Cameron Jay Ortis, right, a former RCMP intelligence director accused of disclosing classified information, leaves the Ottawa Courthouse following a break in proceedings in Ottawa on Oct. 3.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
Jurors at the trial of a former RCMP civilian, who allegedly leaked classified information to targets of international criminal investigations, have been shown a series of secret documents located on a specialized USB stick found at his condo after his arrest.
Crown witness David Proulx, an RCMP sergeant and veteran of the force of 19 years, testified in court Thursday. While being questioned by prosecutor Judy Kliewer, Sgt. Proulx said he was involved in the decryption process.
An agreed statement of facts says that investigators seized numerous devices from defendant Cameron Ortis’s downtown Ottawa residence in the fall of 2019 after search warrants were executed, including five laptops and five external hard drives.
One of the items seized from Mr. Ortis’s apartment was a USB flash drive determined to contain a specialized encrypted operating system. The statement of agreed facts also said that several other devices were seized from Mr. Ortis’s office.
Sgt. Proulx is the Crown’s second witness so far in the trial, which began this week. The prosecution has said it intends to call approximately 12 people in total.
Sgt. Proulx was involved in work at the national police force called “Project Ace”: a probe sparked after Mounties looked at the laptop of a man named Vincent Ramos, who had been arrested in March, 2018, in Las Vegas, and found internal documents on it.
Mr. Ramos’s arrest was the result of an FBI investigation, which the RCMP and members of the Australian police service were asked to assist with, court heard this week.
Mr. Ramos was a Vancouver businessman whose company, Phantom Secure, produced encrypted communications devices used by criminal organizations. He was later charged in the United States with conspiring to distribute narcotics and racketeering, and was sentenced to nine years in prison.
Mr. Ramos is a central figure in the story of how the RCMP came to discover that classified documents had been shared outside of the force. Mr. Ortis is alleged to have been the one to have shared the information without authorization to do so.
Mr. Ortis faces six charges, including four that relate to allegedly breaching the Security of Information Act. He also faces a charge of breach of trust, as well as a computer-related charge.
On the first day of his trial on Tuesday, Mr. Ortis pleaded not guilty to all charges. His trial by jury is expected to last several weeks at the Superior Court of Justice in Ottawa.
Outside of the courtroom, Mr. Ortis’s defence lawyers have said they intend to argue their client did, in fact, have the authority to do everything he did. The defence, which also says Mr. Ortis has a “compelling” story to tell, has yet to detail its arguments in court.
At the time of his arrest, Mr. Ortis was the civilian director-general of the RCMP National Intelligence Co-ordination Centre, which afforded him access to sensitive, highly classified information. He was hired by the force in 2007, and had also held positions in operations research and national-security criminal investigations.
Earlier this week, during opening arguments to the jury, Ms. Kliewer said that when police searched Mr. Ortis’s apartment, they found several electronic devices including one encrypted USB stick that officers decrypted with some effort. She explained “encrypted” means that messages are scrambled and can’t be understood without the decoder.
Ms. Kliewer said the USB contained a folder called “The Project,” which included a subfolder with RCMP documents, e-mails and scripts for communication to “targets of international police investigations.”
She also said that e-mails sent to Mr. Ramos between February and May, 2015, culminated with an offer to provide the full version of classified documents to Mr. Ramos for $20,000.
While being cross-examined by Mr. Ortis’s lawyer, Jon Doody, on Thursday, Sgt. Proulx confirmed that the RCMP never found evidence of a payment to Mr. Ortis.
The agreed statement of facts says that by virtue of his employment with the RCMP, Mr. Ortis was permanently bound to secrecy, that he had top security clearance and that he was authorized to handle highly classified information.
A job description for the director of the operations research group – a role that Mr. Ortis was named to in April, 2013 – includes an expectation to provide senior executives in the RCMP with awareness on national security and issues that involve near-term security threats. It also states that the role involves, on occasion, operating in parallel to a continuing national-security criminal investigation.