By Steve Wright

(The first part in this series can be read here, second part here, and an introduction to the series here.)

The Special Branch Raid On Lancaster University

Not all knowledge is from rational sources. Even the term paranoia literally means ‘beyond knowledge (para: beyond; noia: knowledge). On the night of 5th April 1977 I had a stormy, seemingly pointless argument with my wife. In frustration I declared that my wife didn’t understand the work in which I was engaged and ‘one day my work would walk through the front door.’ The instant response, quite deservedly, was ‘you’re being melodramatic – I’m going to bed!’ I reflected on this afterwards thinking it was a bit melodramatic and that I was making needless emotional waves.

A few hours later loud knocks on the door heralded the arrival of six Special Branch officers who make it clear that they wanted co-operation otherwise they will use ‘blatant search techniques’. This implied that not only would they turn the place over but that the search would become very obvious to the neighbours. Without the argument of the night before, I might have caved in. Because of it and a silly sense of ‘I told you so’ I calmly suggested that what they were doing infringed academic freedom and was unprecedented. This episode of déjà vu was so well documented in the light of subsequent events, Brian Inglis used it in his book, the Hidden Power. The lesson here is whilst one should never give way to paranoia, it is useful to develop and trust your intuition. Our minds are capable of intuitive leaps which are ours to use even if we can not necessarily rationally explain them and the history of science is full of such episodes. Our challenge is to use hunches as a methodology to conjecture with or refute.

In fact my then neighbours were so alarmed by the presence of six burly strangers strolling around our house they called the local police! The officer knocked on our door and was given short shrift by Detective Chief Inspector Moffat of Scotland Yard, who told him, ‘It’s official so piss off’. I queried what it was that I was alleged to have done and the Kafkaesque atmosphere was heightened by the response that it is an official secret and I cannot be told. In the meantime, my diaries and entire research correspondence were removed. I discovered later that the police don’t steal, the technical term is detinue – i.e. they hold on to items longer than they should, a matter which can be devastating if a researcher is working to pre-set deadlines.

In this heavy atmosphere of confrontation with secret police officers, it would have been easy to roll over but I felt it was important to stand up to their infringement of my rights to research. How was another matter. I could easily see how my academic future could be blown out of the water if a full secrets trial resulted from what was to all intents and purposes a fishing expedition.

I was taken by car to Lancaster University. It was the Easter holiday period and the special branch officers expected ‘that a bit of arm twisting’ would give them easy access to my offices in an otherwise empty campus. But the politics department was crawling with academics who were demanding proper procedures be followed. After some delay, I thanked the officers for their lift to campus and announced that I had work to do and proceeded to exit the car. This forced their hand and I was arrested under the official secrets legislation and taken to meet with Professor Phillip Reynolds the Pro-Vice Chancellor, together with various university and college officials who had assembled: Dr Roxbee Cox, Fylde principal and Mr. Forrester, Academic Registrar.

The atmosphere was tense. Special Branch demanded access to my room and I pointed out that principles of academic freedom were involved. After all I had only ever used open sources, had simply followed the university motto and no one had explained the nature of any charges laid against me. Detective Chief Inspector Moffat replied that ‘this was an issue of national security’ and told me that they had a warrant. Professor Reynolds demanded that they go through the proper channels, to which Moffat replied that he had six men present and would start breaking down doors in the department if access was denied. People began sweating – it was an unforgettable moment. I broke it by emphasizing that I had nothing to hide and suggested that they could search to their hearts’ content.¹ The atmosphere was thankfully lightened a bit later with the arrival of my supervisor, Dr Paul Smoker, who amidst the hub bub in the corridors managed to give me a burst of the Beatles hit, ‘Listen Do You Want To Know A Secret – Do you Promise Not to Tell?’ Perfect: but I was later held in Lancaster Police Station for several hours, refused a solicitor and when finally released was told, sometimes you fellows are too clever for your own good.’

The raid turned my research plans upside down not to mention the impact it had on my personal life. However it was many times worse for the main researchers, Crispin Aubrey, John Berry and Duncan Campbell (now deemed the ABC defendants), who were facing the full rigours of an official secrets act trial. And yet there was a puzzle: why had Special Branch undertaken such a foolhardy exercise as to raid a British University – how come I’d touched on a raw nerve? It quickly dawned on me that I had inadvertently stumbled on a network connected with the configuration of the antennae I had photographed on the Quenmore Moor, which the authorities were desperate to keep secret. It seemed incomprehensible. I knew that Menwith Hill was a US base, but what was the link with UK phone lines, and especially the link to Northern Ireland? Just where were the results being transmitted – to the US, but how – by satellite? The system must be huge. It felt like a science fiction movie. Continue reading →

The Associated Press reports: The McClatchy news organization asked National Intelligence Director James Clapper on Tuesday whether U.S. intelligence agencies monitored cellphone calls between a McClatchy freelance reporter and his sources in Afghanistan.

In a letter to Clapper, Anders Gyllenhaal, McClatchy’s vice president of news, and Karole Morgan-Prager, vice president, corporate development and general counsel, called the allegations that U.S. intelligence agencies helped target a journalist working for a U.S. news organization “disturbing.”

“Absent a well-founded, good faith belief that a journalist is engaged in terrorist activities, compiling and analyzing a journalist’s metadata would violate core First Amendment principles, and U.S. law,” Gyllenhaal and Morgan-Prager wrote.

They asked Clapper whether any U.S. intelligence agencies helped in the “collection, use or analysis” of any metadata from McClatchy freelancer Jon Stephenson’s cellphone while he worked in Afghanistan last year.

The Guardian reports: The bipartisan leaders of a powerful Senate committee questioned the truthfulness of the US intelligence community in a heated Wednesday morning hearing as intelligence officials conceded that their controversial bulk phone records collection of millions of Americans was not “the most important tool”.

“We need straightforward answers, and I’m concerned we’re not getting them,” said Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat and chairman of the Senate judiciary committee.

Leahy, joined by ranking Republican Chuck Grassley of Iowa, blasted James Clapper, the US director of national intelligence, for making untruthful statements to Congress in March about the bulk phone records collection on Americans, and NSA director Keith Alexander for overstating the usefulness of that collection for stopping terrorist attacks.

Grassley called Clapper’s recent apology to senator Ron Wyden and the intelligence community “especially disturbing”.

“Nothing can excuse this kind of behavior from a senior administration official,” Grassley said. “Especially on a matter of such importance.” [Continue reading…]

Nicky Hager* reports: The New Zealand military received help from US spy agencies to monitor the phone calls of Kiwi journalist Jon Stephenson and his associates while he was in Afghanistan reporting on the war.

Stephenson has described the revelation as a serious violation of his privacy, and the intrusion into New Zealand media freedom has been slammed as an abuse of human rights.

The spying came at a time when the New Zealand Defence Force was unhappy at Stephenson’s reporting of its handling of Afghan prisoners and was trying to find out who was giving him confidential information.

The monitoring occurred in the second half of last year when Stephenson was working as Kabul correspondent for the US McClatchy news service and for various New Zealand news organisations.

The Sunday Star-Times has learned that New Zealand Defence Force personnel had copies of intercepted phone “metadata” for Stephenson, the type of intelligence publicised by US intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden. The intelligence reports showed who Stephenson had phoned and then who those people had phoned, creating what the sources called a “tree” of the journalist’s associates.

New Zealand SAS troops in Kabul had access to the reports and were using them in active investigations into Stephenson.

The sources believed the phone monitoring was being done to try to identify Stephenson’s journalistic contacts and sources. They drew a picture of a metadata tree the Defence Force had obtained, which included Stephenson and named contacts in the Afghan government and military.

The sources who described the monitoring of Stephenson’s phone calls in Afghanistan said that the NZSIS has an officer based in Kabul who was known to be involved in the Stephenson investigations.

And since early in the Afghanistan war, the GCSB has secretly posted staff to the main US intelligence centre at Bagram, north of Kabul. They work in a special “signals intelligence” unit that co-ordinates electronic surveillance to assist military targeting. It is likely to be this organisation that monitored Stephenson. [Continue reading…]

*Nicky Hager is an investigative journalist from New Zealand who has been exposing the NSA’s global surveillance operations since the 1990s, and is the author of Secret Power (1997) which can be downloaded as a free e-book here.

By Steve Wright, Surveillance & Society, 2005

(The first part in this series can be read here and an introduction to the series here.)

Truth Lies Open To All?

Lancaster University’s motto – ‘Omnibus Patet Veritas’ very much appealed to me. It means ‘truth lies open to all’. I was fascinated by the contradictions between this ideal and the hidden dimensions of political control – especially in the UK where civil servants were required to sign the Official Secrets Act.

I was working on a range of different techniques for assessing new technologies of political control. This included an examination of the growth of surveillance in the UK, which had significantly changed over the last two decades. It is useful to look at the context in which this research was taking place. For example in 1957 when Lord Birkett produced the official report on telephone interception in the UK, telephone tapping was very much a cottage industry. Since then telephone interception has grown into today’s hitech networks.

Nevertheless when figures were officially updated in 1980, many MP’s were surprised by the relatively modest official increase over the intervening 23 years: from 129 warrants in 1958 to 411 in 1979 for England and Wales. However the 1980 paper on the Interception of Communications did admit that one warrant could cover multiple intercepts on an entire organisation and its members e.g. CND. It was also revealed that the Secretary of State ‘may delegate’ to the civil service the power to amend a warrant. Thus the total number of lines monitored was going to be substantially more than the number of warrants issued.

Another anomaly was revealed when MP Clement Freud asked whether the number of interception orders currently in force was cumulative or whether the number given simply indicated how many new orders had been published. The then Home Secretary, William Whitelaw, refused to answer leaving open the possibility that key permanent warrants for MI5 & Special Branch were only issued once. It might also have been supposed that the development of international terrorism in the early Seventies had further fuelled the growth of telephone surveillance. However the public record showed a different story. The sharp boom in UK telephone tapping came immediately after Birkett, who recommended that in future official figures on tapping should not be made public.

Thus the main growth period in telecommunications surveillance occurred in the Sixties before international terrorism – the ostensible reason for official surveillance in the Eighties – had become a major problem. If anything, the official record shows that the growth rate slackened in 1970, just as terrorism, particularly in Northern Ireland, had intensified. It could not be the full story. In this respect the White Paper gave a clue. It did not cover telephone tapping in the Province, nor did it cover warrants signed by the Foreign Secretary for the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ¹) and the Secret Intelligence Services, nor tapping warrants signed by the Prime Minister.

These were particularly significant omissions, given that just one permanent warrant signed in 1967 authorized GCHQ to intercept all overseas telegrams. Indeed the sudden drop in Home Secretary warrants after 1975 can be partially explained by this transfer of the surveillance workload from MI5 to GCHQ in conjunction with the US National Security Agency (NSA) and without reference to parliament.

Bypassing formal democratic authorisation and transparency of interceptions thus became a state norm – but how could surveillance researchers ever hope to get evidence of such a top secret network – especially since the penalties under the Official Secrets Act were draconian – up to 14 years in jail? The short answer, as is often the case, was by accident. Continue reading →

Glenn Greenwald writes: Numerous polls taken since our reporting on previously secret NSA activities first began have strongly suggested major public opinion shifts in how NSA surveillance and privacy are viewed. But a new comprehensive poll released over the weekend weekend by Pew Research provides the most compelling evidence yet of how stark the shift is.

Among other things, Pew finds that “a majority of Americans – 56% – say that federal courts fail to provide adequate limits on the telephone and internet data the government is collecting as part of its anti-terrorism efforts.” And “an even larger percentage (70%) believes that the government uses this data for purposes other than investigating terrorism.” Moreover, “63% think the government is also gathering information about the content of communications.” That demonstrates a decisive rejection of the US government’s three primary defenses of its secret programs: there is adequate oversight; we’re not listening to the content of communication; and the spying is only used to Keep You Safe™.

But the most striking finding is this one:

“Overall, 47% say their greater concern about government anti-terrorism policies is that they have gone too far in restricting the average person’s civil liberties, while 35% say they are more concerned that policies have not gone far enough to protect the country. This is the first time in Pew Research polling that more have expressed concern over civil liberties than protection from terrorism since the question was first asked in 2004.”

For anyone who spent the post-9/11 years defending core liberties against assaults relentlessly perpetrated in the name of terrorism, polling data like that is nothing short of shocking. [Continue reading…]