phone tapping

While I was covering Scotland for the Guardian, the clicks and disturbances on my phone suggested it was being bugged. In the Cold War days, if you filed from the Soviet Union or wrote on nuclear weapons, or lived near the Faslane nuclear submarine base, which I did, then it was likely it was happening.
My phone wasn't being tapped, just suffering from high winds. I knew that because I had hired an inquiry agent to do a scan. Then I used the opportunity to find out what else he could do.
I can't understand why Gordon Brown didn't use a normal "sweep" and scan to make sure his phone was safe - but then he probably left that sort of thing to his staff.
The inquiry agent in Scotland explained exactly how they worked - and I tested his device from my friendly neighbour's house. It worked, and I could hear all the conversation being carried on in my own office next door.
For anyone interested in finding out how to hack a phone, it seemed there was plenty of help around. Then, a firm based in the East End sold widely and in large quantities to private inquiry agents as well as to individuals all over the country. They had catalogues from which equipment could be purchased, without any reason having to be given for ordering them.
There were over 40 different types of bugging devices and transmitters in the catalogue, many of them simple to use. Among the more popular were bugs inside a pen, in a quartz wall clock, a table lamp, a calculator and a bugged ashtray costing £150.
John Ayton, director of a Glasgow security firm expert at de-bugging told me then: "The growth of these devices has been enormous and there are virtually no legal safeguards against their use. We are concerned about the way their use is increased. There is a legal grey area which surrounds them."
There had been concern about this, from a committee on privacy set up by the Edward Heath Tory government which recommended that unlawful use of the surveillance devices should be a criminal offence, a Law Commision report, and a Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure which recommended that surveillance devices should only be used on the authority of a magistrate's warrant. These had obviously had little effect and at the time of my suspected bugging we were now living in the Thatcher years, and, according to some, on edge of civil war during the miners' strike. North Sea oil companies were seeing an outbreak of industrial espionage and one was holding meetings to discuss tenders in a sealed room with no electric plugs or phones.
Revelations over hacking had started long before, when news of a scandal about leaked information broke in the Guardian,in the early days of the Ted Heath government in the 'seventies. Peter Harvey, an Australian reporter, tracked down an inquiry agent, Ian Withers. He took him to the Gay Hussar restaurant and over a long lunch, got him to tell him everything he could do. He said that it was "easy and very common" for his companies to obtain information from government departments, including the Inland Revenue, social services, trade and industry and the Home Office, where security was breached regularly. It was done by two main methods - either by former employees of government departments knowing the ropes, getting the information and then selling it on, or what he called "conning", using a cover story and pretending to be someone in another branch of the same department. It worked well with local authorities. "We find that time and time again we can obtain detailed information over the telephone from government departments that really should not be divulged to anyone at all." Withers proved his point by using the Gay Hussar phone (no mobiles in those days) to get Peter Harvey's address and an annual bill by pretending to be a council officer.
This seems to have been the method used by blaggers to get private information on Gordon Brown,and the method is still running.
The Guardian editor, Alastair Hetherington, would not believe this story unless his own income tax returns could be discovered - an extra test, because he did them himself. But he was soon provided with this proof and the story was carried.
It created a sensation, with questions and a statement from Ted Heath in the House. The clomp of burglary squad detectives down the Guardian corridors heralded a ruthless search for our source and Alastair was threatened with prison by Ted Heath over a cup of tea in the garden at No.10 unless he revealed the source. He didn't but the detectives discovered it from Withers' invoice to the Guardian.
The upshot was that Peter Harvey, later Channel 9's political editor in Australia, became the British Press Awards Journalist of the Year, and Ian Withers went to prison. History is again repeating itself. Privacy laws continue to be weak. It is not just against journalist ethics, but criminal, to use inquiry agents - unless it is being done to expose them, not to pay them for illegal work as Murdoch's papers have done.

ends