MI6 employee arrested for trying to sell documents

March 6, 2010 by Leave a comment

Daniel Houghton

Daniel Houghton

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
British authorities have detained a former MI6 employee after he was caught trying to sell classified documents to MI5 spooks posing as foreign agents. Daniel Houghton, 25, who was arrested on Monday at a central London hotel, worked for MI6 between September 2007 and May 2009. During the course of his employment, he apparently stole MI5 (and not MI6, as has been suggested) electronic documents, classified secret and top-secret, by copying them to CDs and DVDs. He then attempted to sell the material, which is said to relate to “techniques for intelligence collection”, for £2 million ($2.9 million), to MI5 agents posing as intelligence handlers of an unspecified foreign intelligence service. Read more of this post

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

News you may have missed #0262

January 21, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • US Navy posts classified report on China by mistake. An obviously confused official of the US Office for Naval Intelligence (ONI) posted on an open website a classified USN report on the state of the Chinese navy. The 47-page document has now been reposted on the website of the Federation of American Scientists.
  • Analysis: Think different, CIA. Robert Jervis, professor of international politics at Columbia University and a consultant to the US intelligence community, explains that one of the biggest challenges for American intelligence is the way the human brain works.

Bookmark and Share

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

News you may have missed #0248

January 10, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Cuba insists jailed US contractor is secret service agent. Cuban officials say that a US citizen working for Maryland-based international aid group Development Alternatives Inc., who was arrested in Havana last month, was actually recruiting local Cubans to spy on the government.
  • Analysis: Spying in Eastern Europe heats up again. The Cold War may be 20 years dead and buried, but it seems that the old East-West spying game is not only alive and kicking, but gaining vigor in places like Warsaw, Prague and Tallinn.
  • Obama designates new list of secrecy gatekeepers. The US president has designated over two dozen officials as “original classification authorities” (OCAs), who have the power to classify government information as Top Secret or Secret, and (in most cases) to delegate such authority to their subordinates. Importantly, the directive says that OCAs will lose their job if they fail to “receive training in proper classification […] at least once a calendar year”.

Bookmark and Share

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,