NI Policing Board to seek urgent meeting with PSNI over journalist surveillance

Details of the surveillance were revealed in documents released as part of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), sitting at the Royal Court of Justice on Wednesday.

The court heard that the PSNI was engaging in six-monthly trawls of phone data belonging to eight journalists in NI.

Now the Policing Board has requested a meeting with PSNI Chief Constable Jon Boutcher to discuss the revelations.

“Following discussions around yesterday’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal, the Chair and the Vice Chair of the Board have requested an urgent meeting with the Chief Constable to seek further clarification and assurance around whether surveillance powers have been used lawfully, proportionately and appropriately in the past,” said a spokesperson.

“At the June Board meeting, the Board’s Human Rights Advisor John Wadham will also provide Members with an assessment on whether authorization policies and procedures were correctly adhered to.”

The IPT is examining allegations that two investigative reporters in Northern Ireland were subject to unlawful covert intelligence by the police as part of Operation Yurta.

Evidence presented to the tribunal on Wednesday suggested that the PSNI spying operation extended to several other reporters operating in Northern Ireland.

The documents show the surveillance started in 2007/8 and went on for a decade, involving a small group of journalists who were, in the words of one detective, “always looking for a story”.

Documents seen by the Belfast Telegraph show eight redacted names of those under surveillance by the PSNI.

Documentary makers Barry McCaffrey and Trevor Birney were controversially arrested in 2018 by police investigating the alleged leaking of confidential documents that appeared in a film they made about the Loughinisland Massacre.

The PSNI was later forced to apologize and agreed to pay £875,000 in damages to the journalists and the film company behind the documentary No Stone Unturned.

In 2019, Mr Birney and Mr McCaffrey lodged a complaint with the IPT asking it to establish whether there had been any unlawful surveillance of them.

The PSNI had asked Durham Constabulary to take the lead in the investigation into the leaked Police Ombudsman document that appeared in the documentary on the 1994 loyalist paramilitary gun attack.

Meanwhile, Sinn Féin Policing Board member Gerry Kelly said the party would also be seeking a meeting with Mr Boutcher.

“Disclosure from this tribunal has now also pointed to extensive covert surveillance and the harvesting on an industrial scale of the phone data of journalists by the police,” he said.

“It’s becoming increasingly clear that police and British state bodies have gone to extreme lengths to monitor and silence journalists rather than deal with the allegations of collusion and police corruption which journalists have shone a light on.

“We are deeply concerned about this week’s revelations and we will be pressing the Chief Constable for answers on the PSNI’s involvement in these tactics.”

The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) has called for the PSNI to be honest about the surveillance.

Spokesperson Ian McGuinness said: “Journalists exist to hold power to account and that includes writing stories about the PSNI which that force may not like.

“Writing a story about the PSNI and protecting your confidential sources while doing so is not a crime.

“The NUJ is calling, yet again, for the PSNI to come clean. In particular, the force needs to state when it started spying on multiple journalists’ phone data, who the journalists were, and how many times each journalist was spied upon and must give a commitment that it will desist from doing this ever again, simply to uncover legitimate sources for stories.”