The News Machine: Hacking,The Untold Story by James Hanning with Glenn Mulcaire

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015)

[PDF file]: […] the hacking trials themselves. We learn that Mulcaire’s early career was as a ‘tracer’ for John Boyall who, among other things, carried out contract work for the intelligence services. When the NOTW and Boyall fell out, Mulcaire was the beneficiary and became ever more deeply involved with obtaining material by assorted means in support […]

Newsinger on Strarmer

Lobster Issue

[…] being ‘woven together with some thin threads into a left-wing conspiracy theory in which Starmer is presented as an agent of the security state or even AngloAmerican intelligence organisations’. These are, he insists, ‘insidiously effective smears’. (p. 163) On the contrary, the argument that Starmer’s so-called ‘pragmatism’ lead to him wholeheartedly embracing the interests […]

British Counterinsurgency by John Newsinger

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016)

[PDF file]: […] that disastrous campaign, we heard a fair bit of comment that the Americans should have listened to the Brits because the British state – its military and intelligence – is good at counterinsurgency.2 Newsinger’s account of British CI campaigns since 1945 shows that this is a delusion. With the exception of a couple of […]

Kicora review

Lobster Issue

[…] of them suggested giving Detective Caskey ‘false files’. He noted that ‘successive Police Ombudsmen reports have revealed such practices as ranging from the “slow waltz” of withholding intelligence from detectives or conducting sham interviews, or other efforts to disapply the rule of law to agents of the state. The obstruction of investigations through the […]

The writer with no hands by Matthew Alford

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016)

[PDF file]: […] a movie and fucked the writer. Would a script get you killed? Alford’s earlier book about Hollywood describes an entertainment industry in which the US military and intelligence are thoroughly integrated, a system in which a really radical script simply wouldn’t get made. So who would bother to kill the writer when a word […]

View from

Lobster Issue

[…] narratives are found wanting and counter-narratives (of varying plausibility) abound: from the suspicious deaths of government weapons experts, cryptographers and shadowy financiers to the covered-up connections between intelligence agencies and terror groups (see Curtis 2010). Criminologists should shrug off the stigma attached to theorizing that diverges from official accounts and carefully excavate the deep […]

South of the border

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020)

[PDF file]: South of the border (occasional snippets from) Nick Must Spook joke department ‘UK spies will need artificial intelligence’ reads the headline to a Gordon Corera piece on BBC news online.1 Yes, the gags are pretty much writing themselves now. Deferred prosecution agreements – buying your way out of trouble ‘A deferred prosecution agreement, or […]

The Conspiracy and Democracy Project

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014)

[PDF file]: […] or impacts upon democracy. It might, for example, examine all the state conspiracies which now exist within this society; and since the armed forces, police, security and intelligence services (and the big corporations) are almost entirely unaccountable, such research would be entirely apt. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that the […]

View from

Lobster Issue

[…] narratives are found wanting and counter-narratives (of varying plausibility) abound: from the suspicious deaths of government weapons experts, cryptographers and shadowy financiers to the covered-up connections between intelligence agencies and terror groups (see Curtis 2010). Criminologists should shrug off the stigma attached to theorizing that diverges from official accounts and carefully excavate the deep […]

Estes, LBJ and Dallas

Lobster Issue 65 (Summer 2013)

[PDF file]: […] a third party buried in a book mixing fact with faction. But many of the witnesses in other versions of the story can be portrayed as unreliable: intelligence officers of one stripe or another, for example, or the anti-Castro Cubans, and assorted military and right-wing activists, all of whom have axes to grind. If […]

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