The lawyer for a Canadian naval officer who confessed to selling military secrets to the Russians says he is stunned his client wasn’t caught sooner.

Mike Taylor finds it baffling that Sub-Lt. Jeffrey Paul Delisle used floppy discs and thumb drives to smuggle sensitive data from his secure office in Halifax to his home and then on to Russian agents via an online email provider.

Taylor says the way the 41-year-old spy was paid by the Russians should also have been picked up by Delisle’s superiors at HMCS Trinity, the Defence facility where he worked as a threat assessment analyst.

The lawyer wouldn’t detail specific security lapses at the office, but he says some of that material might come up at Delisle’s two-day sentencing in Nova Scotia provincial court in January.

Delisle pleaded guilty earlier this month to breach of trust and espionage.

He was arrested in January after a trip last fall to Brazil, where he met his Russian handler.