After 16-years of legal wrangling it appears that a major Ecuadorian contamination lawsuit against oil giant Chevron may be on the point of collapse.
Just months before the case was scheduled to conclude, Chevron have posted video footage on their website which they say shows evidence of Ecuadorian officials connected with the case, involved in bribes relating to the lucrative cleanup operation to be funded by Chevron if they lose the case.
While the merits of the video evidence are a matter of interest in themselves, from a counter espionage perspective, the remarkable thing is that the two hours of video evidence released by Chevron were apparently recorded using nothing more sophisticated than a £15 camcorder pen. The ‘007 spy pen’ was of a type available for anyone to buy from Amazon and other online toy and gadget retailers.
Devices such as this are a now ten a penny. The pen in question has a 4GB internal memory (enough for 3 hours of video footage) and can be charged from a standard USB port. Despite this impressive spec it looks like a normal pen and even has an ink reservoir so it writes like one too.
With tools such as this at anybody’s disposal, companies and individuals need to be more vigilant than ever about their information security arrangements.
You may think that once the meeting rooms have been swept for bugs and the computers have all been locked down, your information is secure. However, as the Chevron case reveals, the human factor is undoubtedly the hardest part of the security equation to resolve.
If you have concerns about how you are dealing with potential threats to your privacy, whatever their nature, contact QCC (from a secure location of course) and ask the professionals for advice.