Canadian authorities announced on Friday that they’d arrested a senior civilian official and charged him with espionage-related offenses in a case that authorities say has affected multiple national security agencies. So who is Cameron Ortis? What do the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have to do with spying and should the possible spy up north worry the U.S.?
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Canadian news outlets report that authorities there are treating Ortis’ case as a major breach of security, with implications for the loss of secrets across multiple Canadian national security agencies. He reportedly held the rank of a civilian director general in the RCMP’s intelligence unit. A 2008 conference agenda available online described Ortis as a “Senior Intelligence Research Specialist, National Security Criminal Investigations, RCMP.”