Source: The Scotsman
THE news spilled slowly and noisily off the telex machine in the busy office of the Scottish Trades Union Congress . It could hardly have been more mundane: formal greetings from East European trade unionists and responses to invitations to attend STUC meetings. It was of limited interest even to the half dozen staff working there, but 334 miles away from the organisation’s Glasgow headquarters someone was literally sitting up and taking note.
With the Cold War not yet fully over, the government’s GCHQ electronic eavesdropping centre at Cheltenham was intercepting telexes sent to and from the then STUC general secretary Campbell Christie.
It is unsurprising that the intelligence services would regard the ruddy left-winger’s passion for talking politics with colleagues in Hungary, Poland and East Germany as unpatriotic. But Christie only learned he was under surveillance when an intelligence source blew the whistle in 1991. "It confirmed what I suspected," he said. "They regarded us as the enemy within."
Until this week, Christie was philosophical about the unwanted intrusion. To him, it was a feature of a bygone era when secretive surveillance activities in Scotland were far more common.
But a Scotland on Sunday investigation has uncovered startling new figures showing that since 1990, state-sponsored surveillance north of the Border has risen by 500%.
While the latest official government figures show a 7% drop in the number of warrants granted by ministers to allow surveillance in England and Wales (1,608), it is not a good time to be an enemy of the state in Scotland, where the Orwellian reality is that we are being watched as never before.
Ministerial-backed surveillance is sanctioned at almost twice the rate that Scotland’s population would appear to justify.
Warrants to spy on Scots now account for 15% of all cases in mainland Britain, despite a population that accounts for only 9% .
Statistics just released record that in 2000 a total of 292 warrants were issued by Scottish ministers, allowing police and intelligence experts to intercept private mail and tap telephones.
And the intelligence services are not just listening in to private chats and opening letters. They are monitoring offices, homes and hotel bedrooms with powerful cameras and directional microphones. They are bugging and attaching tracking devices to cars, and they are intercepting e-mails, faxes, pager messages and mobile phone calls.
Between April 2000 and March 2001, chief officers of law enforcement agencies have authorised spying on private homes, offices and hotel bedrooms in 56 Scottish cases.
Intrusive surveillance warrants, which give the state power to break into private cars and homes and use undercover agents to spy on individuals, were signed 12 times in the six months between September 2000 and March 2001. Action can be sanctioned where a conviction could be expected to lead to a custodial sentence of three years or more.
Labour’s backbench MSP John McAllion believes his phone was tapped by MI5 snoopers in 1993 over his outspoken backing for strikers at Dundee’s Timex factory. On one occasion his wife put down the phone she had been using and immediately picked it up again to hear the date and the time and a voice saying, "recording finished".
The SNP MSP Christine Grahame has suggested she fell victim to a ham-fisted surveillance attempt in the Scottish parliament after hearing mysterious crackling sounds and echoes on the line.
Widespread reluctance to disclose anything that could help criminals who are under surveillance means the Executive refuses to give even the broadest hint on why subversive activities in Scotland appear so extensive.
In a terse statement, a spokesman would only say: "Police seek these warrants to tackle serious crime where lives are at risk or in other such serious circumstances.
"Within the criteria of the legislation, each case is considered on its merits and the warrant is not issued unless it meets the criteria."
However, intelligence sources have helped to build a picture of the purpose of the burgeoning use of surveillance. One said: "The police, customs and other agencies have all been making more use of warrants. The drugs problem is growing all the time and there has been a feeling that we have been losing the war. "Maybe part of it is also down to the fact that Scotland is smaller. We have fewer forces, so there is better liaison and we are better at clocking criminals."
A newly published report to Scottish ministers, by an official watchdog charged with ensuring surveillance does not fall foul of European human rights law, indicates that drugs are a key factor in the surge in Scottish warrants.
Sir Swinton Thomas, the interception of communications commissioner, records that in 1999, Scottish ministers authorised 44 warrants for HM Customs’ cases, in addition to 231 serious crime cases.
In 2000, Donald Dewar, Jim Wallace and the former Scottish secretary John Reid authorised warrants for 288 "serious crimes" and four for Customs cases.
And the level of secret surveillance is set to rise following the creation of the Scottish Drug Enforcement Agency in Renfrew. There, its officers work alongside the Scottish office of the UK’s National Criminal Intelligence Service, using painstaking long-term intelligence work to track top criminals. Their techniques include surveillance, financial investigations and planting operatives on the inside.
But Scotland has other distinctions that may account for its status as a spying hotspot. There has been substantial activity involving suspected terrorists in Scotland, home to a large number of people sympathetic to Irish Republicans and Loyalist terrorists.
The IRA is believed to have shipped significant quantities of guns and explosives into Scotland more than 10 years ago. Security sources have indicated these are hidden at locations around Stirlingshire and Dunblane. Thomas confirmed that 13 surveillance warrants in 1999 related to terrorism.
The country’s left-wing leanings have long troubled the military, which has a network of bases across Scotland. The intelligence services once listened in on Joan Ruddock, the former Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) chairwoman, now an English Labour MP.
John Scott, the chairman of the Scottish Centre for Human Rights, suspects a rise in Scottish nationalism may also be a factor. "I would like to know what the hell is going on. It gives the impression that New Labour don’t exactly trust Scotland, so maybe there are fears that the path we have set off on with devolution heads off to independence."
Even those who know the law better than most are falling prey to secret surveillance. Several senior solicitors have found evidence of confidential phone calls to clients being routinely and illegally tapped.
Joe Beltrami, one of Scotland’s most celebrated defence lawyers, believes his Glasgow headquarters has been monitored since 1969, when he acted for murder suspect Patrick Meehan - who was convicted, then granted a Royal Pardon - as a result of MI6 connections mentioned at his trial.
Beltrami told Scotland on Sunday he heard "noises, including clicks, on a regular basis" when he spoke to Gorbals-based Meehan on the phone. "I have no doubt in my mind that my office phone was tapped."
His suspicions were reinforced when he later took a call from another murder suspect offering to give himself up. When the men met up at an agreed location near the city’s Saltmarket, police were waiting and watching.
The technology now available to the intelligence services has advanced beyond recognition. In the past, whenever a tapped telephone rang or a suspect started to dial, a tape recorder was automatically set in motion and stenographers transcribed the tapes.
Recent advances in speech recognition equipment mean keywords such as ‘Semtex’ or ‘bomb’ can now be picked up automatically by computer without requiring operators to laboriously monitor and transcribe all suspect calls.
Lawyers and civil liberty activists fear that as the technology improves further the temptation for police to go beyond the letter of the law may prove irresistible.
"The problem is there is no real system of control and checks," says Tony Bunyan of Statewatch, which monitors civil liberties across Europe.
He is equally alarmed by admissions from the government’s watchdogs that they are overstretched. In a report sent last month to Prime Minister Tony Blair and First Minister Jack McConnell, Sir Andrew Leggatt, the chief surveillance commissioner, admits that staff shortages left him unable to carry out "any meaningful oversight" of 950 public bodies entitled to conduct covert surveillance last year, including health trusts and councils.
Both surveillance commissioners also flagged an alarming catalogue of errors and improper surveillance. Leggatt censures Lothian and Borders police for going "beyond the property interference necessary" for an investigation, by removing papers.
But, privately, many senior police officers want more surveillance powers. One officer complained: "Even before you use binoculars for normal surveillance you have to fill out a lengthy form because of the bureaucratic safeguards."
Jack Urquhart of the Association of Scottish Police Superintendents said police must have access to "as much intelligence as possible" to combat increasingly sophisticated criminals.
Others say the current level of British surveillance cannot be tolerated. It is greater now than at any time during the Cold War and even the Second World War, when UK ministers authorised 1,763 warrants to monitor suspected Nazi agents and sympathisers operating for phone taps and mail intercepts.
Eleven years after learning of GCHQ’s surveillance of his own activities, Christie is staggered to learn the practice is growing under New Labour. "I would have expected this of the Thatcher era. It is unacceptable today, when our political process should be more open, that there should be such an invasion of privacy," he said.
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