Security phone gaffes revealed

Published on Sunday 25 July 2004 00:06

BUNGLING security chiefs in Northern Ireland bugged one of their own police officers after his mobile phone number was wrongly added to a warrant authorising electronic surveillance of criminals in the province, an official watchdog has revealed.

The startling error has emerged after the Interception of Communications Commissioner slated the "unacceptably high" toll of serious blunders made by the police, intelligence agents and other officials empowered to listen in on private conversations throughout the UK.

The result of the errors put many innocent people under illegal surveillance, left some suspects bugged for longer than authorised and ultimately allowed the targets of some undercover operations to carry on with their activities without interference.

Sir Swinton Thomas, the commissioner, revealed that 39 mistakes were reported to him last year - and complained that many of them were caused by simple avoidable errors such as transposing phone digits on requests for surveillance authorisation.

Organisations including the police, the security services and Customs & Excise have now been ordered to improve their performance to end mistakes which have veered between the comical and deeply disturbing according to the commissioner.

The catalogue of errors laid bare by Thomas included a case in Scotland where a telecommunications provider had accidentally cancelled an intercept on a line used by a suspected criminal. But it took "a considerable length of time" before the officials eavesdropping on the line realised it had been cut off. The Scottish Executive also reported a further eight blunders by communications service providers, including the failure to activate a line facility and the incorrect programming of a number into the computer system.

Thomas’s report revealed that the number of times David Blunkett authorised UK officials to intercept electronic communications, calls and letters, soared from 1,466 in 2002 to 1,878 last year. The rise coincides with the Home Secretary’s high-profile crackdown on the threat of terrorists operating within the UK. In Scotland, the number of new interception warrants fell dramatically from 139 to 105, but the number of existing warrants still in force rose slightly.

Top of the list of gaffes discovered by Thomas was the mistake in Northern Ireland. He said: "The Northern Ireland Office reported one error that occurred in a modification instrument to an interception warrant. The modification sought to add a new mobile phone number to a warrant.

"Unfortunately, the mobile telephone number cited on the modification was that of a police officer and not a number used by the target."

Simon Davies, of the watchdog group Privacy International, said the blunders reinforced the case against wider powers of surveillance. "We already have grave reservations about the huge increase in this sort of snooping," he said. "When you realise they are making such basic errors, it makes you wonder how far you can trust them to do the job correctly, even if you do accept that they are doing it with the best of intentions."