Canadian police man Cameron Ortiz convicted for passing sensitive & secret information to foreign entity
Cameron Jay Ortis, a former RCMP intelligence official convicted of breaching Canada’s secrets law, arrives for his trial at the courthouse in Ottawa on Thursday, Nov. 16, 2023. (Justin Tang/Canadian Press)
Cameron Ortis, convicted by a jury Wednesday of violating Canada’s secrets act, was arrested when he was “on the cusp” of passing state secrets to a foreign entity, a Crown prosecutor alleged during the former RCMP official’s bail hearing in 2019.
When RCMP officers raided Cameron Ortis’s condo in late August 2019, they were hunting for clues related to leaks of internal police documents to criminal groups.
Their investigation took a quick turn into the murky world of international espionage when they analyzed electronic equipment and documents seized at the residence of the national police force’s top intelligence analyst.
According to an unsealed 2020 court document, which can now be reported on, RCMP investigators feared Ortis was planning to share information with Chinese officials.
On several to-do lists police found in his condo, Ortis noted mundane activities like donating blood, cleaning his apartment, working out and filing dental insurance claims — in addition to tasks related to what he called “the project.” Prosecutors said this was the name given to his plan to leak state secrets.
On his computer equipment, RCMP agents discovered 488 highly classified documents.
According to information disclosed in court in the fall of 2019 — which can now be reported publicly for the first time — almost all of these documents were printed by Ortis at his RCMP offices between September 2018 and August 2019.
