Tech
Police ordered to give reasons in closed court for seizing phone of UK Hamas lawyer | Computer Weekly
North Wales Police has been ordered to disclose the reasons for stopping a UK lawyer who represented Hamas and seizing the contents of mobile phone to closed-door court hearing.
Justice Martin Chamberlain said that he did not accept that North Wales Police could simply assert there was a lawful basis for stopping and copying the contents of solicitor Fahad Ansari’s phone, without saying what the reason was.
But the judge refused to issue an order preventing a police-appointed independent legal counsel from rstarting a review of the contents of Fahad Ansari’s phone until Ansari could appeal to a judicial review.
The decision came after North Wales police gave an undertaking that the material would not be shared with police investigators until a decision in a further court hearing.
Solicitor Fahad Ansari, who represented Hamas in a legal challenge to overturn its status in the UK as a proscribed terrorist organisation, is seeking a judicial review after being stopped by police and his mobile phone seized.
Ansari, an Irish citizen, argues that he was unlawfully stopped, detained and questioned under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act after he drove off a ferry with his family at Holyhead after visiting relatives in Ireland in August.
The case is understood to be the first time police have used Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act – which allows police to stop people without grounds for suspicion – to seize and copy the contents of a phone belonging to a solicitor in the UK.
Ansari said that his phone contained material used for work, and that accessing it would breach the legal privilege of clients dating back 15 years.
Jude Bunting KC, told a court hearing today that North Wales Police, which leads counter-terrorism policing in Wales, had failed to provide any reason for stopping Ansari and seizing his mobile phone.
He told the court that Ansari’s phone contains communications with past and current clients, witnesses and legal counsel, stored on multiple applications and cloud-based services that were protected by legal privilege.
The phone contains details of at least 3,000 contacts, voice notes, memos, case papers, search terms, and meta data, the overwhelming proportion of which is likely to be legally protected.
Bunting said that Ansari had been targeted by police to obtain and access the contents of his mobile phone. A Schedule 7 stop cannot be justified on the grounds that Ansari’s clients were of interest to the police and the security service, he said.
The barrister said that it was not reasonably practicable for an independent counsel to ‘sift’ the legally privileged material on the phone, which made up 95% to 98% of the content, from non-privileged material that police were allowed to access.
North Wales Police has refused to explain how material can be sifted, apart from simply asserting “there are adequate safeguards in place,” he said.
He said it was not practicable to identify key words to carry out searches that would identify legally privileged material.
The police had given no explanation why it was necessary to search Ansari’s mobile phone, let alone why it was necessary to search it now, Bunting told the court.
“There is a real risk that legally privileged material will be provided to the examining team. If this happens, the damage to the claimant will be irreparable,” Bunting wrote in legal submissions.
Georgina Wolfe, representing North Wales Police, said that there was no evidence to support the assertion that Ansari had been stopped and his mobile phone seized can copied, because of the clients he represented.
She argued that there was an effective long-established procedure to sift legally privileged material from seized devices, under the Schedule 7 code of practice.
The court heard that the chief constable of North Wales Police had appointed an independent KC to review material on Ansari’s phone. “The chief constable has no intention of reviewing or sharing any legally privileged material,” said Wolfe.
In written submissions, Wolfe said that if any material was found that appeared to suggest Ansari was a terrorist, or requires further action by law enforcement, that material may be lawfully shared with other law enforcement agencies.
Wolfe told the court that North Wales police accepted that Ansari acting as legal representative of Hamas would not be a proper basis for stopping him under Schedule 7.
She told the court that there was a proper reason for stopping him but she was not in a position to share it in open court.
The judge, Justice Martin Chamberlain, said that he did not accept that the chief constable of North Wales Police “could simply assert there was a proper basis of that search without saying what the reason was”.
He rejected arguments from Bunting to allow an interim injunction to prevent the contents of the phone being examined until a judicial review could consider the lawfulness of the police decision to stop Ansari under Schedule 7.
“There was a strong public interest in allowing the chief constable to pursue an investigation into whether or not the claimant was involved in terrorism,” he said.
Wolfe had offered an undertaking that the independent counsel would not inform the chief constable, “or anybody else” of the contents of the phone.
The judge said he accepted that this would involve some loss of confidentiality for Ansari, but said there was no material risk of material from his phone being communicated to the police.
The court will make a ruling to hear an explanation from North Wales Police for the reasons for stopping Ansari in a closed hearing before a special advocate, later this month.
The judge suggested that the special advocate could make an argument for a ‘gist’ of the reasons for the stop to be made public if that was appropriate.
Speaking before the hearing, Ansari said: “Even the police agree that my phone contains sensitive, privileged information. All I am asking the court on Monday is to make sure this material stays protected until a judge rules on whether the police acted lawfully in detaining me and seizing it.”
The campaigning group, Cage, said Schedule 7 was an “exploitative power”. Head of public advocacy Anas Mustapha, said:“Courts have repeatedly failed to claw back citizens’ rights undermined by Schedule 7. In this case, with the stakes so high, the judges ought to do more to defend civil liberties and the right to practice law without state harassment.”
After two years of intensive development and close collaboration with leading global brands, together with its customers, the company is unveiling its complete footwear solution at ITMA Asia + CITME Singapore 2025, marking a turning point for digital production in footwear. For the first time, Kornit technology has crossed the milestone of more than one million pairs of sports shoes sold globally under leading brands, proving that digital footwear manufacturing has moved beyond concept and is now a fully scaled commercial reality.
Kornit Digital has launched its revolutionary digital footwear solution at ITMA Asia + CITME Singapore 2025, marking a major step in sustainable, on-demand footwear production.
The solution allows direct digital printing on technical fabrics, combining design flexibility, precision, and durability.
The company is exhibiting at Hall 6 Stand C204 at the event.
A Massive Market Opportunity for Digital Transformation, and Kornit is Just Getting Started
The addressable market Kornit is targeting represents roughly one billion decorated shoe uppers each year across the global sports and athleisure footwear industry. This is a massive and fast-growing segment shaped by consumer demand for variety, innovation, and personalization. Kornit’s technology directly addresses the key challenges of this market, including design limitations, long development cycles, and overproduction, by replacing complex analog decoration with a single-step digital workflow that delivers durability, flexibility, and limitless design freedom. Kornit’s patented technology enables high-quality, durable prints directly on technical fabrics used in footwear, combining precision, sustainability, and performance in one streamlined process. This innovation redefines how footwear is designed and produced, shifting from traditional mass-production methods to agile, efficient, and creative digital workflows that allow brands to create on demand.
Following successful deployments with two leading footwear manufacturers in China, Kornit is expanding globally with additional customers in Vietnam and in Germany, setting a new standard for agility, creativity, and sustainability across the world’s leading footwear hubs. Ronen Samuel, Chief Executive Officer at Kornit Digital said:
“The footwear industry is undergoing a profound transformation. Through close collaboration with visionary partners and relentless innovation, we have developed a fully digital solution that redefines how shoes are designed, produced, and delivered. What started as a concept is now being adopted at scale, with leading global brands. Kornit has always been about pushing boundaries, and this milestone marks a new era for digital manufacturing and sustainable growth.”
Customer feedback highlights that Kornit’s digital solution has dramatically accelerated footwear development and unlocked creative freedom. What took months now happens in days, enabling brands to respond faster to trends and deliver distinctive, high-performance products with consistency and efficiency.
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Looking ahead, Kornit’s next-generation patented footwear technology will be introduced at Techtextil 2026 in Frankfurt, showcasing new specialized polymers and expanded material compatibility that will further enhance performance and scalability.
Visit Kornit at ITMA Asia + CITME Singapore 2025, Hall 6 Stand C204, to experience how creativity is replacing complexity and digital is replacing analog, empowering the footwear industry to move at the speed of imagination, with Kornit leading the way.
Note: The headline, insights, and image of this press release may have been refined by the Fibre2Fashion staff; the rest of the content remains unchanged.
Fibre2Fashion News Desk (KD)
Do you like having a second screen with your computer setup? What if your laptop could carry a second screen for you? That’s the idea behind Lenovo’s latest proof of concept, the ThinkBook Modular AI PC, announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Lenovo is never shy to show off wacky, weird concept laptops. We’ve seen a PC with a transparent screen, one with a rollable OLED screen, a swiveling screen, and another with a flippy screen. At CES earlier this year, the company showed off a gaming laptop with a display that expands at the push of a button. Sometimes, these concepts turn into real products that go on sale (often in limited quantities).
At MWC 2026, Lenovo trotted out three concepts. While it’s unclear whether any of them will become real, purchasable products, there’s some unique utility here, and a peek at how computing experiences could change in the future.
A Laptop With a Built-In Portable Screen
As someone with a multi-screen setup at home and a fondness for portable monitors, the ThinkBook Modular AI PC appeals to me the most. At first glance, it looks like a normal laptop. Take a look behind, and you’ll notice there’s a second screen magnetically hanging off the back of the laptop, like a koala carrying a baby on its back.
The screen is connected to the laptop using pogo-pin connectors, so you can use it in this state to display content to people in front of you, say, if you were making a presentation during a meeting. Alternatively, you can pop this second screen off, remove a hidden kickstand resting under the laptop, and magnetically attach it to the 14-inch screen so that you have a traditional portable monitor experience. (You’ll need to connect this to the laptop via a USB-C cable in this orientation.)
If you don’t have the desk space for that orientation, you can always remove the keyboard from the base and pop the second screen there—it’ll auto-connect to the laptop via the pogo pins, and you’ll be able to use the Bluetooth keyboard to type on a dual-screen setup that resembles the Asus ZenBook Duo. The whole system is a fantastically portable method of improving productivity on the go, and the laptop isn’t too thick or cumbersome.
More recently, Iran has been a regular adversary in cyberspace—and while it hasn’t demonstrated quite the acuity of Russia or China, Iran is “good at finding ways to maximize the impact of their capabilities,” says Jeff Greene, the former executive assistant director of cybersecurity at CISA. Iran, in particular, famously was responsible for a series of distributed-denial-of-service attacks on Wall Street institutions that worried financial markets, and its 2012 attack on Saudi Aramco and Qatar’s Rasgas marked some of the earliest destructive infrastructure cyberattacks.
Today, surely, Iran is weighing which of these tools, networks, and operatives it might press into a response—and where, exactly, that response might come. Given its history of terror campaigns and cyberattacks, there’s no reason to think that Iran’s retaliatory options are limited to missiles alone—or even to the Middle East at all.
Which leads to the biggest known unknown of all:
5. How does this end? There’s an apocryphal story about a 1970s conversation between Henry Kissinger and a Chinese leader—it’s told variously as either Mao-Tse Tung or Zhou Enlai. Asked about the legacy of the French revolution, the Chinese leader quipped, “Too soon to tell.” The story almost surely didn’t happen, but it’s useful in speaking to a larger truth particularly in societies as old as the 2,500-year-old Persian empire: History has a long tail.
As much as Trump (and the world) might hope that democracy breaks out in Iran this spring, the CIA’s official assessment in February was that if Khamenei was killed, he would be likely replaced with hardline figures from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. And indeed, the fact that Iran’s retaliatory strikes against other targets in the Middle East continued throughout Saturday, even after the death of many senior regime officials—including, purportedly, the defense minister—belied the hope that the government was close to collapse.
The post-World War II history of Iran has surely hinged on three moments and its intersections with American foreign policy—the 1953 CIA coup, the 1979 revolution that removed the shah, and now the 2026 US attacks that have killed its supreme leader. In his recent bestselling book King of Kings, on the fall of the shah, longtime foreign correspondent Scott Anderson writes of 1979, “If one were to make a list of that small handful of revolutions that spurred change on a truly global scale in the modern era, that caused a paradigm shift in the way the world works, to the American, French, and Russian Revolutions might be added the Iranian.”
It is hard not to think today that we are living through a moment equally important in ways that we cannot yet fathom or imagine—and that we should be especially wary of any premature celebration or declarations of success given just how far-reaching Iran’s past turmoils have been.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has repeatedly bragged about how he sees the military and Trump administration’s foreign policy as sending a message to America’s adversaries: “F-A-F-O,” playing off the vulgar colloquialism. Now, though, it’s the US doing the “F-A” portion in the skies over Iran—and the long arc of Iran’s history tells us that we’re a long, long way from the “F-O” part where we understand the consequences.
Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.
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