this is the news report that could easily topple the Conservative Government and its burried off the news

Editorial: How risky is it to move DND to the Nortel campus?

 

 

BY OTTAWA CITIZEN EDITORIAL, OTTAWA CITIZEN OCTOBER 1, 2013

 

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The discovery of electronic bugs in the former Nortel campus that was slated to be the new home of the Department of National Defence smacks of a cold-war era whodunit with all the twists and turns of a le Carré thriller, but the implications could be far more serious for national security.

The sprawling campus, made up of 11 interconnected buildings sitting on a 370-acre site in the western Greenbelt, was supposed to be our own version of the Pentagon, a secure and impregnable symbol of national defence. Now we find out it is possibly riddled with snooping devices we had no idea were there, or indeed who planted them. Now we learn the DND is reconsidering whether to relocate to this now highly compromised location, and it raises the question what kind of homework the department did before it made the decision to move in.

Anyone familiar with Nortel in its heyday would know that one of the recurring issues for the company was its lax security.

For years, there were reports that the company had been infiltrated by hackers and industrial spies, thought to be mainly Chinese, digging for its highly valued secrets. In fact, an internal security report by the company suggested that, since 2000, hackers had been able to download vital research and development plans of the company, and some experts believed the Chinese hacking activity contributed to its subsequent demise.

Shocking as it seems, the discovery of bugging devices should not have come as a surprise. Officials at DND certainly had concerns about the site’s porous security — security officers flagged the issue last year — but this doesn’t appear to have been part of the consideration on relocation.

The question now is what to do with this $208-million campus. Is it worth the risk to move DND into a building complex that is known to be compromised? The fact that the listening devices were discovered is good news, and some security experts say DND has the technology to track down and remove all of them, especially because they are likely to be leftovers from an industrial espionage operation against Nortel. But since it is impossible to prove the non-existence of undiscovered devices, suspicions will always remain about the integrity of the site.

In any case, making the Nortel campus secure for a department as security-conscious as DND is going to cost tens of millions of dollars. The Nortel campus may well be the best place to relocate DND, and we may well have the technology to clean up the site. But the cabinet should think carefully before it gives final approval for the move.

Ottawa Citizen

this was breaking front page news last night  and now its buried!!!!