Cameron Ortis trial: what the jury didn’t hear about the convicted RCMP leaker
Global News
Court filings and evidence -- all covered by publication bans until now -- reveal that authorities were gravely worried about Ortis's next steps.
A jury has declared former RCMP intelligence official Cameron Jay Ortis guilty of disclosing secrets to targets of police interest in violation of the Security of Information Act.
The verdict came after weeks of testimony from Ortis and current and former colleagues at the national police force.
But there’s much more the jurors didn’t hear.
A sworn statement filed in court, evidence from bail proceedings and a preliminary ruling from the presiding judge — all covered by publication bans until now — reveal that authorities were gravely worried about Ortis’s next steps.
In the summer of 2019, Ortis was director general of the RCMP’s National Intelligence Co-ordination Centre, a unit that aimed to track emerging trends of interest to the force.
He assumed the post in 2016 after several years with the RCMP’s Operations Research group, which compiled and developed highly classified information on terror cells, cybercriminals and transnational criminal networks.
Between Aug. 26 and Sept. 11, 2019, police conducted covert searches at Ortis’s downtown Ottawa apartment, where they found a laptop with a user folder entitled “Batman.”
It contained 400 classified documents related to national security that had been accessed and printed from a computer terminal allowing access to the Canadian Top Secret Network. The CTSN is a highly classified network that allows information to be shared within the Canadian law enforcement intelligence community.
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