British Police Declare War On Journalists
Officers’ covert access of phone records puts off whistleblowers
The police appear to have declared war on journalists. If this sounds more than a little far-fetched, consider the evidence.
Case one: in September, it emerged the Metropolitan police had used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) in order to covertly access the mobile phone records of the Sun’s political editor, Tom Newton-Dunn. He was responsible for the controversial Plebgate story in September 2012, which alleged the then government chief whip, Andrew Mitchell, had insulted police officers at the gates of Downing Street.
Case two: in October, it was revealed that Essex police had secretly used Ripa, also in 2012, to hack into the phone records of the Mail on Sunday newsdesk in order to discover how it obtained exclusive articles about the former cabinet minister Chris Huhne. In so doing, the police outed the paper’s source and the freelance journalist, Andrew Alderson, who acted as the go-between. The police did not even keep the details of the calls and emails between Alderson and the paper’s news editor, David Dillon, to themselves; they passed them on to lawyers.
Case three: two weeks ago, six journalists announced they were taking legal action against the Met after discovering officers had been recording their activities and movements on a database that monitors “domestic extremism”. They are Jules Mattsson, a Times reporter; Mark Thomas, the comedian-cum-journalist; three photographers – Jess Hurd, David Hoffman and Adrian Arbib – and Jason Parkinson, a freelance video journalist. Parkinson was astonished to find the police had detailed his movements in 130 entries, including his attendance at demonstrations as a member of the press.
The six, represented by the National Union of Journalists, have launched a legal challenge to the surveillance along with a demand that the Met destroys the files held on them. Some of the group complain that, quite apart from being monitored, they have been persistently stopped, searched and assaulted by police officers. Five of them have successfully sued the police in the past, winning damages or apologies from the force. These frontline confrontations have something of a history, but they are also suggestive of the growing antagonism between officers and journalists.
Case four: last week, , including journalists and lawyers, working for the Times, Sunday Times and Sun after the material was mistakenly sent to them by Vodafone. It enabled officers to scrutinise the records to the extent of conducting data analysis and building a spreadsheet before, after several months, they eventually lodged “a formal error report”.
Those four separate incidents certainly go a long way to suggest the police are at war with the hacks. In addition, we should not overlook the matter of the arrests of 25 Sun journalists for alleged illegal payments to public officials, which followed the News of the World phone-hacking drama. Indeed, it was the Met’s embarrassment after being exposed for having failed to carry out a comprehensive investigation into hacking that engendered the opening of hostilities with the press.
It triggered an , that registered official concern about the nature of the relationships between police officers, from the highest to the lowest ranks, and journalists. Her inquiry ran in parallel with Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry into press practices. But Filkin’s report appeared almost a year before Leveson’s and heralded a split between Scotland Yard and Fleet Street. She contended that the previous informal relationships had caused “serious harm”, that information was passed to journalists “inappropriately” and warned of the need to terminate socialising.
Social Media
