When news broke that Ortis, a senior civilian RCMP intelligence official, had been accused of violating secrecy laws, to his friends it just didn’t compute
When Cameron Ortis showed up at Uncle Bill’s Pub in Abbotsford, B.C., for his 10-year high school reunion, there were two things that stood out.
What is clear is that Ortis had access to a smorgasbord of some of the most sensitive files — not only belonging to Canada but to its closest allies. The fallout and potential damage this alleged breach could have on our international relationships remains to be seen. According to the narrative, Ortis encountered one of his first brushes with danger after he and a companion were apparently kidnapped briefly by locals and then had to talk their way to safety. Parry said one of Ortis’s closest friends told him recently that Ortis was shaken up after that trip and friends surrounded him to try to keep him busy.
His interest in Asia continued at UBC, where he pursued graduate studies from 1999 through 2006. He cites in the opening pages of his PhD dissertation the reasons why he homed in on East Asia as the focus of his study into cyber intrusions. In part, it’s because of the region’s “growing reputation as a breeding ground for software piracy, crackers, virus writers and lackadaisical system administrators. The region plays host to the most advanced use of the Internet by organized crime groups.
When it came to Ortis’s views in the post 9/11 world, his opinions weren’t radical, but they were critical, friends said. And the way he expressed them went beyond superficialities like “Bush is a prick,” Parry said. He spent several years in the National Security Criminal Investigations program, said Angus Smith, a retired senior intelligence advisor who worked in the same unit.
In 2013, the force underwent a major re-organization within its federal policing branch, leading to the creation of a new unit called the National Intelligence Coordination Centre. Ortis’s contact with his B.C. friends diminished over time, but during one visit back home, Parry remembers Ortis joking that he was Jack Bauer’s boss, a reference to the fictional counter-terrorist agent in the popular TV show “24.”
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