Claire‘ll have a thing or two to say about this one.
Katharine Gun, formerly of UK snooping centre GCHQ (direct descendant of Bletchley Park), has been acquitted of charges under the Official Secrets Act, having told the World that the US had asked the British to tap the phones of representatives of anti-Iraq war countries.
I am not alone in noticing that, given her outlook on life, she chose a pretty strange job. For example, how many successful spies say things like this?:
“Obviously I’m not prone to leak secrets left, right and centre… but this needed to get out, the public deserved to know what was going on at the time”
It’s alright, chaps; she doesn’t make a habit of leaking; we’ll let her off this time.
And doesn’t this seem a smidgen naïve from a professional spook?:
“I’m just baffled in the 21st century we as human beings are still dropping bombs on each other as a means to resolve issues.”
Obviously we should have taken the Tony Benn approach and just invited Saddam and Slobodan over for a nice cup of tea—instead of getting all shirty and 20th century about things.
Talking of professional spooks, ex-spy and self-publicizing “whistleblower” David Shaylor chimes in in the same BBC report with this:
“If the intelligence services are going to do things that are illegal they have to expect people to whistleblow.”
Omigod. We wouldn’t want members of the intelligence agencies breaking the law on Her Majesty’s service, would we? Where would it end?
You know, I actually don’t have anything interesting to say about it? I tried to think of something, but nothing whatsoever came to mind.
Am I losing my touch?
Seems if you sign the Official Secrets Act you can no longer use the “public interest” defence when you spill the Heinz. Namely, that the information disclosed is in the public interest rather than simply being of interest to the public. So no what dastardly deed MI5/6 has carried out, or what plot is being hatched, how many innocent people have been killed or unjustly imprisoned, no matter how much MI5 have paid to al-Qaeda, how much fraud, waste and abuse discovered, you can’t go public. The press is under government control, and the police, the government and especially the Prime Minister will use a ten-foot pole to drop you in the trash can. So even if for example, you know Mossad is planning to detonate a micro-nuke in London, blame Al-Qaeda in order to give GWB the justification to nuke Iran, well tough. You have to keep stumm. Lie all the way to the grave. Nice neutral Buddhist country anyone?