Canada border officer ‘went white’ with shock when he realised he had lost Meng Wanzhou’s device passwords, boss testifies
- Court hears information ‘accidentally’ ended up with police, breaching privacy laws
- Meng’s lawyers have depicted breach as a deliberate violation of her rights, and a covert exercise orchestrated by the American FBI
A Canadian border officer “went white” during a meeting a few days after the arrest of Meng Wanzhou, when he realised his note of the Huawei Technologies executive’s electronic passwords had gone missing, the officer’s superior has testified.
Meng’s extradition hearing in the Supreme Court of British Columbia in Vancouver previously heard the passwords ended up in the hands of police, in breach of Canada’s privacy laws. But Nicole Goodman, the Canada Border Services Agency’s chief of passenger operations at Vancouver’s airport, testified on Tuesday that she had no doubt the handover was accidental.
Goodman described a debriefing the week after Meng’s December 1, 2018 arrest at the airport. In the three hours before Meng was taken into custody by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, she underwent an immigration examination, during which border officer Scott Kirkland wrote down her electronic passwords on a loose piece of paper.
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During a conversation about information sharing, Kirkland “just went white and seemed distracted”, Goodman told Canadian government lawyer Diba Majzub, representing US interests in the extradition case. She said his reaction was so extreme she remembered it “vividly”.
“I said, ‘what’s wrong here Scott’, and that’s when he told me – he had had an epiphany that there was this piece of paper that had Ms Meng’s passwords on it and he doesn’t know where it is,” Goodman said.
It was later discovered the note had been given to RCMP officers along with Meng’s two phones, an iPad, her laptop and a memory stick, all seized during the border exam.