Security & intelligence - new material (16)
01 December 1994
Review: De Muren Hebben Oren... Backslash Hack-tic Jansen & Janssen (Backslash Amsterdam 1994)
De Muren Hebben Oren (The Walls Have Ears) aims to be a simple guide to the various ways in which those who want to listen in to other peoples" conversations go about doing it. The book gives brief but useful descriptions of the kind of people who would want to listen in to conversations such as the police and the Dutch Secret service (BVD).
It covers the latest Dutch legislation on phone tapping and other forms of bugging. It also gives detailed tips on how to avoid eavesdroppers from such things as codes which are fairly simple to use but quite hard to crack through to an update on the latest anti-bugging technology. Along the way it manages to debunk a few myths such as the fairly widely held view that mobile phones are untappable.
The book is currently in Dutch Spanish and German and may soon be available in English. It is well written and informative, and aimed primarily at activists yet manages to provide information without being polemical. This edition in Dutch will be of most use to people living in Holland and to a lesser extent Belgium. However both the update on legislation and technology will be of interest to other Europeans. After all what happens in one European country tends quickly to become the norm for others.
Public Records revelations in Scotland: Scotsman Stephen Breen and Severin Carrell 25.8.94. Page feature on the surveillance of Sinn Fein groups in Scotland in 1920; police inaction against attacks on Catholics in the 1930s; and raids on Scottish nationalist groups thought to be pro-Nazi because of their "anti- English" stance in 1941.
Report of the Commissioner for 1993 under the Security Service Act 1989: HMSO March 1994 Cm 2523 2.90. The six-page report is almost entirely devoted to the European Commission of Human Rights's decisions in the cases of David Esbester (who claimed to have lost a job through vetting); Vanessa Redgrave (who found a "bug" in her house and of files kept on her) where the Commission found that because of her "continuing political commitments there was reasonable likelihood" that MI5 kept her under surveillance and held that this was "necessary in a democratic society"; Patricia Hewitt and Harriet Harman who complained of surveillance and the keeping of records on them, whose case was also rejected.