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My colleague Jim Bagnall and I recently wrote a feature on the move by the Department of National Defence to the former Nortel campus in west end Ottawa. More than 8,000 military and civilian staff will make the move.

One of the issues that emerged when we were researching and writing the article had to do with the mystery of listening/spy devices that were planted at the Nortel Campus.

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So what happened? Were listening devices found at the Nortel Campus or not?

The Department of National Defence keeps changing its story on that issue.

In 2013 the Citizen reported that workers preparing the former Nortel complex as the new home for the DND had discovered electronic eavesdropping devices. It shouldn’t have come as a big surprise. The year before it had been revealed that Nortel was the target of industrial espionage for almost a decade, with the main culprits thought to be based in China. An internal security study by Nortel suggested that hackers had also been able to download research and development studies and business plans as far back as 2000. The hackers also placed spyware into some employee computers.