Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003)
[…] years in the Ministry of Defence when Robertson became New Labour Defence Secretary in 1997, she is now its director of general security and safety. Her former MoD colleague, Jonathan Day, moved with Robertson to NATO HQ in Brussels to become director of his private office. He was signed up to the BAP in […]
Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002)
[…] British-Irish Rights Watch, (23) partly over allegations that phone calls between Britain and Ireland, including legally privileged material confidential to the complainants, were routinely intercepted by an MoD installation at Capenhurst, Cheshire, and later by the Echelon system. The rights groups say that the RIP act fails to provide adequate safeguards to protect individual […]
Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2)
[…] of 2001. It includes broad-ranging anti-terrorism measures, including the power to require comms service providers to retain comms data (eg email addresses); extended police powers, also for MOD, nuclear and transport police; allowing govt. agencies to share information and, most contentiously, powers to detain asylum seekers suspected of terrorist acts. These powers required the […]
Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2)
[…] be old news, but here goes. Reading Wensley Clarkson’s book The Valkyrie Operation (1998) recently, I was struck by his remark that: ‘Between 1970 and 1990 the MoD recruited dozens of personnel after they had been discovered at Britain’s most highly acclaimed strategic studies centres, Oxbridge, Lancaster and Aberystwyth.’ (p.19). I don’t know how […]
Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2)
[…] FCO can produce specialists in the area. Secondly the ‘stans’, by which I mean principally Pakistan, used to come under MI5 (sometimes army officers seconded from the MOD) and the colonial office, which is again why SIS neglected things. Afghanistan was of interest because of India/Iran/Soviet Union and all those SIS specialists certainly had […]
Lobster Issue 41 (Summer 2001)
[…] The Sunday Times was a serious, respectable newspaper until Andrew Neil became its editor in the mid-1980s and turned it into a mouthpiece for MI5 and the MOD to run their rubbish through. The Sunday Telegraph shows all the signs of going down the same dangerous path. But then I’m an old-fashioned kind of […]