The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) had sought the support of the Metropolitan Police as far back as 2011 to monitor journalists working for the BBC in Belfast, MPs on the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee were told.
Belfast journalists Barry McCaffrey and Trevor Birney told the committee there were suspicions that other police forces in the UK were also monitoring journalists’ phones.
They were giving evidence after a tribunal ruled in December 2024 that the PSNI and Met Police had unlawfully placed them under surveillance in an attempt to identify confidential sources.
Evidence disclosed at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal last year showed that over a four-month period in 2011, more than 4,000 phone calls and text messages were monitored by the Met for the PSNI, Birney told the committee.
“Basically, a UK police force was spying on the state broadcaster, the BBC, and its journalists, and sharing that unlawful surveillance data with at least two other UK police forces,” he added.
Defensive operation became offensive
Birney told the MPs that he believed the PSNI’s practice of trying to uncover police whistleblowers began when a former Met Police chief took over as chief constable of the then Royal Ulster Constabulary in 2002.
Hugh Orde introduced a policy to stop leaks by making it an offence for police officers to talk to journalists without the agreement of senior officers.
But what started as a “defensive operation” to crack down on police officers leaking information to the press turned into an offensive operation that also monitored journalists to find out if police officers were among their confidential sources, he said.
McCaffrey said phone data showed that the Met Police had monitored phone calls made by journalists to other journalists. “That’s not a defensive operation, that’s an offensive operation. That’s spying on journalists to identify their sources,” he said.
By 2011, the PSNI was “breaking rules on an industrial scale”, McCaffrey claimed.
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Journalist labelled a criminal after call to press office
The journalists claimed the PSNI had repeatedly sought to bypass regulations designed to protect the confidentiality of journalists and lawyers.
In 2013, for example, McCaffrey had called the PSNI’s press office to ask if it was investigating an allegation of corruption.
“That was a simple question. Are you investigating an allegation of corruption? Within 40 hours, McCaffrey was turned into a criminal suspect,” Birney told the MPs.
In December 2024, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) found that Birney and McCaffrey had themselves been placed under unlawful surveillance by two UK police forces, which spied on their phone communications and suspected confidential sources.
The PSNI commissioned Angus McCullough KC in June 2024 to investigate allegations of “unlawful” surveillance of journalists, lawyers and other groups.
Birney told the MPs: “We don’t believe that the review goes far enough. We think the remit is far too narrow. And we think that Angus McCullough, despite being a very experienced and knowledgeable KC, doesn’t have the tools to get to the bottom of what’s going on here.”
Birney told the cross-party group of MPs that one of the problems with the McCullough review was that it had an arbitrary cut-off date of 2011, so nothing before that date will be looked at.
“That isn’t going to get to the bottom of where the spying operations emanated from, who ordered it, why and what would be the culture that led to the incidents that we’ve seen at the IPT,” he said.
Another problem with the review, the committee heard, was that it didn’t have the power to look at the role played by other state institutions in monitoring journalists.
The IPT disclosed in October 2024 that former BBC journalist Vincent Kerney had been subject to surveillance at the same time as McCaffrey in 2011.
A barrister for MI5 and GCHQ told the IPT after a secret court hearing that MI5 would need a “number of months” to unearth documentation related to BBC journalism in Belfast and would need to hire a security-cleared lawyer to do so.
That indicated “there was an enormous amount of information that MI5 held on the BBC and its journalists”, said Birney.
The committee also heard that Tory MP David Davis had written to all police forces in the UK to ask if they’d been doing the same thing as the PSNI, but had been met with silence, suggesting that other forces may also be monitoring journalists.
Live interception outside scope
The MPs heard that the McCullough review is unable to investigate whether journalists were subject to live interception of their phone calls or text messages, leaving a “black hole” in the review.
If journalists are being “spied on on a daily basis, or phone calls are being listened to on a daily basis, the McCullough review can’t tell us that”, said McCaffrey.
He called on Jon Boutcher, the current chief constable of the PSNI, to cooperate with the review to ensure that McCullough “gets access to every file and every record and that there is no obfuscation or delay”.
Judicial strip tease
The MPs heard that it was Durham Police, not the PSNI, that made the most important disclosures to the IPT about surveillance on journalists, including extracts from PSNI’s own files.
Seamus Dooley, assistant general secretary of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), said the PSNI had engaged in a “form of judicial strip tease”.
“Every day you walked in [to the IPT], there was a new little piece [of information] presented. I am an experienced journalist, editor and court reporter, and I have never seen evidence presented in that sort of manner before,” he said.
McCaffrey said it was extremely difficult to trust the PSNI to be fully open with the McCullough review. “There had been an incredible amount of delay, obfuscation and denial by the PSNI,” he said.
McCaffrey said trust in the PSNI was being further undermined by a “whispering campaign” – which, eight years later, still continues.
“When we were first arrested, someone within the PSNI leadership was briefing that anybody who supported us, whether it was the Irish government or political parties or trade unions, would be left with egg on their face,” he said.
“This was the phrase that we kept on hearing, again and again, from different parties, different organisations,” he said.
The Belfast-based journalists told the committee that a public inquiry would be the only way to get to the bottom of what they say is a “culture of contempt” within the PSNI for journalists, lawyers, activists and institutions of state.
Any public inquiry must be far broader in scope, and look not only at the PSNI but also the Met, because of its recent history of unlawful spying on BBC journalists, the MPs were told.
Chilling effect
The NUJ’s Dooley told the committee that the surveillance of journalists was having a chilling effect on press freedom, as journalists weren’t able to assure their sources that they could protect them.
Dooley told the committee that the PSNI appeared to think of “journalists as the enemy, that journalists are criminal, and that any activity which seeks to shine a light is automatically a crime”.
He said “the mindset … is the problem here … the word that kept coming back to me as I sat in the IPT was contempt – contempt for journalists, contempt for lawyers, contempt for due process.”
