Tech
Northern Ireland police kept inspectors in dark over surveillance of journalists | Computer Weekly
Northern Ireland police failed to disclose two covert surveillance operations against journalists to the UK’s independent surveillance watchdog in breach of their statutory obligations.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland kept inspectors from the Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office (IPCO) in the dark about two covert operations against journalists in 2018 and 2023, it has been disclosed.
Brian Leveson, the investigatory powers commissioner, confirmed in a letter to Northern Ireland’s policing board that the PSNI only informed IPCO about the covert operations in 2025, after they had become public.
The disclosure, in letters published in the Northern Ireland Policing Board’s annual human rights report, first reported by The Detail, comes as the PSNI is preparing to publish a review by barrister Angus McCullogh KC into police surveillance of journalists and lawyers in Northern Ireland.
Covert surveillance in 2018
In August 2018, the PSNI authorised an unlawful surveillance operation in a failed attempt to identify a confidential journalistic source suspected of supplying information to journalists Barry McCaffrey and Trevor Birney.
The then chief constable of the PSNI authorised a Directed Surveillance Authorisation (DSA) to allow the PSNI to monitor an individual suspected of leaking information to the two journalists.
But according to Leveson, the PSNI failed to disclose the existence of the surveillance operation against the journalists to IPCO inspectors during the watchdog’s annual inspection in spring 2019, in breach of its statutory obligations.
“There is no indication in the 2019 inspection report for PSNI that my inspectors were notified of any covert activity conducted against journalists, or with the intention of identifying a journalistic source,” he wrote in a letter to the Policing Board.
Leveson said that he had received no explanation for the PSNI’s omission. “The question remains why the DSA was not specifically brought to my inspectors’ attention in 2019, given its stated objective of identifying a journalistic source,” he said.
The PSNI did not inform IPCO of the surveillance operation until after the Investigatory Powers Tribunal disclosed it publicly in its judgment in favour of the two journalists in 2024, awarding them costs.
Independent inquiry
Barry McCaffrey and Trevor Birney told Computer Weekly that the PSNI had consistently failed to take oversight seriously during the journalist’s legal battle with the PSNI.
“It’s quite clear that the PSNI is incapable of acting honestly with any of these oversight bodies. They don’t take it seriously at all, or they show them complete disrespect by failing to properly and honestly interact with them,” said McCaffrey.
He said that the only way of getting to the truth was to hold an independent public enquiry.
“We now see with Brian Leveson that they have withheld evidence even when IPCO was asking for it and we fear that there are going to be more incidents of this when the McCullough review comes out,” he added.
2023 operation spied on Twitter
The PSNI also failed to disclose a surveillance operation against another unnamed journalist in 2023 to IPCO inspectors.
The operation targeted the covert monitoring of social media posts on X by investigative journalist Dónal MacIntyre.
In a letter to the policing board, Leveson said that the PSNI had failed to alert inspectors to the operation despite being asked to do so.
“This authorisation was not brought to my inspectors’ attention, despite their specific enquiry regarding any operations involving confidential journalistic or legally privileged material” he added.
The inspection was led by judicial commissioner Declan Morgan, the retired former Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, who sought specific assurances from IPCO on surveillance authorisations issued agaist journalists. He reported that he identified no issues on non-compliance with the management of confidential information.
As Lord Chief Justice, Morgan ruled in 2019 that the Durham Police, which was assisting the PSNI, had unlawfully used search warrants in an attempt to identify Birney and McCaffrey’s sources.
Boutcher: journalistic risk not identified
PSNI Chief constable, Jon Boutcher told the policing board that he had no explanation why the PSNI had not disclosed the 2018 surveillance operation to IPCO inspectors.
“No reason or record can be located to explain why this was not highlighted to IPCO as intended,” he said.
He said that the PSNI had not reported the later 2023 surveillance operation to IPCO as it had not identified that it related to journalistic material.
“As this application had not been highlighted correctly in conjunction with journalistic material, it was not identified when preparing for the 2024 inspection and not highlighted to the IPCO inspectors,” he added.
He said that the material sought was limited to “public tweets” and did not seek private communications.
Up to 16 BBC journalists targeted
Following the IPTs’ ruling in favour of Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey, other journalists have made complaints that they were unlawfully spied on.
Former BBC journalists, Vincent Kearney has filed a complaint against the PSNI, and up to another 16 BBC journalists have also raised concerns about unlawful surveillance by the PSNI or MI5, according to the policing board.
Computer Weekly reported in July that the PSNI engaged in sustained surveillance of BBC journalists in Northern Ireland from at least 2006 to 2022.
Surveillance against BBC journalists allegedly took place during multiple PSNI operations, codenamed Operation Oxbow in 2009, Operation Settat in 2011, Operation Basanti in 2014 and Operation Grimmicaeie in 2022.
Data published by the policing board, shows that the number of complaints to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal relating to the PSNI’s use of surveillance powers, rose from 9 in 2022, to 16 in 2023 and 33 in 2025.
The PSNI received “notifications to disclose” information in 3 cases in 2022, raising to 6 cases in 2023, and 19 in 2024, which according to the policing board “might indicate that these are not hopeless cases.”
Oversight mechanism ‘not working’
Amnesty International said the admission that the PSNI covert surveillance operations targeting journalists, including one later ruled unlawful, were withheld from the UK’s surveillance watchdog is “deeply concerning”.
“The PSNI not only authorised covert surveillance designed to identify journalists’ confidential sources, in flagrant violation of press freedom, but then withheld details of those operations from the very watchdog charged with holding them to account,” said Patrick Corrigan, Amnesty International’s Northern Ireland Director.
“There must now be an overhaul of the mechanisms designed to provide oversight of police surveillance activities across the UK,” he said.
Daniel Holder of the Belfast-based human rights group the Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ) called for the government to implement the 1999 Patten Commission’s recommendation for a dedicated Commissioner for Covert Law Enforcement in Northern Ireland.
“We cannot continue with an oversight system that is dependent on the PSNI and other bodies here exercising such covert powers voluntarily telling the oversight body what they are doing, or hope that such matters are turned up in limited dip-sampling,” he said.
IPCO ‘not dependent on voluntary disclosures’
A spokesperson for IPCO said that the investigatory powers commissioner Brian Leveson will personally raise the issues with the PSNI chief constable, Jon Boutcher.
In response to the failures, the PSNI had enhanced its central record of surveillance authorisations and would implement training on the “acquisition and management of information relating to journalists,” the spokesperson added.
IPCO said that its oversight regime is not dependent on voluntary disclosures.
“Inspectors use proactive techniques, including ‘dip sampling’ of authorisations, to identify compliance issues and verify responses to requests for information,” the spokesperson said.
“The requirement for PSNI to highlight journalist-related authorisations provides an additional layer of assurance in the oversight process,” the spokesperson added.
Policing board “open to all courses of action’
The chair of the Northern Ireland policing board, Mukesh Sharma, said that the Board has expressed its serious concerns regarding the use of covert surveillance.
“The Board awaits the findings of the McCullough Review and remains open to all courses of action to ensure proper accountability,” he said.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland’s deputy chief constable, Bobby Singleton said that the PSNI welcomed the policing board’s human rights report.
“We will continue to work closely with the Policing Board’s Independent Human Rights adviser as we consider and respond to the content and recommendations of this wide-ranging report,” he said.
Tech
Top Design Within Reach Promo Codes for March 2026
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Tech
A Billionaire-Backed Startup Wants to Grow ‘Organ Sacks’ to Replace Animal Testing
As the Trump administration phases out the use of animal experimentation across the federal government, a biotech startup has a bold idea for an alternative to animal testing: nonsentient “organ sacks.”
Bay Area-based R3 Bio has been quietly pitching the idea to investors and in industry publications as a way to replace lab animals without the ethical issues that come with living organisms. That’s because these structures would contain all of the typical organs—except a brain, rendering them unable to think or feel pain. The company’s long-term goal, cofounder Alice Gilman says, is to make human versions that could be used as a source of tissues and organs for people who need them.
For Immortal Dragons, a Singapore-based longevity fund that’s invested in R3, the idea of replacement is a core strategy for human longevity. “We think replacement is probably better than repair when it comes to treating diseases or regulating the aging process in the human body,” says CEO Boyang Wang. “If we can create a nonsentient, headless bodyoid for a human being, that will be a great source of organs.”
For now, R3 is aiming to make monkey organ sacks. “The benefit of using models that are more ethical and are exclusively organ systems would be that testing can be meaningfully more scalable,” Gilman says. (R3’s name comes from the philosophy in animal research known as the three R’s—replacement, reduction, and refinement—developed by British scientists William Russell and Rex Burch in 1959 to promote humane experimentation.)
New drugs are often tested in monkeys before they’re given to human participants in clinical trials. For instance, monkeys were critical during the Covid-19 pandemic for testing vaccines and therapeutics. But they’re also an expensive resource, and their numbers are dwindling in the US after China banned the export of nonhuman primates in 2020.
Animal rights activists have long pushed to end research on monkeys, and one of the seven federally funded primate research facilities across the country has signaled it would consider shutting down and transitioning into a sanctuary amid growing pressure. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is also winding down monkey research, part of a bigger trend across the government to reduce reliance on animal testing.
As a result, Gilman says, there aren’t enough research monkeys left in the US to allow for necessary research if another pandemic threat emerges. Enter organ sacks.
Organ sacks would in theory offer advantages over existing organs-on-chips or tissue models, which lack the full complexity of whole organs, including blood vessels.
Gilman says it’s already possible to create mouse organ sacks that lack a brain, though she and cofounder John Schloendorn deny that R3 has made them. (For the record, Gilman doesn’t like the term “brainless” to describe the organ sacks. “It’s not missing anything, because we design it to only have the things we want,” she says.) Gilman and Schloendorn would not say how exactly they plan to create the monkey and human organ sacks, but said they are exploring a combination of stem-cell technology and gene editing.
It’s plausible that organ sacks could be grown from induced pluripotent stem cells, says Paul Knoepfler, a stem cell biologist at the University of California, Davis. These stem cells come from adult skin cells and are reprogrammed to an embryonic-like state. They have the potential to form into any cell or tissue in the body and have been used to create embryo-like structures that resemble the real thing. By editing these stem cells, scientists could disable genes needed for brain development. The resulting embryo could then be incubated until it grows into organized organ structures.
Tech
A Mysterious Numbers Station Is Broadcasting Through the Iran War
“Tavajoh! Tavajoh! Tavajoh!” a man’s voice announces, before going on to narrate a string of numbers in no apparent order, slowly and rhythmically. After nearly two hours, the calls of “Attention!” in Persian stop, only to resume again hours later.
The broadcast has been playing twice a day on a shortwave frequency since the start of the US-Israel attack on Iran on February 28.
According to Priyom, an organization which tracks and analyses global military and intelligence use of shortwave radio, using established radio-location techniques, the broadcast was first heard as the US bombing of Iran began. It has since played on the 7910 kHz shortwave frequency like clockwork—at 02.00 UTC and again at 18.00 UTC.
Over the weekend, Priyom said it had identified the likely origin of the broadcast. Using multilateration and triangulation techniques, the group traced the signal to a shortwave transmission facility inside a US military base in Böblingen, southwest of Stuttgart, Germany.
The site lies within a restricted training area between Panzer Kaserne and Patch Barracks, with technical operations possibly linked to the US army’s 52nd Strategic Signal Battalion, headquartered nearby.
That identification narrows the field, but it does not reveal who is behind the transmissions or who they are meant for.
The two-hour-long transmission is divided into five to six segments, each lasting up to 20 minutes. Each opens with “Tavajoh!” before shifting into a string of numbers in Persian, sometimes punctuated with an English word or two. Five days into the broadcast, radio jammers were heard attempting to block the frequency. The following day, the transmission shifted to a different frequency—7842 kHz.
Radio communication experts believe the broadcast is likely part of a Cold War–era system known as number stations.
The Return of the Numbers
Number stations are shortwave radio broadcasts that play strings of numbers or codes that sound random—like the one now heard in Iran. “It is an encrypted radio message used by foreign intelligence services, often as part of a complex operation by intelligence agencies and militaries,” says Maris Goldmanis, a Latvian historian and avid numbers stations researcher.
Number stations are most commonly associated with espionage. “For intelligence agencies, it is important to communicate with their spies to gather intelligence,” says John Sipher, a former US intelligence officer who served 28 years in the CIA’s National Clandestine Service. “This is not always possible in person due to political constraints or conflict. This is where number stations come in.”
While the use of number stations can be traced back to the First World War, they gained prominence during the US-Soviet Cold War. As espionage grew more sophisticated, governments used automated voice transmissions of coded numbers to communicate with agents, Goldmanis says. Citing declassified KGB and CIA documents, he adds that number stations were widely used during this period, often as Morse code transmissions and, in many cases, as two-way communications, with agents reporting back using their own shortwave transmitters.
“Nowadays, you have various satellite and encrypted communications technologies,” Sipher says. “But during the Cold War and even before that, governments had to find ways to do this without being noticed, and broadcasting coded messages was one way to communicate with your assets discreetly.”
The apparent randomness of the numbers means they can be understood only with a codebook, Sipher adds. “Nobody can make heads or tails of it or understand what it says unless you have the codebook that can give you hints to decrypt the code,” he says, noting that such systems must be set up and coordinated in advance.
A Signal Without a Sender
While the likely origin of the signal may now be clearer, its purpose and intended recipient remain unknown.
Because the broadcasts are encrypted and designed to be covert, those details may remain unclear for years, Goldmanis says. The structured nature of the transmission—its fixed schedule and consistent use of frequencies—further suggests it is part of a planned operation.
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