Surveillance is the source of the problem

The promise to keep confidential the source of sensitive information is a journalists’ defining undertaking. That solemn assurance is what empowers witnesses to wrongdoing to seek out reporters and tip them off – be that to reveal corners that have been cut, bribes paid or laws ignored. But for so long as reporters have promised that their contacts identities’ are sacrosanct, the corner-cutters, bribers and criminals have tried to identify those who would expose them. Revelations that the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) snooped on the phone of Barry McCaffrey underlines just how vulnerable journalists are to surveillance.

Front page of 'The Irish News' on 24 July, 2023.

McCaffrey was one of the Belfast-based team who made the 2017 film 'No Stone Unturned', exposing the depths of police collusion protecting the identities of those behind the 1994 Loughinisland massacre. In that attack, six died and five were seriously injured when a terrorist Ulster Volunteer Force gunman burst into a pub and fired indiscriminately at a crowd of football fans.

McCaffrey and his colleague Trevor Birney have already experienced shocking treatment as the hands of the PSNI. In 2018 they were dragged from their homes at dawn, their equipment seized, and they were arrested under the Official Secrets Act. Supported by the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), they challenged their arrests at a judicial review and were eventually awarded £875,000 in compensation.

The arrests it now transpires were simply the one element of PSNI’s unlawful operations. The Police have now admitted that four years before 'No Stone Unturned' opened in cinemas, McCaffrey’s electronic communications were spied upon. The Police’s motivations? They wanted know how McCaffrey had got his hands on an internal report that laid bare the depths of Police collusion with terrorists. (For the record, McCaffrey told me long ago that the document was pushed through his door in an unmarked envelope.)

All of this would be serious were it an isolated incident. But it isn’t. The world over, governments, Police, businesses, and criminal enterprises are using increasingly sophisticated means to eavesdrop on journalists. And what they do to the media, you can be sure is also being done to trades unionists, community leaders and opposition politicians.

In France, the NUJ’s opposite number, the Syndicat National de Journalistes (SNJ) is taking legal action after Morocco used snooping software to spy on journalists. A group of El Salvadorian reporters are currently bringing legal action in the United States, after Pegasus software was used to spy on their phones. And we now know that snooping software was extensively used to track Jamal Khashoggi’s movements in preparation for his shocking murder in the Saudi Arabian embassy in Istanbul.

In a nutshell, tyrants, despots and criminals are using increasingly sophisticated methods to try and keep tabs on journalists. The governments, police and security services in mature, liberal democracies are doing the same. Each scandal is just the tip of the iceberg. For every snooping tool that becomes known, such as Pegasus, manufactured by the NSO group, there are many more that remain in the shadows. Predator and Quadream are two actively-marketed snooping tools. Both UK and US intelligence services have their own proprietary software that allow them to infiltrate smartphones.

There may well be a case for sophisticated technology to protect national security, prevent terror attacks, and unmask criminal enterprises. The sad truth, however, is that more often that not, Police use this capability for the most mundane and needless purposes. McCaffrey’s is a case in point.

Whatever case there might be for these powerful weapons of surveillance, for so long as Police use them to commit crimes rather than solving them, their use should be heavily proscribed.

The best solution would be an international prohibition on such snooping without a publicly-obtained, judicially approved order. In the meantime, journalists, and any in those other groups who fear surveillance, must deploy a kind of antique tradecraft – particularly in the way that they use smartphones.

Android and iPhone devices have the potential to reveal their position and all movements. Microphones and cameras can be activated remotely by hostile snoopers. Handsets can be switched on from afar. Messages, encrypted or not, can be intercepted. Smartphones’ proximity to other smartphones is easy to track.

So, don’t take your phone to important, confidential meetings. Create pattens of smartphone use that don’t draw attention to the only times that you don’t take your phone with you. Leave your smartphone at home if you think that it will be taken from you, say when you enter a building. And assume that all communication over a smartphone can be intercepted.

It is a challenging, paranoid world to enter, and occasionally giving up the resources to which a phone gives you access is inconvenient. For journalists, failing to take these steps, however, is to risk our defining commitment to those who make our work possible. For other civil society activists, it is to risk our most sensitive information falling into the hands of those who would undermine our work.

More revelations are expected in the Belfast case, and it is probable that further compensation will be paid. The most valuable upshot of these revelations, however, is the fresh attention that they draw to the risks of surveillance. If this persuades a few more of us to take steps to thwart the snoopers, so much the better. And who knows, an occasional break from the distractions of smartphone, might even help us all better appreciate the unfiltered world around us?

Tim Dawson is Deputy General Secretary of the International Federation of Journalists.