Police in Northern Ireland ran a rolling program to monitor the telephone records of “trouble-making journalists”, a tribunal heard.
Journalists that “were perceived to be conducting unwanted investigations” into the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), were subject to unlawful monitoring, it was claimed.
The “defensive operation”, revealed in documents disclosed at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) on 8 May 2024, was intended to identify confidential sources of journalists, said barrister Ben Jaffey KC.
The IPT is investigating claims that Northern Ireland journalists Trevor Birney, Barry McCaffrey and former BBC journalist Vincent Kearney were unlawfully placed under surveillance by the PSNI, Durham Police and the Metropolitan Police.
A police note of a meeting between Durham Police and the PSNI disclosed to the tribunal revealed the PSNI ran “defensive operations” to cross-reference telephone billing information with police telephone numbers on a “six-monthly basis” – in an apparent attempt to identify police officers that had contact with journalists.
Addressing the tribunal, Jaffey said the PSNI had been running an “extensive operation” to identify journalists’ confidential sources in 2017 and that the operation had apparently been in place for some time before then. It was unclear how long the operation continued and whether it was still going, he told the tribunal.
“As well as being obviously unlawful, this rolling programme of authorisations had never been disclosed by the PSNI’s evidence … to the tribunal to date,” he said. “Full disclosure and evidence is required on this matter of grave public interest and concern.”
The police note records a meeting between a detective inspector at Durham Police – brought in by the PSNI to assist in investigating Birney and McCaffrey’s sources – and two senior detectives at the PSNI’s professional standards and anti-corruption intelligence unit.
It discusses an investigation by Durham Police, codenamed Operation Yurta, that attempted to identify the source of an official document used by Birney and McCaffrey in a documentary film exposing police failures to investigate the murders of six innocent people killed by a paramilit