesley Wark, intelligence specialist with the University of Ottawa, DND would be able to sweep the campus handily, rendering it free for secure occupation.

Much ado was made of the general level of prospective unfitness for the security of the Department of National Defence to take possession of the sprawling campus, which was to undergo a near $1-billion facelift to suit its new occupants. Perhaps, after all was said and done, DND would bypass the opportunity to take possession of a campus that might rival that of the Pentagon, a kind of penis-envy psychosis fulfilled.

But no, says DND; and today's headline said it all "No bugs found at Nortel, DND says". What, then, is all the fuss about? Oh yes, former high-ranked Nortel employees attesting that listening devices discovered when Department of National Defence officials performed an initial security sweep were real and they were present. Nortel, said the former staff, had been victim to spy and computer hacking operations over a decade.

"We knew it was well penetrated", affirmed Michel Juneau-Katsuya, formerly senior officer with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. "When I was the chief of Asia-Pacific, we warned Nortel", he said. Asia-Pacific? Why, yes, of course; China is well known to take short cuts to research and discovery, to avail itself of research and development studies and business plans; for after all, why re-invent someone else's wheel?