Latest News & Updates

Big Brother is Watching, Listening, Monitoring…

05/07/08

Last Wednesday (July 1) the European Court of Human Rights ruled unanimously that a major British electronic spying and intelligence gathering operation aimed at all electronic communications emanating from or to Ireland had violated Article 8 (right to respect for private and family life and correspondence) of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The European ruling is the culmination of an 11-year legal challenge, initiated by three civil liberties’ organisations based in Dublin and London – the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, British Irish Rights Watch and Liberty.

The case was taken after a television programme broadcast in 1999 showed that, between 1990 and 1997, all telephone, fax, e-mail and data communications between Britain and Ireland, including legally privileged and confidential information, had been intercepted by an Electronic Test Facility (ETF) operated by the British Ministry of Defence.

During this period, all telephone calls, faxes, emails and text messages sent between Ireland and Britain were intercepted and stored en masse, to be filtered by British intelligence services. The intercepts also applied to all cross-border communications within Ireland itself. The story was originally made public by the well-known investigative journalist, Duncan Campbell.

The British Ministry of Defence operated the ETF at Capenhurst in Cheshire, which was built to intercept 10,000 simultaneous telephone channels between Ireland and Britain, including all those between two British Telecom radio stations at Clwyd and Chester, a link which carried much of Ireland’s telecommunications traffic.

At the time of the Channel 4 News exposure in 1999, Channel 4 said sources told the programme that “although the primary justification for building the tower was anti-terrorism, the information it gathered was also of economic and commercial significance”.

A British Home Office spokesperson told the Channel 4 programme that the British government did not comment on “alleged interception activity” in accordance with “standard practice”.

The original 158ft tower at Capenhurst was demolished in 2004. The demolition came after the opening in 2003 of Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (the electronic surveillance arm of the British intelligence services) complex at Cheltenham in England. At the time of its opening, the complex was the second-largest public-sector building project in Europe, with an estimated cost of £337 million (€424.5m).

éirígí spokesperson Seán Mac Brádaigh said the British government’s intelligence gathering activities were central to their continued presence in the North of Ireland.

“This case demonstrates the extent to which ongoing, secret and intrusive intelligence and electronic spying operations are being mounted by the British to maintain their occupation of the Six Counties.

“The Capenhurst facility, which could intercept and store up to 10,000 telephone calls, faxes and e-mails at any one time, has been replaced by more modern facilities with even greater capabilities. Those facilities include MI5’s new spy-base, located just outside Belfast.”

Seán continued: “The British occupation of the Six Counties is being maintained by a strategy of false normalisation. As Britain publicly reduced the numbers of its troops in Ireland to a 5,000 strong garrison, leaving the RUC-PSNI to remain the public face of the occupation, a significant number of British intelligence operatives remain engaged in covert operations. Irish republicans should be mindful that not being able to actually see those operatives does not mean they are not there.”

Print-friendly version