Victims’ families say Jon Boutcher’s report into British spy proves state and IRA were ‘co-conspirators’ in murder

The police chief who led the inquiry into a murderous British spy in the IRA known as Stakeknife has condemned MI5 for stalling his investigation, as his report was hailed by victims’ families as proof that the British state and the IRA had been “co-conspirators” in murder.

Jon Boutcher criticised attempts “to undermine me and the investigation” and spoke of a delay strategy deployed by the secret services as he revealed that agent Stakeknife had probably killed more people than he saved in the service of the British state.

The army’s claim that Stakeknife saved “hundreds” of lives was “implausible”, “rooted in fables and fairytales” and should have rung “alarm bells”. He said it was probable that the handling of Stakeknife “resulted in more lives being lost than saved” .

Stakeknife was involved in “very serious and wholly unjustifiable criminality, including murder”.

There were several cases of murder where the security forces had advance intelligence but did not intervene in order to protect sources.

Boutcher had “extremely fractious spells” with the secret services. He was forced to hold several meetings with MI5 to raise “concerns regarding access to information, its decision to classify as ‘top secret’ an accumulation of ‘secret’ documents, the fact that solicitors representing former security force personnel had been given greater and unorthodox access to MI5 materials and my concern that its strategy was one of delay”.

When Operation Kenova tried to submit evidence files in October 2019 to prosecutors on Scappaticci and members of the security services relating to cases of murder, abduction and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, that “MI5 informed us that the building’s security accreditation had expired and we therefore could not proceed”. The evidence was finally submitted in February 2020.

The pigeon was found last May with a message that was said to look like it contained Chinese characters

Indian police have cleared a suspected Chinese spy pigeon and released it into the wild after eight months in detention, according to reports in the Press Trust of India.

The pigeon’s ordeal began in May when it was captured near a port in Mumbai with two rings tied to its legs, carrying a message that was said to look like it was in Chinese, local media said. Police suspected it was involved in espionage and took it in, later sending it to Mumbai’s Bai Sakarbai Dinshaw Petit hospital for animals.

As Beijing has increased its efforts to recruit Taiwanese people, the number of spying cases has risen

In November, a Taiwan court heard accusations that two serving soldiers had accepted bribes from Chinese agents to record a video declaring their loyalty to China and their intention to defect in the event of a war. The video reportedly made its way into Chinese propaganda materials.

Weeks later, a conviction over a similar accusation was upheld against a retired army colonel. The colonel was found guilty of having accepted monthly payments totalling more than half a million Taiwan dollars (£12,500) to delay his retirement for years and serve as a spy. Local media reports said the colonel also posed for a photo holding a handwritten note, pledging his loyalty to Beijing’s cause of annexing Taiwan to the Chinese state.

Joshua Schulte, who prosecutors said was responsible for agency’s largest data breach, also guilty of possessing child abuse images

A former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) software engineer who was convicted for carrying out the largest theft of classified information in the agency’s history and of charges related to child abuse imagery was sentenced to 40 years in prison on Thursday.

The 40-year sentence by US district judge Jesse Furman was for “crimes of espionage, computer hacking, contempt of court, making false statements to the FBI, and child pornography”, federal prosecutors said in a statement. The judge did not impose a life sentence as sought by prosecutors.

Enlarge / Cybercriminals or anonymous hackers use malware on mobile phones to hack personal and business passwords online. (credit: Getty Images)

Hackers suspected of working for the Chinese government are mass exploiting a pair of critical vulnerabilities that give them complete control of virtual private network appliances sold by Ivanti, researchers said.

As of Tuesday morning, security company Censys detected 492 Ivanti VPNs that remained infected out of 26,000 devices exposed to the Internet. More than a quarter of the compromised VPNs—121—resided in the US. The three countries with the next biggest concentrations were Germany, with 26, South Korea, with 24, and China, with 21.

(credit: Censys)

Microsoft’s customer cloud service hosted the most infected devices with 13, followed by cloud environments from Amazon with 12, and Comcast at 10.

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Attorney general alleges ‘one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations’ of US government by foreign agent

The US government charged a former diplomat who served on the national security council in the 1990s with secretly serving as an agent of Cuba’s government for more than 40 years.

Victor Manuel Rocha was arrested on Friday, following a long-running FBI counterintelligence investigation. The US ambassador to Bolivia from 2000 to 2002, Rocha also worked on the national security council from 1994 to 1995. He is charged with committing multiple federal crimes.

Journalist arrested on espionage charges in March set to remain in jail until at least 30 November

A Moscow court has extended the detention of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was arrested on espionage charges at the end of March.

During a brief hearing on Thursday, the court ordered that Gershkovich should remain in jail until 30 November, Russian news agencies reported. His pre-trial detention had initially been scheduled to expire next week. He is being held in the notorious Lefortovo prison in Moscow, and could face a sentence of up to 20 years if found guilty.

With offices on both sides of the Atlantic, Nardello & Co is tracking assets for the new managers of collapsed crypto exchange FTX

The office is a bland building near Chancery Lane. Neither its position, tucked away on a quiet backroad in the City, nor its facade, an iron grey home for grey suits, seems accidental.

Founded in the US in 2003 and incorporated in the UK four years later, Nardello & Co is part of a lesser-known branch of London’s financial and legal ecosystem: corporate spies for hire.

Lenore Taylor looks back at Guardian Australia’s first big scoop and its far-reaching repercussions

• Ten years of Guardian Australia’s most impactful journalism
• Support Guardian Australia journalism by making a contribution of any size

Lenore Taylor remembers the pressure she felt carrying a USB stick from Sydney to Canberra with the contents of a top-secret leak implicating the Australian government in a spying scandal that reached the then president of Indonesia’s personal mobile phone.

It was 2013 – the same year that David Miranda, the late partner of former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, was detained in Heathrow airport for nine hours after a series of stories revealed mass surveillance programs by the US National Security Agency.