Political life in Britain

Lobster Issue

[…] and Brown governments packed with lawyers with little apparent concern for either the legality of their actions on their far-reaching consequences for human rights and well-being. From surveillance and the national security state to the ‘war on terror’ and control orders and rendition, Ewing’s solid, incisive work reaches out to lawyers and journalists, but […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 76 (Winter 2018)

[PDF file]: […] Atlantic. The British military are trying RFIDs in their warehouses. In an article written after the book was published, the authors report tell us that ‘Cincinnati video surveillance company CityWatcher.com now requires employees to use VeriChip human implantable microchips to enter a secure data centre’;16 and the US government has begun producing passports with […]

Team mercenary GB: Part 1 – the early years

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016)

[PDF file]: […] input from MI5’s Jack Morton, who used his extensive counter-insurgency experience from India, Malaya and Northern Ireland to help restructure the intelligence agencies of President Junius Jayewardene. Surveillance of Tamil separatists was carried out not only in Sri Lanka but also on those who were living in exile in the United Kingdom. Regarding the […]

White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa by Susan Williams

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[PDF file]: […] And as former head of the U2 programme, nobody knew better than Bissell that the Soviets were not a 3 threat to the US. Prior to those surveillance flights which began in 1957, what was happening behind ‘the iron curtain’, e.g. how many missiles the Soviets had, etc., was unknown and the ‘danger’ belief […]

Book reviews

Lobster Issue

[…] The Rise and Fall of New Labour Andrew Rawnsley London: Penguin/Viking, 2010, £25.00 Ghost Dancers David John Douglass Hastings: Christie Books, 2010, £12.95 The Silent State: Secrets, Surveillance and the Myth of British Democracy Heather Brooke London: William Heinemann, 2010, £12.99 Broonland: The Last Days of Gordon Brown Christopher Harvie London/New York: Verso, 2010, […]

The secret life of Bellingcat’s so-called ‘Timmi Allen’

Lobster Issue 87 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] proved fruitless, Manfred’s widow was forced to sign an affidavit stating that she would not tell anyone else what had happened; and Rene’s widow was kept under surveillance for months to see if she would reveal information to anyone else. The two women, who have exercised their right to privacy ever since, were also […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016)

[PDF file]: […] post-mortem and the following paragraphs are from the executive summary.2 The italicised bits are my comments. 1 2 The report’s executive summary is at . ‘The IMF’s surveillance of the euro area financial regulatory architecture was generally of high quality, but staff, along with most other experts, missed the build-up of banking system risks […]

View from

Lobster Issue

[…] bin Salman, whom Trump “likes a lot”. (Emphasis in the original.) The two men are Esam Ghazzawi and Omar al-Bayoumi. Of Ghazzawi, Baker notes: ‘Phone records and surveillance videos of their gated community showed frequent contact with the hijackers, including lead hijacker Muhammad Atta’. The liberal website Propublica noted last year: FBI agents identified […]

The Shadow Man: At the Heart of the Cambridge Spy Circle by Geoff Andrews

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016)

[PDF file]: […] existence in 1940. At the time this interview took place, MI5 were tapping Klugmann’s phone, his mother’s phone and was having him tailed. Nothing came of this surveillance however. According to Andrews, it is most likely that ‘Kim Philby, by now head of counter-espionage at MI6…. acted to protect him’. Klugmann remained in fear […]

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