Lost Document Débâcle

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So anoth­er intel­li­gence offi­cial has mis­laid some highly clas­si­fied doc­u­ments — this time by leav­ing them lying on a com­muter train depart­ing Water­loo sta­tion. And while the Cab­in­et office (his soon to be former employ­er?) is des­per­ately try­ing to down­play the sens­it­iv­ity of these doc­u­ments, let’s not be fooled. “Top Secret – Strap – Can/Aus/UK/US Eyes Only” is very high level clas­si­fic­a­tion indeed.

In this case, it appears that the offi­cial may not even have had per­mis­sion to remove these doc­u­ments in the first place. Cab­in­et Min­is­ter, Ed Miliband, is quoted in the Daily Mail today as say­ing that there had been ‘a clear breach’ of rules for­bid­ding the remov­al of doc­u­ments without author­isa­tion. Then, hav­ing removed these doc­u­ments illeg­ally, the intel­li­gence offi­cial appears to have taken them out of the secur­ity briefcase and read them in pub­lic, before leav­ing them on the train.

One can only spec­u­late wheth­er he was drunk, simply care­less, or wheth­er this was a tim­id attempt to blow the whistle and draw the BBC’s atten­tion to yet fur­ther proof that the “war on ter­ror” is overhyped.

The secur­ity breach is not unusu­al. Over the years, drunk­en spies have mis­laid count­less doc­u­ments in pubs and on the jour­ney home. In 2000 an MI6 officer even left a laptop in a Vaux­hall bar. How­ever, the secret inform­a­tion usu­ally has a degree of low-level pro­tec­tion – the com­puter is encryp­ted or the doc­u­ments are locked in a secur­ity briefcase, not left lying around in an orange folder.

When I was work­ing for the spooks, the drink­ing cul­ture was endem­ic. Seni­or man­agers set the pace, with some going to the pub most days for lunch – one pub was fam­ously called Base Camp Two – sink­ing a few pints, and then doz­ing the after­noon away. Of course, the young­er officers fol­lowed suit, reg­u­larly meet­ing after work for a drink and a moan. Often, they would have secur­ity briefcases with them to take away the next day for work, and it was a mir­acle that more doc­u­ments were not lost.

There is spec­u­la­tion in the media that the man will be dis­cip­lined. He has already been sus­pen­ded. But the media appears to be miss­ing a trick: this is also a breach of the Offi­cial Secrets Act 1989. In this case, Sec­tion 1(1) will apply:

“A per­son who is or has been—

(a) a mem­ber of the secur­ity and intel­li­gence ser­vices; or

(b) a per­son noti­fied that he is sub­ject to the pro­vi­sions of this subsection,

is guilty of an offence if without law­ful author­ity he dis­closes any inform­a­tion, doc­u­ment or oth­er art­icle relat­ing to secur­ity or intel­li­gence which is or has been in his pos­ses­sion by vir­tue of his pos­i­tion as a mem­ber of any of those ser­vices or in the course of his work while the noti­fic­a­tion is or was in force.”

So, if this offi­cial was drunk and care­less with the nation’s secrets, he deserves to face the music. The doc­u­ments were seen by a mem­ber of pub­lic and by BBC staff, so the “clear bright line” against dis­clos­ure that is always argued in whis­tleblower tri­als had already been breached.

If this was a cov­ert attempt a get­ting the inform­a­tion to the media, as happened, then this per­son is a whis­tleblower and deserves pro­tec­tion. The law makes no dis­tinc­tion based on intent, as the pub­lic interest defence was removed from the OSA in 1989 (des­pite the fact that Blair, Straw and most of the Labour gov­ern­ment past and present voted against this measure).

How­ever, such an action is clearly mor­ally dif­fer­ent from drunk­en care­less­ness, and if that was indeed his intent, he would have done bet­ter to have had the cour­age of his con­vic­tions and gone dir­ectly to the media. He would still not have had any defence under the OSA for his prin­cipled stance, but the impact and poten­tial for change would have been great­er. Bet­ter to be hung for a sheep than a lamb.

The Media and the Spies

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The UK main­stream media has made much this week of Home Sec­ret­ary Jac­qui Smith’s asser­tion that MI5 had not reques­ted the government’s pro­posed exten­sion of the impris­on­ment without charge of ter­ror­ist sus­pects from 28 to 42 days.

This state­ment has caused a furore in the UK, and there is a chance that the PM may lose the key vote in Par­lia­ment on this amend­ment tomorrow.

In fact, such has been the uproar that the Dir­ect­or Gen­er­al of MI5, Jonath­an Evans, is repor­ted by Reu­ters to have made a rare pub­lic statement:

“Since the secur­ity ser­vice is neither a pro­sec­ut­ing author­ity nor respons­ible for crim­in­al invest­ig­a­tions, we are not, and nev­er have been, the appro­pri­ate body to advise the gov­ern­ment on pre-charge deten­tion time lim­its,” he said in a state­ment on the MI5 website.

“We have not, there­fore, sought to com­ment pub­licly or privately on the cur­rent pro­pos­als, except to say that we recog­nise the chal­lenge posed for the police ser­vice by the increas­ingly com­plex and inter­na­tion­al char­ac­ter of some recent ter­ror­ist cases.”

What par­tic­u­larly strikes me about this is an appar­ently insig­ni­fic­ant phrase, “raised pub­licly or privately”.

In con­trast to the Met­ro­pol­it­an Police Com­mis­sion­er Sir Ian Blair, who admit­ted to “unin­ten­tion­ally mis­lead­ing” the par­lia­ment­ary Joint Com­mit­tee charged with assess­ing the need to increase the deten­tion lim­it, Evans had refused to give evid­ence about the 42 day issue. So he has cer­tainly not raised this in a pub­licly account­able way.

It’s the word “private” that intrigues me. It reeks of sotto voce dis­cus­sions between old school chums at the grander gentlemen’s clubs in Lon­don: of unat­trib­ut­able brief­ings between anonym­ous MI5 officers and chosen journ­al­ists; and of cosy lunches with Fleet Street edit­ors in the DG’s din­ing room at Thames House, MI5’s Lon­don HQ.

While Evans denies using this meth­od­o­logy around the 42 day issue, his state­ment con­firms that such private dis­cus­sions do indeed play a part in influ­en­cing policy decisions and media perception.

I saw this approach first-hand in the 1990s dur­ing the whis­tleblow­ing years. In fact, it was then that MI5 stepped up its charm offens­ive with politi­cians and journ­al­ists. It was dur­ing one of the first of these cosy media lunches in Thames House, hos­ted by the then DG Steph­en Lander, that the respec­ted BBC Dip­lo­mat­ic Edit­or Mark Urb­an asked a fate­ful ques­tion about the Gad­dafi Plot and was reportedly told by Lander that “he was not here to answer half-baked ques­tions from smart-arse journ­al­ists”. So there were cer­tain short­falls in the charm, even if the lack of account­ab­il­ity held up well.

But there are oth­er, more sin­is­ter ways for the spies to manip­u­late pub­lic opin­ion. MI6 has a sens­it­ive sec­tion called Inform­a­tion Oper­a­tions (I/Ops), which exists purely to set the news agenda for the spies. I/Ops man­ages this either by mas­sa­ging the facts, spin­ning the tone of the story or, more wor­ry­ingly, plant­ing false stor­ies in a qui­es­cent press.

In the 1990s there was a fam­ous case. Col­on­el Gaddafi’s son, Saif Al Islam, applied for a visa to come to Bri­tain. I/Ops planted a com­pletely false story in The Sunday Tele­graph that he was involved in money laun­der­ing with Iran and, lo and behold, MI5 had the per­fect excuse to deny him a visa. Al Islam sub­sequently sued the news­pa­per which, faced with Shayler­’s evid­ence, settled out of court.

A few months ago the ex-head of MI6, Sir Richard Dear­love, gave a talk at the LSE about the intel­li­gence agen­cies and the media. I went along to have a laugh, and was gra­ciously allowed to ask a ques­tion. Nat­ur­ally I raised the issue of I/Ops, its rela­tion­ship with the media, and wheth­er such a role was accept­able in a mod­ern democracy.

In the con­text of the talk, what could have been more per­tin­ent? How­ever, Dear­love declined to answer. In fact, he went so far as to say that such a mat­ter was “with­in the ring of secrecy”. At which point a journ­al­ist from a pres­ti­gi­ous nation­al news­pa­per who was sit­ting next to me, turned and said glee­fully that this at last proved that I/Ops exis­ted. Grat­i­fy­ing as this was, I shall reit­er­ate my ques­tion: is the role of I/Ops accept­able in a mod­ern demo­cracy, where we are sup­posed to enjoy free­dom of inform­a­tion, trans­par­ency and account­ab­il­ity from the powers-that-be?

Spooks leave UK vulnerable to Russian mafia

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Accord­ing to the Daily Mail this week, Rus­si­an secur­ity expert, Andrei Sold­atov, reck­ons the UK is wide open to the threat of the Rus­si­an mafia. He primar­ily blames the froid­eur that has blighted Anglo-Rus­si­an rela­tions since the Litv­inen­ko affair. How­ever, he also states that MI5 no longer has a role to play in invest­ig­at­ing organ­ised crime, and that has con­trib­uted to our vulnerability.

Nat­ur­ally res­ist­ing the tempta­tion to say that MI5’s involve­ment would not neces­sar­ily have afforded us any mean­ing­ful pro­tec­tion, I would say that this is down to a fun­da­ment­al prob­lem in how we organ­ise our response to threats to the nation­al secur­ity of this country.

The secur­ity infra­struc­ture in the UK has evolved over the last cen­tury into a ter­ribly Brit­ish muddle. For his­tor­ic reas­ons, we have a pleth­ora of intel­li­gence agen­cies, all com­pet­ing for fund­ing, power and prestige: MI5, MI6, GCHQ, the Met­ro­pol­it­an Police Spe­cial Branch (MPSB), spe­cial branches in every oth­er police force, mil­it­ary intel­li­gence, and HM Rev­en­ue and Cus­toms et al. Each is sup­posed to work with the oth­er, but in real­ity they guard their ter­rit­ory and intel­li­gence jeal­ously. After all, know­ledge is power.

MI5 and MPSB have always been the lead intel­li­gence organ­isa­tions oper­at­ing with­in the UK. As such, their cov­ert rivalry has been pro­trac­ted and bit­ter, but to the out­side world they appeared to rub along while MI5 was primar­ily focus­ing on espi­on­age and polit­ic­al sub­ver­sion and the Met con­cen­trated on the IRA. How­ever, after the end of the Cold War, MI5 had to find new tar­gets or lose staff, status and resources.

In 1992 the then Home Sec­ret­ary, Ken Clarke, announced that MI5 was tak­ing over the lead respons­ib­il­ity for invest­ig­at­ing IRA activ­ity on the UK main­land — work that had been done by MPSB for over 100 years. Vic­tory was largely cred­ited to clev­er White­hall man­oeuv­er­ing on the part of the head of MI5, Stella Rim­ing­ton. The Met were furi­ous, and the trans­fer of records was frac­tious, to say the least.

Also, there was a year’s delay in the han­dover of respons­ib­il­ity. So MI5 arti­fi­cially main­tained the per­ceived threat levels posed by polit­ic­al sub­ver­sion in order to retain its staff until the trans­ition was com­plete. This meant that there was no real case for the aggress­ive invest­ig­a­tion of sub­vers­ive groups in the UK – which made all such oper­a­tions illeg­al. Staff in this sec­tion, includ­ing me, voci­fer­ously argued against this con­tin­ued sur­veil­lance, rightly stat­ing that such invest­ig­a­tions were thereby flag­rantly illeg­al, but the seni­or man­age­ment ignored us in the interests of pre­serving their empires.

How­ever, in the mid-1990s, when peace appeared to be break­ing out in North­ern Ire­land and bey­ond, MI5 had to scout around for more work to jus­ti­fy its exist­ence. Hence, in 1996, the Home Sec­ret­ary agreed that they should play a role in tack­ling organ­ised crime – but only in a sup­port­ing role to MPSB. This was nev­er a par­tic­u­larly pal­at­able answer for the spooks, so it is no sur­prise that they have sub­sequently dropped this area of work now that the threat from “Al Qaeda” has grown. Ter­ror­ism has always been per­ceived as high­er status work. And of course this new threat has led to a slew of increased resources, powers and staff for MI5, not to men­tion the open­ing of eight region­al headquar­ters out­side London.

But should we really be approach­ing a sub­ject as ser­i­ous as the pro­tec­tion of our nation­al secur­ity in such a haphaz­ard way, based solely on the fact that we have these agen­cies in exist­ence, so let’s give them some work?

If we are really faced with such a ser­i­ous ter­ror­ist threat, would it not be smarter for our politi­cians to ask the basic ques­tions: what is the real­ist­ic threat to our nation­al secur­ity and the eco­nom­ic well­being of the state, and how can we best pro­tect ourselves from these threats? If the most effect­ive answer proves to be a new, ded­ic­ated counter-ter­ror­ism organ­isa­tion, so be it. We Brits love a sense of his­tory, but a new broom will often sweep clean.

 

IT Defense Conference, Hamburg January 2008

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In Janu­ary 2008 I spoke at the IT Defense Con­fer­ence in Ham­burg in Janu­ary 2008.  This is a sum­mary of my talk.

The Spy­ing Game? – Annie Machon

I gave a present­a­tion about the role of intelligence
agen­cies in the cur­rent era of the unend­ing “war on ter­ror”, how they
mon­it­or us, and the implic­a­tions for our democracies.

In the name of pro­tect­ing nation­al secur­ity, spy agen­cies are being
giv­en sweep­ing new powers and resources. Their intel­li­gence has been
politi­cised to build a case for the dis­astrous war in Iraq, they are
fail­ing to stop ter­ror­ist attacks, and they con­tin­ue to col­lude in
illeg­al acts of intern­ment and tor­ture, euphemist­ic­ally called
“extraordin­ary rendi­tion”. Most west­ern demo­cra­cies have already given
so many new powers to the spies that we are effect­ively liv­ing in
police states. As an informed com­munity, what can we do about this?
t‑style: nor­mal; font-vari­ant: nor­mal; font-weight: nor­mal; font-size: 7pt; line-height: nor­mal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: nor­mal;”> The illeg­al MI6
assas­sin­a­tion attempt against Col­on­el Gad­dafi of Libya

International Islamic Fair, Malaysia 2007

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In July 2007 I was invited to speak at the Inter­na­tion­al Islam­ic Fair in Malay­sia along with 9/11 hero Wil­li­am Rodrig­uez.

The Fair is designed to increase under­stand­ing and co-oper­a­tion between Islam­ic and non-Islam­ic com­munit­ies.  Politi­cians, dip­lo­mats and cam­paign­ers from around the world are invited to speak.  Thou­sands of people atten­ded the four day event, and the Fair made head­lines across the Far East.

Here is the photo gal­lery of the 2007 IIF Conference.

I was hon­oured to receive a stand­ing ova­tion, and com­ments included:

“Former Brit­ish MI5 agent & Amer­ic­an depleted urani­um expert among best received paper presenters”

and

“The IIF2007 Con­fer­ence ful­filled most of its pre-event prom­ises – as far as con­tent goes. In addi­tion to the pres­ence of Wil­li­am Rodrig­uez (last sur­viv­or of 9/11) as a ses­sion mod­er­at­or, the con­fer­ence par­ti­cipants were also ‘thrilled’ by the lec­tures of oth­er over­seas speak­ers includ­ing Sheikh Imran Hosein (former N.York mosque imam), H.E. Mahdi Ibrahim Muhammad (Ambas­sad­or / mem­ber of Nation­al Assembly, Sudan), Annie Machon (former Brit­ish Intel­li­gence MI5 agent) and Khaled Taha of Aljaz­eera, Qatar.”

Iran Threat — First the Spooks, now the Politicians

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As I pos­ted on on 7 May, Israeli intel­li­gence is claim­ing it has new intel­li­gence that proves the recent US Nation­al Intel­li­gence Estim­ate wrong in its assess­ment of the nuc­le­ar threat posed by Iran.

Mossad claims to have sol­id intel­li­gence that proves Iran is still try­ing to devel­op a nuc­le­ar mil­it­ary cap­ab­il­ity. There have been recent high-level talks about this between the intel­li­gence agen­cies of the US, UK and Israel.

A report in The Guard­i­an today now indic­ates that the politi­cians are fol­low­ing suit. Israeli Prime Min­is­ter, Ehud Olmert, is set to meet Pres­id­ent Bush today to dis­cuss the threat from Iran. It would not sur­prise me if the US soon announces that it has proof of Iran’s nuc­le­ar intent, and tries to push for anoth­er a “pre-empt­ive”, and highly illeg­al, attack.

Pay peanuts, get monkeys

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So the spooks are yet again try­ing to recruit IT pro­fes­sion­als. MI6 is cur­rently advert­ising for a, quote, “world class enter­prise archi­tect”, but is offer­ing a salary sig­ni­fic­antly below the mar­ket rate. MI5 is con­stantly on the lookout for IT staff –as recent adverts in the press will attest.

My sense is that the agen­cies are still des­per­ately play­ing IT catch-up. In the 1990s, when I worked as an intel­li­gence officer, we were still writ­ing out everything longhand and get­ting our sec­ret­ar­ies to type it up – with all the attend­ant typos, revi­sions and delays. Inform­a­tion data­bases, such the sys­tem code­named Durbar, which held the ter­ror­ist records, could only be accessed via 1970s, beige, mon­it­or-and-key­board, all-in-one computers.

In the early 1990s MI5 did try to devel­op its own inform­a­tion man­age­ment sys­tem from scratch, rightly think­ing that buy­ing off-the-shelf from an Amer­ic­an mega­corp was prob­ably not good secur­ity. How­ever, MI5 man­age­ment still thought IT was a low pri­or­ity – des­pite the fact the effi­cient pro­cessing of inform­a­tion should have been the core work. So, the agency paid sig­ni­fic­antly below the mar­ket rates for IT pro­fes­sion­als, and pos­ted main­stream intel­li­gence officers, with no pro­ject man­age­ment exper­i­ence, to run the depart­ment for 2 year peri­ods. Need­less to say, mor­al was rock-bot­tom. The IT bods were unmo­tiv­ated, the IOs demor­al­ised at being pos­ted to a career grave­yard slot and the unwieldy sys­tem, code­named Grant, nev­er got off the ground.

In the middle of the dec­ade MI5 in des­per­a­tion bought an off-the-shelf pack­age which was based on Win­dows 95. Even then officers had to fight to have access to a ter­min­al to do their work. And, of course, Win­dows is not known as the most stable or secure sys­tem avail­able. I also heard recently that MI5 is still using this pro­pri­et­ary soft­ware, and thinks that it can pro­tect its inform­a­tion sys­tems by patch­ing up secur­ity prob­lems. It gives one such faith that MI5 can really pro­tect this coun­try from ter­ror­ist attack.

But this leads us onto a more ser­i­ous issue regard­ing our nation­al sov­er­eignty. What the hell is our gov­ern­ment doing, shov­el­ling bil­lions of pounds every year over to US IT com­pan­ies to pay for licences that then per­mit our gov­ern­ment depart­ments to use their soft­ware pack­ages? And with the cur­rent con­cerns about ter­ror­ism and the sub­sequent datamin­ing activ­it­ies of a para­noid US admin­is­tra­tion, how can we be sure that the NSA is not sneak­ing a peek at the work of our secur­ity forces via back doors in this software?

So, to pro­tect our sov­er­eignty, as well as devel­op our know­ledge base and grow our eco­nomy, why does the UK gov­ern­ment not encour­age all gov­ern­ment agen­cies and depart­ments to switch from pro­pri­et­ary to open source soft­ware? After all, many oth­er coun­tries around the world are already doing this for pre­cisely these reasons.

No doubt it’s that pesky “spe­cial rela­tion­ship” kick­ing in again.….

MI5 caught with its pants down

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An MI5 A4 sur­veil­lance officer has had to resign because his wife sold a story to The News of the World news­pa­per that the For­mula One boss, Max Mos­ley, son of notori­ous fas­cist Sir Oswald Mos­ley, had indulged in a Nazi-inspired orgy with her and four oth­er pros­ti­tutes in a cel­lar in Chelsea, one of the swanki­est areas of London.

This raises an inter­est­ing ques­tion. Either the A4 officer, reportedly a former Roy­al Mar­ine, had no idea that his wife was work­ing as a pros­ti­tute, in which case, what the hell was he doing work­ing for the sur­veil­lance unit of MI5? Not quite the sharpest knife in the block, then. Or he knew, but chose to keep it quiet – a ser­i­ous vet­ting offence. Which was it?

The move against Mos­ley cer­tainly seems to have been a “hon­eytrap” of sorts – at least on the part of The News of the Screws, which reportedly equipped “Mrs Bond” with the cam­er­as. But bey­ond that? The Screws and its sis­ter paper The Sunday Times asser­ted that the MI5 con­nec­tion was just a coin­cid­ence, as did The Sunday Tele­graph, known in spook circles as the in-house magazine of MI6.

The Mos­ley case does have his­tor­ic­al echoes. A sim­il­ar, and notori­ous case, occurred in the 1970s. Lord Lamb­ton, at the time the RAF Min­is­ter in Edward Heath’s gov­ern­ment, was caught in flagrente with a call girl and, even worse, was caught on film smoking a joint. Lamb­ton had to resign in disgrace.

But there was more to it. The News of the Screws pho­to­graph­er lurk­ing in the ward­robe had been lent the night-vis­ion cam­era by an MI6 agent to obtain nice, clear images.

Why did MI6, the for­eign intel­li­gence gath­er­ing agency, tar­get Lord Lamb­ton? Well, accord­ing to the agent in ques­tion, Lee Tracey who first came to the public’s atten­tion in the Pro­fumo Affair, MI6 was motiv­ated by a desire to embar­rass MI5, which it deemed not to be up to scratch in its domest­ic spy­ing work.

So the “hon­eytrap” is a tried and tested meth­od to com­prom­ise your oppon­ents and score polit­ic­al points. But, unless there is some private feud with the spies, it does seem unlikely in this case. Mos­ley may enjoy an exot­ic sex life, but does the F1 boss really look like he poses a legit­im­ate threat to nation­al security? .

The more fun­da­ment­al issue is surely the effect­ive­ness of MI5’s in-house vet­ting sec­tion. How did the A4 officer­’s mar­riage to a pros­ti­tute escape their notice? The sec­tion respons­ible, C4, checks the back­grounds of employ­ees to the nth degree – a sys­tem called “Developed Vet­ting”. Any char­ac­ter “defects” must be picked up via an extens­ive series of checks.

In the wake of this scan­dal, an inev­it­able unnamed seni­or White­hall source was quoted as say­ing “I can­not talk about indi­vidu­al cases, but we do expect high stand­ards of beha­viour from all staff at all times, both pro­fes­sion­ally and privately”.

Well, sort of….

When I was recruited in 1991, MI5’s primary con­cern was that unknown trans­gres­sions could lead to black­mail. If the mis­de­mean­ours were minor but admit­ted, MI5 ten­ded to turn a blind eye.

In the 1990s MI5 still had an offi­cial policy of not employ­ing homo­sexu­als. As late as the 1980s, homo­sexu­al­ity had been deemed by the ser­vice to be a “char­ac­ter defect”, as well as a poten­tial source of black­mail. As you sign away your employ­ment rights when you join MI5, there was no point in any­one cry­ing “dis­crim­in­a­tion”. The pos­i­tion changed in 1995, and one brave soul did step out of the closet at the time. Also, when I worked there, dope-smoking was com­mon­place amongst young officers – and some coughed (if you’ll par­don the pun) to this dur­ing their vet­ting inter­views. No action was taken. Sim­il­arly, infi­del­ity was a vet­ting offense, but many (mar­ried) officers were at it like the pro­ver­bi­al rabbits.

Per­haps it has tightened up since my day. How­ever, this seems unlikely giv­en the recent scan­dal. How can we expect MI5 to adequately pro­tect this coun­try when it can’t even police its own staff?

Terrorism Act used against Journalist

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A wor­ry­ing art­icle in today’s Guard­i­an by the indefatig­able Duncan Camp­bell, in which he reports that police are using the Ter­ror­ism Act (2000) to try to force a journ­al­ist to hand over inform­a­tion from a source.

This issue is the scared cow of journ­al­ism – that they nev­er reveal their sources. To do so would imme­di­ately deter whis­tleblowers from speak­ing in con­fid­ence to the media, and gov­ern­ment crimes and lies would remain secret. The pro­tec­tion of journ­al­ist­ic sources con­trib­utes to safe­guard­ing our demo­cracy, as legis­la­tion such as the Free­dom of Inform­a­tion Act (2000) is effect­ively tooth­less when up against the inner work­ings of the state.

Because of this, journ­al­ists with integ­rity in this coun­try and abroad are will­ing to risk pris­on rather than hand over their notes. As Camp­bell remarks, this happened to Mar­tin Bright in 2000 when he was Home Affairs Edit­or at The Observ­er. The Met­ro­pol­it­an Police Spe­cial Branch went crash­ing into the offices on Far­ring­don Road, demand­ing that he hand over all his notes on the Shayler case. More bizar­rely, they also deman­ded a let­ter Shayler had sent to The Guard­i­an, even though it had already been pub­lished in the news­pa­per. Thank­fully for Mar­tin, the Nation­al Uni­on of Journ­al­ists sup­por­ted him, and the police even­tu­ally backed off.

The fact that the police are using the Ter­ror­ism Act as is a wor­ry­ing new devel­op­ment. But it’s not just pro­duc­tion orders from the police that journ­al­ists and news­pa­pers have to be wor­ried about. The author­it­ies have a range of weapons in their arsen­al if they choose to sup­press inform­a­tion eman­at­ing from inner gov­ern­ment circles or the intel­li­gence world. And yet it is with­in these very circles that the most hein­ous crimes and viol­a­tions are com­mit­ted, and whence the most sig­ni­fic­ant whis­tleblowers tend to emerge. Think Dr Dav­id Kelly, Dav­id Shayler, Kath­er­ine Gun.

So, what else can the author­it­ies use to sup­press val­id cri­ti­cism? Well, firstly and most notori­ously, we have the Offi­cial Secrets Act in the UK. This does not just pre­vent intel­li­gence officers and noti­fied gov­ern­ment offi­cials from ever speak­ing to any­one out­side the agency about any­thing, ever (Sec­tion 1(1)). Slightly less well known is Sec­tion 5, which makes it a crime for any journ­al­ist to receive or eli­cit inform­a­tion from these whis­tleblowers that dam­ages “nation­al secur­ity” (the term to this day remains undefined). Of course, as we saw in the Shayler case, the gov­ern­ment is always extremely reluct­ant to cross the media and enforce this, so it is usu­ally just the unfor­tu­nate whis­tleblower who is hung out to dry.

If the threat of the OSA fails, the gov­ern­ment can always find a tame judge to issue an emer­gency injunc­tion. Again, this happened in the Shayler case, when an injunc­tion was taken out both against him and the UK’s nation­al media. Need­less to say, the injunc­tion against the media was dropped (even this gov­ern­ment quailed at the pro­spect of tak­ing on News Inter­na­tion­al and the Mail group), but remains in place to this day against the hap­less whistleblower.

This injunc­tion is no small thing. The government’s law­yers have used it to fright­en off pub­lish­ers from even look­ing at a nov­el (that’s right – a work of fic­tion) that Shayler wrote in 1998. Let­ters winged their way from gov­ern­ment law­yers to UK pub­lish­ers in Lon­don in 1999. And when Shayler built a web­site, hos­ted by Tab­net in Cali­for­nia, the gov­ern­ment wrote to them point­ing out that there was an injunc­tion in place and ask­ing for the site to be taken down. Tab­net gently poin­ted out that per­haps the Brit­ish gov­ern­ment had for­got­ten about 1776, and con­tin­ued to host the site.

If the OSA and injunc­tions are not enough, we also have the notori­ous D Notice Com­mit­tee (now rebranded as the Defence Press and Broad­cast­ing Advis­ory Com­mit­tee), a body that can block pub­lic­a­tion of a story by issu­ing a notice at the say-so of the gov­ern­ment. Very appro­pri­ate in a so-called demo­cracy. What makes it worse is that the Com­mit­tee is made up of volun­teers from amongst the great and the good from the media world, as well as rep­res­ent­at­ives from gov­ern­ment depart­ments. These guys, seni­or edit­ors and TV exec­ut­ives, enter the charmed inner circle and start to police their own industry. It’s amaz­ing how quickly new appointees go nat­ive and fight the government’s corner.

So there you have it – a whole bat­tery of laws to pro­tect the Brit­ish Estab­lish­ment from the scru­tiny and con­struct­ive cri­ti­cism of the media. When a journ­al­ist of integ­rity stands up to the author­it­ies, we should all sup­port them. They are provid­ing a cru­cial ser­vice of vent­il­a­tion and account­ab­il­ity for our retreat­ing demo­cracy. I wish Shiv Malik, the freel­an­cer at the eye of the cur­rent storm, the very best.

 

Cockle Rustlers under Surveillance

Posted on by Annie Machon
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Four times in the past three years, powers designed to catch ter­ror­ists have been deployed against poten­tial cockle rust­lers on the sands out­side Poole Har­bour in Dor­set. I kid you not. The Inde­pend­ent news­pa­per yes­ter­day repor­ted that Poole Bor­ough Coun­cil had used the sweep­ing sur­veil­lance of the Reg­u­la­tion of Invest­ig­at­ory Powers Act (2000), oth­er­wise known as RIPA, to police the cockle fish­er­men of Dorset.

RIPA was inten­ded (the gov­ern­ment told us in 2000) merely to update for the inter­net age the old Inter­cep­tion of Com­mu­nic­a­tions Act (1985) that for the first time had reg­u­lated the intrus­ive sur­veil­lance car­ried out by spooks and police. In fact, the Grim RIPA massively expan­ded state intru­sion into our per­son­al lives, so that nine gov­ern­ment organ­iz­a­tions, includ­ing the secur­ity ser­vices and police, and 792 pub­lic author­it­ies (of which 474 are loc­al coun­cils) now have the powers to snoop on our private com­mu­nic­a­tions, and then some.

In fact, doc­u­ments dis­closed under the Free­dom of Inform­a­tion Act sug­gest that Poole Bor­ough Coun­cil may have the dubi­ous dis­tinc­tion of being the nosi­est in the UK, using RIPA not only to police its waters, but also to check on the res­id­en­tial status of loc­als, dam­age caused to traffic bar­ri­ers or oth­er minor infrac­tions. Hardly the stuff of James Bond.

Inad­vert­ently, Poole Coun­cil has provided a clas­sic case of reduc­tio ad absurdum, but this can be use­ful in high­light­ing more ser­i­ous flaws.

In the last dec­ade we have seen a slew of laws passed by our elec­ted rep­res­ent­at­ives in par­lia­ment that are poten­tially dan­ger­ous to our demo­cracy and way of life. All these laws have been whipped through par­lia­ment, and the media has ten­ded not to give them much consideration.

One such law that springs to mind is the Civil Con­tin­gen­cies Act (2004). This was passed with barely a mur­mur and, in the wake of the foot and mouth crisis, was deemed to be A Good Thing. How­ever, the dev­il is always in the detail. This law allows any seni­or gov­ern­ment min­is­ter, at the stroke of a pen, to declare a 30 day state of emer­gency. Under these terms, the author­it­ies can pre­vent our free asso­ci­ation at polit­ic­al meet­ings or demon­stra­tions, they can quar­ant­ine us, or pre­vent us mov­ing freely around our coun­try. They can even seize our homes, demol­ish them, and not have to pay a penny in com­pens­a­tion, as this will have been done to pro­tect “nation­al security”.

But the real stinker was the draft of the Legis­lat­ive and Reg­u­lat­ory Reform Act (2006). If Blair had suc­ceeded in passing this law, it would have spelled the end of 700 years of par­lia­ment­ary demo­cracy in Bri­tain. Had the ori­gin­al draft been approved, any seni­or gov­ern­ment min­is­ter could have abol­ished any law pre­vi­ously passed by our Houses of Parliament.

Not for noth­ing was this nick­named the “Abol­i­tion of Par­lia­ment Bill” (well, that and the fact that its form­al title is a tongue-twister – try say­ing it out loud!). Fol­low­ing a cit­izens’ cam­paign, the Bill was watered down as it passed through the Houses of Par­lia­ment. How­ever, even though lim­ited safe­guards have been intro­duced, min­is­ters are still in a pos­i­tion to tinker with any Brit­ish laws except the Human Rights Act. So, the tend­ency for author­it­ari­an gov­ern­ment may have been reined in this time, but we need to remain vigilant.

Many people are aware and are also appre­hens­ive of how these laws could be mis­used against the cit­izens of the UK if a more ruth­less and dra­coni­an gov­ern­ment were in power. Many com­ment­at­ors say we are sleep-walk­ing towards a police state. The tragedy is that we are pretty much there – most of the neces­sary laws are in place. It is time for us all to re-engage in the demo­crat­ic pro­cess and halt this rush towards a com­pletely unac­count­able government.

Straw Man

Posted on by Annie Machon
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The gov­ern­ment is push­ing through yet anoth­er piece of legis­la­tion designed to provide “pub­lic ser­vice hon­esty, integ­rity and inde­pend­ence” to the Brit­ish people. As part of this strategy, the draft Con­sti­tu­tion­al Renew­al Bill even con­tains a sec­tion to provide pro­tec­tion for gov­ern­ment whis­tleblowers. Need­less to say, spies are auto­mat­ic­ally excluded (see sec­tion 25 (2) of the draft Bill).

The draft Bill states that any whis­tleblowers from with­in the ranks of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ will be dealt with intern­ally. This has always been the case for MI5 and 6 (des­pite the government’s breath­tak­ing lies dur­ing the Shayler case that he could have gone to any crown ser­vant with his con­cerns). How­ever, in the case of GCHQ, this Bill will take away employ­ees’ rights to go to an inde­pend­ent Com­mis­sion­er, to bring it into dra­coni­an line with its sis­ter agencies.

So, to put this bluntly, those in our intel­li­gence agen­cies who exper­i­ence eth­ic­al qualms about their work or, even worse, wit­ness crimes, will have to take their con­cerns to the head of the very agency com­mit­ting these crimes. Let’s guess how far these com­plaints will go.

Now, some might say that it’s naïve to think that the intel­li­gence agen­cies don’t com­mit illeg­al or uneth­ic­al acts. All I can say to that is — grow up. James Bond is a myth. Even the bad old days of the Cold War when, as former MI5 officer Peter Wright put it, MI5 could “bug and burgle its way around Lon­don” with impun­ity are long gone. The 1985 Inter­cep­tion of Com­mu­nic­a­tions Act (and sub­sequent legis­la­tion), the 1989 Secur­ity Ser­vice Act, and the 1994 Intel­li­gence Ser­vices Act, have put paid to that. In line with basic human rights, the spies now have to apply for min­is­teri­al per­mis­sion based on, ahem, a sol­id intel­li­gence case, to aggress­ively invest­ig­ate a target.

Dur­ing the 10 month peri­od of my recruit­ment to MI5 in 1990, I was repeatedly told that the organ­isa­tion had to obey the law; that it was evolving into a mod­ern counter-ter­ror­ism agency. If that is indeed the case, then why is MI5 still to this day not account­able in the same way as the Met­ro­pol­it­an Police Spe­cial Branch, which does the same work?

And who is the brave politi­cian ensur­ing that our intel­li­gence com­munity can remain shrouded in secrecy and pro­tec­ted from cri­ti­cism by the full force of the law? Stand up Justice Min­is­ter Jack Straw.

It just remains for me to say that Straw has a cer­tain his­tory in this area. In 1997, when Shayler blew the whistle, Straw was the Home Sec­ret­ary, the gov­ern­ment min­is­ter charged with over­see­ing MI5. One of Shayler’s early dis­clos­ures was that MI5 held files on a num­ber of politi­cians, includ­ing Straw him­self. Did Straw demand to see his file in angry dis­be­lief? No, he meekly did the spies’ bid­ding and issued a blanket injunc­tion against Shayler and the UK’s nation­al media.

But think about it — this is a clas­sic Catch 22 situ­ation. Either MI5 was right to open a file on Straw because he was a polit­ic­al sub­vers­ive and a danger to nation­al secur­ity – in which case, should he not have imme­di­ately resigned as Home Sec­ret­ary? Or MI5 got it wrong about Straw. In which case he should have been invest­ig­at­ing this mis­take and demand­ing to know how many oth­er inno­cent UK cit­izens had files wrongly and illeg­ally opened on them.

But Straw did neither. Per­haps he was wor­ried about what the spies could reveal about him? It’s inter­est­ing that he is yet again rush­ing to pro­tect their interests….

 

CCTV doesn’t prevent crime

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So, the argu­ment about CCTV and our big broth­er soci­ety rumbles on. A seni­or police­man, Detect­ive Chief Inspect­or Mick Neville of the Visu­al Images, Iden­ti­fic­a­tions and Detec­tions Office (Viido) at New Scot­land Yard, has been quoted as say­ing that only 3 per cent of crimes have been solved by CCTV evid­ence. Des­pite the UK hav­ing the highest per cap­ita num­ber of CCTVs in the world, this brave new world has failed to make us safer.

A few oth­er police forces, and nat­ur­ally the secur­ity com­pan­ies flog­ging the kit, say that CCTV has at least dra­mat­ic­ally reduced oppor­tun­ist­ic crimes. Who should we believe?

What can­not be dis­puted is the fact that there are well over 4,000,000 CCTVs in this coun­try, and the organ­isa­tion, Pri­vacy Inter­na­tion­al, assesses that we are the most watched cit­izenry in Europe.

While some law-abid­ing cit­izens say they feel intim­id­ated by CCTV and how the inform­a­tion could poten­tially be mis­used, most people seem not to care. In fact, the major­ity appar­ently feel safer if they can see CCTV on the streets, even if this per­vas­ive sur­veil­lance has in no way dis­cour­aged crimes of viol­ence. So why this gap between per­cep­tion and reality?

One of my pet the­or­ies has always been to blame Big Broth­er. No, not the book. I have always been flum­moxed by the pop­ular­ity of the TV show and the pleth­ora of real­ity TV spin-offs. My instinct­ive reac­tion was that it was sim­il­ar to being “groomed” to accept round-the-clock intru­sion into our per­son­al lives. More than accept – desire it. The clear mes­sage is that such sur­veil­lance can lead to instant fame, wealth and access to the Z‑list parties of Lon­don. And for that we are sleep-walk­ing into a real Orwellian nightmare.

Slightly flip­pant the­or­ies aside, it is inter­est­ing that one of the most cited examples of the need for CCTV was the Bish­opsgate bomb­ing in Lon­don in 1993. In this case a lorry bomb, filled with a tonne of home made explos­ive (HME) was det­on­ated in the heart of the city of Lon­don by the IRA. One per­son was killed, many were injured, and hun­dreds of mil­lions of pounds worth of dam­age was caused, not to men­tion the fact threat the IRA scored a huge pub­li­city coup.

But this had noth­ing to do with the lack or oth­er­wise of CCTV in the streets of the City. It was an intel­li­gence fail­ure, pure and simple.

This attack could and should have been pre­ven­ted. It occurred while I was work­ing in MI5, and it was widely known in the ser­vice at the time that the bomber should have been arres­ted six months before dur­ing a sur­veil­lance oper­a­tion. Des­pite the fact that he was seen check­ing out anoth­er lorry bomb in stor­age, he was allowed to walk free and escape to the Repub­lic of Ire­land due to pro­ced­ur­al cock-ups. Months later, he returned to the City and bombed Bishopsgate.

By rely­ing increas­ingly on tech­no­lo­gies to pro­tect us, we are fol­low­ing in the foot­steps of the Amer­ic­ans. They have always had an over-reli­ance on gad­gets and giz­mos when seek­ing to invest­ig­ate crim­in­als and ter­ror­ists: satel­lite track­ing, phone taps, bugs. But this hoover­ing up of inform­a­tion is nev­er an adequate replace­ment for pre­cise invest­ig­at­ive work. Plus, any crim­in­al or ter­ror­ist worth their salt these days knows not to dis­cuss sens­it­ive plans electronically.

Scat­ter-gun approaches to gath­er­ing intel­li­gence, such as blanket sur­veil­lance, still at this stage require human beings to pro­cess and assess it for evid­en­tial use. That, accord­ing to DCI Neville, is part of the prob­lem. There is just too much com­ing in, not enough staff, insuf­fi­cient co-oper­a­tion between forces, and the job lacks per­ceived status with­in the police.

The oth­er prob­lem of an over-reli­ance on tech­no­logy is that it can always be hacked. The most recent hack­ing has broken the RFID chips that we all carry in our pass­ports, Oyster cards and the planned ID cards. New tech­no­lo­gies can­not guar­an­tee that our per­son­al data is secure, so rather than pro­tect­ing us, they make us more liable to crimes such as iden­tity theft.

So once again nation­al and loc­al gov­ern­ment bod­ies have rushed to buy up tech­no­logy, without fully think­ing through either its applic­a­tion or its use­ful­ness. And without fully assess­ing the implic­a­tions for a free soci­ety. Just because the tech­no­logy exists, it does not mean that it is fit for pur­pose, nor that it will make us safer.

 

Iran threat ramped up

Posted on by Annie Machon
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The Sunday Times repor­ted last week­end that Sir John Scar­lett, the cur­rent head of MI6, is to fly to Israel at the end of the month to meet his counter-part, Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad. White­hall has tried to down­play the meet­ing as “routine”. How­ever, the focus of the meet­ing appears to be to dis­cuss Israel’s assess­ment of Iran’s nuc­le­ar capability.

In recent years the neo-cons in power in the US have made no secret of their desire to “fin­ish the job” in the Middle East and attack Iran. For the last two years there has been much sabre-rat­tling on both sides. The polem­ics from the US usu­ally coin­cided with Iran’s plans to trade increas­ing amounts of its oil in euros. The south west region of Iran has vast oil reserves, and if Iran switched trad­ing cur­ren­cies, this would have an extremely det­ri­ment­al effect on the power of the petro­dol­lar, and the Amer­ic­an eco­nomy as a whole.

Lest we for­get, Sad­dam Hus­sein had also begun to trade in euros what little oil he could pri­or to the Iraq war in 2003. Scar­lett, a career MI6 officer, played a lead­ing role in mak­ing the case for that war. At the time he was Chair of the Joint Intel­li­gence Com­mit­tee, and came to pub­lic atten­tion when he signed off the notori­ous Septem­ber Dossier. It has since become appar­ent that Iraq did not have WMD, nor was it try­ing to acquire urani­um from Niger, as MI6 had stated in the dossier. This claim was based on forged documents.

So the tim­ing of the new Israeli intel­li­gence is inter­est­ing, to say the least. Last week, Iran announced that it was going to trade ALL its oil in euros and the yen, and Israel appears to be furi­ously lob­by­ing the US and UK about Iran’s increas­ing nuc­le­ar threat. Israeli intel­li­gence sources are claim­ing that they have inform­a­tion “on a par with” that which led to the bomb­ing of the Syr­i­an nuc­le­ar power station.

Based on this, they are ask­ing the US gov­ern­ment to reas­sess the level of threat posed by Iran. In Decem­ber 2007 the com­bined think­ing of the whole of America’s intel­li­gence infra­struc­ture was pub­lished in the US Nation­al Intel­li­gence Estim­ate. It clearly stated that Iran had stopped devel­op­ing its nuc­le­ar weapons pro­gramme in 2003 because of inter­na­tion­al pressure.

But the appar­ent tri­umph of inter­na­tion­al dip­lomacy does not suit the agenda of the hawks in the US admin­is­tra­tion. What could be bet­ter than to have the spy agen­cies of its closest allies con­veni­ently reveal new intel­li­gence say­ing that Iran now poses an increas­ing nuc­le­ar threat?

The (Il)legal Road to War

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Yet anoth­er art­icle has appeared about the mess that is the wars in Afgh­anistan and Iraq. Max Hast­ings, writ­ing in the Daily Mail yes­ter­day, described how our sol­diers in Afgh­anistan feel that the con­tin­ued con­flict is point­less if there is no clear polit­ic­al strategy to resolve the situation.

The Brit­ish army is over­stretched, appar­ently at the behest of the USA. Accord­ing to the art­icle, our mil­it­ary badly needs to redeploy both nor­mal troops and the SAS from Iraq to Afgh­anistan, but the US is unwill­ing to allow this to hap­pen for polit­ic­al reas­ons. The Amer­ic­ans also appear to be mak­ing shame­less use of the SAS.

So, let’s remind ourselves of how we got into this mess. At an inform­al meet­ing with Bush in 2002, Blair uni­lat­er­ally com­mit­ted this coun­try to sup­port the Amer­ic­an inva­sion of Iraq. Without the sup­port of Blair, Bush could not have pre­ten­ded that he had a mean­ing­ful inter­na­tion­al coali­tion to invade Iraq.

Hav­ing made this prom­ise, Blair needed to deliv­er. Intel­li­gence mater­i­al, rather than being used to inform policy mak­ing, was manip­u­lated to fit around pre-determ­ined decisions. This was sum­mar­ised clearly by the then head of MI6, Sir Richard Dear­love, in the notori­ous leaked “Down­ing Street Memo”, in which he is quoted as say­ing that the intel­li­gence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

Fol­low­ing on from this came the Septem­ber Dossier, which not only placed undue emphas­is on the claim that WMD could be launched against Brit­ish interests in 45 minutes, but also the fake intel­li­gence that Sad­dam was try­ing to pro­cure urani­um from Niger. And finally, we had the Dodgy Dossier of Feb­ru­ary 2003, based largely on a 12 year old PhD thes­is culled from the inter­net, but which also con­tained nug­gets of raw intel­li­gence from MI6. Inter­est­ingly, it has been estab­lished by the For­eign Affairs Select Com­mit­tee in par­lia­ment that Blair did not have pri­or writ­ten per­mis­sion from MI6 to pub­lish this intel­li­gence, which leaves him wide open to pro­sec­u­tion under Sec­tion 1(1) of the 1989 Offi­cial Secrets Act.

These are the false asser­tions that inex­or­ably took this coun­try to war. But even if these claims had been true, aggress­ive war is illeg­al under both inter­na­tion­al and Brit­ish law. A raft of legis­la­tion pro­hib­its our coun­try enga­ging in any mil­it­ary action except in self-defence:

Just Foreign Policy Iraqi Death EstimatorThe Gen­er­al Treaty for the Renun­ci­ation of War (Kel­logg-Bri­and Pact)
The United Nations Charter
The Nurem­burg Judgment
The Nurem­burg Principles
The Rome Stat­ute of the Inter­na­tion­al Crim­in­al Court
The UK’s Inter­na­tion­al Crim­in­al Court Act 2001

The Iraq and Afghan wars are unwinnable and illeg­al. It is time for the people of the UK to inform them­selves of the laws of war and demand that they be upheld. We are all equal under the law – even the former Prime Min­is­ter. Every day we delay res­ults in the deaths of more of our ser­vice­men and of yet more inno­cent people in the Middle East.

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