Extent of illegal surveillance by PSNI, MI5 shocked me

Protecting sources is the bedrock of journalism.

Those prepared to provide information, particularly of a sensitive nature, need to trust the person they are sharing it with.

They need to know that a promise to protect their identity is cast iron.

Throughout my career as a journalist, starting as cub reporter with the Belfast Telegraph in 1988, I have prided myself on building and retaining relationships of trust with a wide range of sources.

They have included members of republican and loyalist paramilitary organisations, police officers, politicians, and others with knowledge of the security and political environment of Northern Ireland.

Many spoke to me without the knowledge or approval of the organisations of which they were members, and some genuinely feared the consequences if they were exposed as a source for stories I wrote or broadcast.

Stories that included IRA moves towards ceasefires and decommissioning, loyalist paramilitary activities and internal debates, and allegations of collusion involving police officers and members of the British military.

Good sources are hard won but easily lost.

The widespread illegal monitoring of my communications by the PSNI and British security service MI5 exposed during a case brought to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) in London was an attempt to destroy those relationships.

As I said in a witness statement to the IPT, agencies charged with upholding the law used unlawful means to undermine and hinder my ability to perform my lawful duties as a journalist. It was an attack on journalism itself.

The full extent was set out in stark detail last week in a BBC Northern Ireland documentary, 'Watched By MI5', made in conjunction with RTÉ.

I had always worked on the basis that there was a high likelihood that the police and possibly the British security service may have been interested in some of what I was doing and those to whom I was speaking.

But I was shocked by the extent of the illegal activity by the PSNI and MI5 to identify my sources.

I was targeted systematically over a period of 11 years.

The PSNI conducted seven separate named operations against me. In one of them accessed communications data on more than 1,580 calls and texts, information that identified the numbers of everyone I was in contact with and also, crucially, the location of the phones at the time.

The IPT case resulted in MI5 being forced to make an unprecedented admission that they had also been secretly accessing my communications data.

They did so several times in 2006 and 2009. At one point they even labelled me a threat to national security in order to justify authorisations for their intrusion.

I still do not know what data they gleaned nor whether they listened to and transcribed any of my calls because their legal team was able to submit vast amounts of information to the tribunal judges in closed, secret sessions.

My suspicion is shared by former BBC Northern Ireland Security Editor Brian Rowan.

It was revealed during my IPT hearing that his phone was also targeted. He has good reason to believe that some of his calls were listened to as he was once told by a trusted police source that MI5 was able to "critique" a conversation he had with that person.

"The only way you can critique that conversation is if you have a transcript of it, or you've heard it, or you’re aware of its detail," he told the documentary.

"So, I do not rule out that possibility, that this went much further, much further than simply trying to match one number up with another number."

I was also described as and treated as a suspect in an investigation; journalism literally was treated as a crime.

One of the most shocking discoveries was that the PSNI had built an intelligence profile of me and my family.

A document marked 'OFFICIAL – SENSITIVE' recorded my date of birth, home and work address, landline and mobile phone numbers, vehicle registrations, the names of my wife Louise and her late mother who lived with us at the time.

The police have still not explained the purpose of that intelligence document. The fact that it contained details of the cars we were driving at the time suggests strongly that the purpose may have been to put me under active surveillance in order to identify who I was meeting and talking to.

The unlawful attempts by law enforcement agencies to identify journalistic sources is potentially dangerous.

If such an operation was to result in a confidential source within the ranks of a paramilitary organisation being identified, that could place the journalist in jeopardy as the finger of blame would be pointed firmly in their direction.

'I was the target of a number of threats'

Many journalists in Northern Ireland have faced threats from loyalist and republican groups.

I was the target of a number of threats that resulted in my wife Louise and I having to hurriedly take our four children to hotels.

On one occasion Louise, who was eight months pregnant with our third son, awoke in the early hours of the morning to find two masked men walking up our driveway towards our car, with one carrying an unidentified object in his hand.

I yelled out the window and that scared them off, but it left a deep sense of unease and my employer at the time, The Sunday Times, immediately paid to upgrade security at our home. The BBC later also enhanced security following another threat that also led to a hotel stay.

After each of those incidents, and a number of others, trusted sources helped ensure threats were removed.

The revelations about the illegal targeting of my communications data made throughout this case had a very real chill factor.

Many sources understandably expressed concern that their communications with me may have been compromised, some have fallen silent.

One example is a long-standing friend who helped me with an investigation into loyalist paramilitary racketeering.

He picked me up at 5.30am in his work van, with me dressed in old painting clothes and steel-toecap boots and parked up in a building site where I was able to watch a senior member of the UDA collect protection money.

That senior paramilitary figure was later exposed as a police informer.

Shortly after the revelations were made at the IPT hearing he approached me genuinely alarmed that he may have been wrongly identified as a source rather than a friend going out on a limb, and what the potential consequences might be, particularly because the target of our early-morning excursion was a state agent.

A republican source who had spoken to me without clearance and had continued to do so after the IRA ceasefires and decommissioning Sinn Féin’s journey to power made his anger clear in very stark terms.

The late former PSNI Assistant Chief Constable Alan McQuillan was planning to contact the IPT himself as he believed he may have been "collateral damage" in the operations by his former employer and MI5. He once warned me that I would be naïve not to believe that my phone was being targeted, it was advice I took on board.

Our four children used to joke about the fact that I never used our home landline for work calls and sometimes remarked to my wife Louise that I thought my mobile phone calls may not be secure.

I was also very careful about what I texted or put into emails.

When MI5 was forced by the IPT last year to admit to the BBC’s lawyers that it had illegally accessed my communications data the children each received a WhatsApp group chat message saying "I told you so".

But I had no idea about the scale of what was to come, the sheer level of intrusion.

Unanswered questions

There remain many unanswered questions.

I do not know how the data gleaned from my phone records was used.

I do not know if the police officers involved are still within the ranks of the PSNI and potentially in a position to act like this again. I do not know if any of them have been disciplined in any way.

It is not for the want of trying. I have asked the police several times and been told they don’t know. I don’t buy that - and even if I did, they are in a position to find the answer quickly.

I still do not know the identities of the senior PSNI officers who signed off on what have been deemed to be unlawful authorisations to target my data; those are questions that need answering.

I also do not know the full extent of MI5’s activities against me. I have very good reason to believe that my phone was targeted more often than they have admitted.

On one occasion when I was working on an investigation about a senior loyalist paramilitary, a senior PSNI officer I had just intervened made a casual remark that displayed knowledge of a conversation I had with a former senior member of the UVF; a conversation I had only shared with my producer Chris Thornton and no one else.

We both remarked at the time that he could only have known that detail if the conversation had been monitored.

Of course, we will never know what RUC Special Branch and British military intelligence were doing during the darkest days of the Troubles in terms of surveillance and monitoring of journalists.

Given what the new, reformed face of policing the PSNI got up to it’s fair to assume the level of intrusion in the past was much, much worse.

London based barrister and media law expert Gavin Millar told the Spotlight/RTÉ documentary that it is vital that law enforcement agencies realise the particular sensitivities for journalists working in Northern Ireland.

"It’s very often specific to Northern Ireland, where there is a lot of anxiety and fear on the part of sources coming forward to journalists," he said.

"It’s particularly important that that chill factor is understood by state agencies and by judges and that the concerns underlying this part of the law are respected, otherwise there is a threat to democracy."

Attempt to silence sources

I have been fortunate to have had a great career in journalist spanning almost 40 years since starting out with the Belfast Telegraph in the summer of 1988.

If these revelations had been made in the early years of that journey it could have been career ending, and certainly career limiting as potential sources would have understandamly been reluctant to trust my assurances to protect their identities.

That is why this case matters.

It was an attempt to silence sources and stop them providing information the police and security services did not want to get into the public domain.

It is not the job of journalists to be evidence gatherers for the police; it is their job to investigate crime, or in this case what they perceived to be crime, and in doing so they must stay within the law.

This ruling was a victory for journalism as it reinforces the legal right and duty of journalists to protect their sources, without whom there can be no investigative journalism.

There is no doubt that many other journalists have been targeted in the same way, and perhaps still are.

This ruling should make those tasked with upholding the law think long and hard about breaking the law.

But the reality is that I will still work on the basis that someone somewhere may still be tracking my activities and potentially listening to calls.

As the late Alan McQuillan said, it would be naïve to think otherwise.