Wednesday, June 22, 2011

This Week in World Spy News

Egypt - An Egyptian judicial official said yesterday that the prosecution does not plan to prosecute an American-Israeli man who was arrested in Cairo and accused of spying for Israel. (more)

USA - A Michigan professor called on Congress to investigate the government's alleged spying on him to discredit his blogging about the Iraq war. (more)

UK - While serving time under house arrest in an East Anglian home in the UK, those close to Julian Assange have claimed the British government are spying on him.
It follows the discovery of three CCTV cameras erected outside his temporary home at Ellingham Hall in the county of Norfolk. (more)

Thailand - Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva has admitted that the suspected leader of three men arrested for alleged spying on the Thai-Cambodian border has managed to flee the country. (more)

Lebanon - Druze politician Wiam Wahhab denied Thursday that a man charged with spying for Israel was his personal bodyguard. (more)
Sweden - Over fifteen countries are systematically conducting intelligence operations against Sweden, in Sweden or against Swedish interests overseas, according to security service Säpo. (more)

Mexico - Admiral Sergio Javier Lara Montellano, commander of the VIII Naval Region based in Acapulco, said that city police cameras...were aimed at various points inside the military installation. He affirmed that information on movements of the military thus obtained was leaked to organized crime groups. “The information was disseminated to crime groups by taxi drivers who serve as informants and by corrupt police in both the traffic police and in crime prevention,” he said. (more)

Austria - An idyllic Austrian village has apparently impressed Chinese architects so much that they have decided to copy it in their own country. But the townspeople living in the UNESCO World Heritage site are unhappy about the plans. This isn't the first time this sort of copying has occurred. China has also replicated amongst other places, Thames Town. (more)

India - The report that Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee’s conversations may have been tapped by sticking secret electronic devices in his chambers and that of his staff is a chilling reminder that Big Money now operates so close to the centres of power. ...the bugging devices were first discovered on September 4, 2010, when the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) swept Mukherjee’s office to check for eavesdropping gadgets, and found “plantable adhesive substances”. Translated, it means devices that can monitor conversations could have been stuck to these adhesives, including chewing gum-like stickies. (more)

Canada (Toronto International Airport) - An employee used surveillance equipment to spy on her ex-husband as he walked through the terminal with his girlfriend and kids. A man filed a complaint to the federal privacy commissioner after he discovered that his ex-wife, whose job it is to monitor the flow of traffic at Toronto Pearson International Airport using surveillance equipment, was using her special access to track him through the airport. (more)