Daily News: Your secrets aren't safe, exspy says
Tuesday, June 17, 1997
By NANCY RADCLIFFE The Daily News

Big Brother is listening, warns a former Canadian spy.
Use words like "bombed" or "sabotaged" during telephone
conversations and you could be labelled a "possible terrorist," Mike Frost
said yesterday.
"Individuals are (being) caught in the broad net of electronic
surveillance" at an ever increasing rate, he said. "No one is safe from
being spied on.
Frost spent 35 years working as a spy for the Canadian Security
Establishment (CSE) a littleknown but powerful branch of National
Defence. He retired in 1990 and has detailed some of his experiences in a
bestseller called Spyworld.
`Accountable'
He wrote the book "to make Canadians aware of the CSE and to make
the CSE accountable," Frost told The Daily News after a speech to business
people yesterday during the Canadian Payments Association Conference at
the Halifax Sheraton.
"With modern technology, cheating is becoming easier and easier,"
and it's robbing Canadians of their rights to privacy, he told 300
executives.
A personal computer screen emits electromagnetic radiation that
can be read, with the right equipment and under the right circumstances,
at a distance of one to two blocks away, he said.[see TEMPEST site online]
Cell phones are the easiest to intercept, while cordless phones
are "an espionage agent's dream." But socalled land phones are also
vulnerable, he said. "All communications today are not only susceptible to
interception, they are in fact usually intercepted."
The casual conversation of a woman telling a friend her son
"bombed" in the school play contains a key word that triggers a "hard
copy" of the conversation. This is then passed to the appropriate section
of the CSE responsible for terrorism, Frost said.
"In all probability, it will end up in the garbage," he added. But
human error could land the woman's name in a CSE data bank as a "possible
terrorist." If the name comes up again the woman is promoted to "probable
terrorist," he said.
"I see many of you are shaking your heads. Well, don't. That case
happened while I was at CSE."
Frost spent most of his spying years in the former Soviet Union
and other communist countries. The Cold War once targeted nuclear arms and
troops, he said, but the emphasis has switched to "economic and industrial
espionage."
Businesses are now the targets and unemployed Cold War spies make
expertise readily available. "Canada is a prime location due to the large
number of U.S. multinationals that run Canadian operations."
Frost's message to senior managers attending the conference was to
exercise caution and, whenever possible, use telephone, fax and email
encryption.
Borrowing a quote from Ontario Liberal MP Derek Lee, Frost said:
"In light of the (CSE's) capacity to invade the privacy of Canadians ...
we have allowed it to operate far too long without some form of oversight.
Trudeau assignment
The CSE has an annual budget of about $350 million about "$1
million a day" of taxpayers' money but is allowed to operate without
legal guidelines or limits on its power, Frost said as he urged the crowd
to speak out to their MPs.
On the lighter side, Frost shared several anecdotes about his life
as a spy. He also said one of his more interesting cases was when he spied
on Margaret Trudeau to find out if she was "smoking dope."
"But if you want to know more about this operation," he said,
"you'll have to buy my book."