The Dutch?
Now, I may not be a super spy myself, but I wouldn't have figured the dutch would have been the obvious buyers for purloined MI6 information.
Ex-spook jailed for selling secrets
Ex-MI6 worker Daniel Houghton has been sentenced to 12 months in prison for unlawfully disclosing top secret material, in breach of the Official Secrets Act. Houghton, 25 years old and previously living in Hoxton, London, worked for MI6 for just under two years. He left the organisation with Top Secret files which he then …
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Friday 3rd September 2010 19:19 GMT JohnG
The Dutch
That's because he holds both British and Dutch citizenship.
Are they now going to revoke his British passport, like they did for Anna Chapman? Unlike Houghton, she had not attempted to pass on any British secrets to anyone. EU rules allow EU nationals to be barred entry for criminal offences or matters of national security.
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Monday 6th September 2010 07:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
going dutch
maybe you think james bond films are documentaries?
it's quite possible the dutch spy was pretending to work for someone else. spies sometimes tell lies and use false identities you know. any competent intelligence agency will be keen to find out what another one is up to, who its agents are, etc.
intelligence agencies don't just spy on the opposition. they will spy on allies and friendly powers too. you'd expect mi6 and gchq to try and find out what line the yanks or aussies were going to take at trade talks or what sort of deal the germans and french were cooking for the next eu summit. i'd be rather peeved if her majesty's spies didn't do that of thing.
paris icon because she works for mossad and nsa. allegedly.
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Friday 3rd September 2010 14:03 GMT ratfox
Only 12 months??
I'm really surprised here. Ok, so he would not have hurt anybody directly, and anyway he failed. But still, I would have assumed that such a breach of trust would be punished more severely in these circles.
- M doesn't mind you earning a little money on the side, Dryden. She'd just prefer it if it wasn't selling secrets.
- You have the wrong man, Bond. If M was so sure that I was bent, she'd have sent a double-0. Your file shows no kills, and it takes...
-Two.
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Friday 3rd September 2010 15:57 GMT Colin Brett
@ratfox
"I'm really surprised here. Ok, so he would not have hurt anybody directly, and anyway he failed. "
He wouldn't have killed anyone directly but, had he managed to sell it to a foreign power or terrorist outfit, they would have combed the lists, eliminated any agents that posed a threat to them and then perhaps passed the info on to more <insert your favourite badguy here>, so they could remove their threats.
How many on the list? 300? That's 300 agents burned plus however many they ratted out themselves under duress or torture (depending who is using the information).
12 months is excessively lenient, I would say.
Or have I been reading too much Tom Clancy?
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Friday 3rd September 2010 14:47 GMT DrXym
I would have thought...
... the best way to sell stuff to a foreign power is to catch a plane to a nearby country, walk into the suitable embassy, ask for their security officer and present them with a sample of the merchandise they can expect if they stump up the £££.
And the worst way to sell stuff to a foreign power is to talk to a division B ally and watch as they shop you to your own intelligence services. Still 12 months is getting off pretty lightly.
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Friday 3rd September 2010 23:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
the Dutch
I'd assume that we spied on our allies in a more "sideways glance at their homework while teacher has their back turned" rather than buying stuff directly from agents.
I doubt they'd risk the possibility of their transaction getting back to British Intelligence or even that it was a deliberate sting? My knowledge of inter-country espionage is limited to novels and films but it seems unlikely.
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Friday 3rd September 2010 23:30 GMT Anonymous Coward
12 months?!
hmm.
Had I been in charge, the penalty for this would have been to be "hanged by the teeth until he falls into a pot of boiling electronic fire".. paraphrasing a certain author...
Failing that, death by Asian giant hornets with an adrenaline drip just so he suffers more.. that'll learn 'em.
AC, because wiring said traitor up to it would also be an effective "deterrent"....
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Monday 6th September 2010 11:25 GMT myhandle
Didn't think they were Dutch?
But he was Dutch himself. I suppose they could have been Dutch imports, but a native Dutchman would have trouble hiding his Dutch accent from another Dutchman. Despite the fact the Americans in the movies would do it all the time with Germans and get away with it :-)
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Monday 6th September 2010 08:45 GMT John Smith 19
*very* fishy
He's got access to a list of 300 agents within 2 years of starting work.
He's able to copy the list to removable storage and get out of the building with it.
MI6 appear to be *unaware* the data has been copied and/or copied to removable media.
He then decides to sell it in Holland (not such a bad idea). But did he *really* think he was selling it to *Dutch* intelligence?
He get's 12 months, half of which is already served. How long did David Shayler get?
BTW it is unclear which of the 300 were under diplomatic cover (and hence diplomatic immunity) and which were not.
I'd still say the loss of the USB stick from the bag of a SOCA staff member in Columbia was a *bigger* loss and probably lead to a lot more immediate death, given most of them were informants on the drugs trade.
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Monday 6th September 2010 09:00 GMT Henry Wertz 1
Disabled? How about not having any?
When I worked at the university surplus outlet, we'd frequently get machines with CD readers -- departments would special order computers specifically without burners. And that wasn't even a concern about secrets, it was a concern that people'd waste time burning each other music or whatever. In the case of Top Secret, I think I would "disable" the USB ports physically -- probably either fill them with hot glue or bust out the innards on unused ports, and either get a PS2 keyboard and mouse, or glue them in if they are USB. (I just don't think I would trust disabling ports in software.)
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Monday 6th September 2010 12:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
Rewriting This For You
"Given recent enormous government data losses you might assume that computer systems at the highest levels of security would have things like CD burners and USB ports disabled."
should read
"Given that the data is very sensitive and affects 300 officers, you might assume that computer systems have some access control, logging, reporting and alerting systems in place. The same could be said about INSCOM"
Just ten years ago I read about lots of stuff built into Unix systems to accurately log anything which happens on a computer. Now that juvenile US Army "Analyst" managed to copy tens of thousands of "Top Secret" messages UNDETECTED (and then sent it to Wikileaks).
All the smart people have apparently deserted Anglosaxon government offices and gone into Destructive Finance, errm I mean Quant Finance.
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