Suspicions exist that police forces across the UK have been involved in spying on journalists, MPs have been told.
Two Belfast journalists told the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee that their experience of covert surveillance showed a public inquiry was needed, describing it as an “attack on democracy”.
The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) ruled last year that a covert surveillance operation authorised by a Northern Ireland police chief in a bid to unmask the journalistic sources of award-winning journalists Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey was unlawful.
The tribunal quashed the decision made by former Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) chief constable Sir George Hamilton to approve the directed surveillance authorisation (DSA) in an investigation into the leaking of a confidential document that appeared in a documentary on a Troubles massacre.
In 2018, McCaffrey and Birney were arrested as part of a police investigation into the alleged leaking of the document that appeared in a documentary they made on the 1994 loyalist paramilitary massacre in Loughinisland, Co Down.
The PSNI, citing a conflict of interest, asked Durham Police to lead the investigation into the inclusion of the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland document in the No Stone Unturned film on the UVF pub shooting that killed six men.
The PSNI later unreservedly apologised for the way the two journalists had been treated and agreed to pay £875,000 in damages to them and the film company behind the documentary.
In 2019, Birney and McCaffrey lodged a complaint with the IPT asking it to establish whether there had been unlawful surveillance of them.
The tribunal heard that a detective requested the DSA from Sir George to monitor whether the two reporters would contact their source in the week after their initial release from custody.
Sir George approved the covert surveillance of an individual who officers suspected was the source of the leaked document.
The tribunal also looked at separate allegations that the PSNI and the Metropolitan Police in London unlawfully accessed McCaffrey’s phone data in unrelated operations, in 2013 and 2012. The two forces had already conceded that those 2012 and 2013 operations were unlawful.
Spying ‘nothing to do with national security’
The two journalists, along with Seamus Dooley, the assistant general secretary of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), gave evidence on Wednesday to a Westminster committee which is investigating press freedom in Northern Ireland.
McCaffrey said disclosure documents obtained by the IPT showed that journalists had been spied on “solely to identify our journalistic sources”.
He said: “When you look at the disclosure and the police notes the IPT has shared with us, it is quite clear that in each and every occasion, it is nothing to do with national security, it is all to do with trying to identify journalistic sources.
“Indeed the documents show the PSNI branded myself and other journalists as criminals.”
He added: “We now know that the PSNI spied on me five times to identify journalistic sources.
“These included spying on my contacts with trade union officials, civil servants, they even used a loyalist death threat against me to go after my phone records.
“This was just an excuse to trawl through the phone records of a working journalist.”
Complaint ‘pulled a thread’ revealing ‘ugly picture’
Birney said they had “pulled a thread” in making the complaint to the IPT.
He said: “That thread then ultimately revealed a very ugly picture of widespread dragnet surveillance by police in Belfast.”
Describing the PSNI operation to use surveillance against the individual suspected of leaking the document, Birney said it was “like a storyline from Line Of Duty or some sort of Kafkaesque novel”.
He added: “What we discovered in the thousands of pages of disclosure is that the PSNI was seeking the support of the Metropolitan Police going back as far as 2011 in order to surveil the communications data of journalists in Northern Ireland.
“Over one four-month period in 2011, over 4,000 phone calls and text messages were monitored by the Met at the behest of the PSNI.
“Many of those phone calls and messages were between BBC journalists.
“Basically a UK police force was spying on the state broadcaster, the BBC, and its journalists and sharing that unlawful surveillance data with at least two other UK police forces, PSNI and Durham Constabulary, who also were involved in our arrest.”
Concerns of treatment of journalists ‘relate to all areas in the UK’
Current PSNI Chief Constable Jon Boutcher last year announced an independent review, headed by Angus McCullough KC, of any use of surveillance against journalists and other specific groups by police in Northern Ireland.
But Birney said the scope of that review is “much too narrow”.
He said: “We think this isn’t an issue which is just relating to Northern Ireland, we think it relates to all areas in the UK.
“David Davis MP, who has supported us throughout the case, was so concerned by what he learnt from the IPT he wrote to all the police forces in the UK to say ‘have you been doing the same thing as the PSNI has been doing?’
“As David said, he got what he described as a ‘dead bat’ response from all the police forces basically saying nothing.
“That is very concerning. It obviously raises suspicions about what is going on right across the UK, not only in Belfast.”
Dooley added: “The key issue is that this is about the wider treatment of journalists and it is not just Northern Ireland-based.
“While this is the Northern Ireland committee, it is of concern to every member of Parliament.”
Birney said only a full public inquiry could “get to the bottom” of the practice.
Addressing MPs, he said: “All you will know that you have communications with journalists, you all speak to journalists on a daily basis. That information is now in the hands of PSNI.
“The PSNI know what journalists are speaking to what politicians, and we feel that is an attack on democracy.
“This isn’t just an issue which pertains to the journalistic community… whether it is politicians, lawyers, activists, journalists, we feel it is a much broader societal issue and that is why it needs a public inquiry.”
McCaffrey said: “The police need to be held to account, to follow the rules. It wasn’t us who broke the law.
“Confidence in policing has been seriously undermined and damaged.
“Trevor didn’t do it, Seamus didn’t do it, I didn’t do it. It was the PSNI.”
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