The disclosures have occurred in the leak of passport data of the US Embassy diplomats published on the Internet. Recall that on August 29, the video posted in YouTube video poez showed the scan-copies of the passports of five US Embassy employees. The problem is that the passport data of members of foreign diplomatic representation, moreover, the scanned passports, cannot be accessible openly. Daniel Ioannisyan, Program Coordinator of the “Union of Informed Citizens” NGO, in an interview with “Aravot”, presented some remarkable information about how this leak could have happened.
He pulled out two factors: “The first is who has the passport scans of these diplomats. Here, we must note that they have available with the US State Department and the National Security Service of Armenia, in the Sect system where the scanned data of the passports are loaded in the border checkpoints.”
Daniel Ioannisyan drew attention to the fact that usually the two opened pages of the passports are scanned, while when a passport is scanned at the border checkpoint thru Bayazet system, only one page of the passport is scanned, “The passport data of US diplomats published on the Internet were in the same scanned form. This once again proves that these scans on the RA border probably were made in “Zvartnots” and the leak of this information is coming from the NSS. The whole question is whether the NSS has transferred this to some Russian absurd propagators or the RF Federal Security Service, which as we know is also involved in the RA border guard mission at the Meghri checkpoint, “Zvartnots” airport, maybe it has an access to this system Bayazet, sect and so on.” The “Union of Informed Citizens” NGO sent an inquiry to NSS to determine whether the Russian side has an access to the scanned passports or not.
The deadline to answer as prescribed by law expires on September 12-13 but there is not answer. According to Daniel Ioannisyan, in that case, it is beyond doubt that this is just transferred by Russians to their propagators, “If not, then it can be assumed that either this information was stolen from the NSS which speaks of the fact that the NSS is not working well, or there was a leakage. Both cases show that the NSS has serious problems.” Daniel Ionnisyan tends not to believe that the data are stolen from the National Security Service, “Apparently, they were just taken, and the NSS has given access to Russians on this.”
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Recall that the RA MFA spokesperson Tigran Balayan considered this leak a provocation. Back to MFA’s statement, Mr. Ionnisyan expressed surprise that one ministry criticizes the other ministry for its poor work. Referring to the topic of the possible leak, Daniel Ionnisyan said, “I do not think that the NSS has submitted the passport scans of the US diplomats to absurd propagators deliberately, simply NSS has submitted them to Russian law enforcement agencies, and they have transferred them to propagators who want to cause harm to the Armenian-American relations with their actions.”
Tatev HARUTYUNYAN
“Aravot”
15.09.2016
