Tech
PSNI appoints legal counsel to report on police conduct after McCullough surveillance review | Computer Weekly
The PSNI has commissioned a senior lawyer to review whether there was any misconduct by police officers following an independent review that found police unlawfully monitored journalists’ phone data, but found no ‘widespread and systemic’ surveillance.
Jon Boutcher, chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, told the Northern Ireland Policing Board that he had appointed an “eminent” legal counsel, John Beggs KC, to review a 200 page report on PSNI surveillance and report back to confirm there was no misconduct or wrong-doing by police officers.
Beggs, a specialist in police misconduct cases, represented the police commanders at the 2016 Hillsborough inquests, and is the co-author of Police Misconduct, Complaints, and Public Regulation
Separately, the police force has referred itself to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), to investigate whether a “defensive operation” by the PSNI to gather journalist’s phone numbers to and compare them to internal phone records to identify PSNI staff who may have passed information to journalists was lawful.
Boutcher was speaking following the publication of a 200 page review by Angus McCullough KC, which found that the PSNI had made 21 phone data applications to identify journalist’s confidential sources, collated a secret register of over 1000 journalists phone numbers, and identified four cases where the PSNI had used “directed surveillance” for investigations involving journalists and one involving a lawyer.
Sinn Féin representative Gerry Kelly, pressed the chief constable on whether he stood by his public statement that there were no issues of misconduct, criminality or unlawfulness revealed by the McCullough report.
Kellly said there were “unlawful retentions” of two journalists data, despite clear court orders that the data should be destroyed, that there were 21 cases of the unlawful use of covert powers to identify journalists sources, and a “washing through” operation to identify PSNI employees who had phone contact with journalists that was likely in breach of human rights laws.
“I just think for you to come in and to say that there’s no issue here, I just find hard,” he told Boutcher.
Code of practice had no public interest test
Boutcher said that the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, found that the PSNI had acted unlawfully in 2013 by obtaining the phone data of journalist Barry McCaffrey, but had found that PSNI officers had acted in good faith.
This was because the 2007 codes of practices followed by the police “were not fit for purpose” and were changed in 2015, to introduce a public interest test, said Boutcher.
“Proper consideration wasn’t given in the application process around things that weren’t required by the code, but should have been,” he said.
Boutcher said that he had asked the Information Commissioner to assess the legality of the “washing through” operation.
The PSNI’s professional standards department, had stopped the practice in March 2023, and Boutcher had issued a formal notice to discontinue the practice in May 2024, the policing board heard.
Boutcher said that police should be able to investigate whether staff breached the PSNI’s code of ethics by releasing information to journalists, but investigations should be based on a “specific and precise concern”.
“In all the time that I’ve been a senior investigating officer and dealt with some really complex organised crime operations, I don’t think I’ve ever required comms data for a solicitor or a journalist,” he said. “So I don’t understand why the washing through was done, and it’s not going to happen anymore. It stopped,” he added.
He told the policing board that the lists of journalists used in the “washing through” operation were inaccessible and would be destroyed when they were no longer needed by cases currently being investigated by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal.
Police did not act with malice
Boutcher said that McCullough had found no malice or that anyone was deliberately trying to inappropriately use the system, he said.
“There were mistakes, there are process issues. There was a lack of legal advice. Special status issues weren’t properly thought through,” he said.
Human rights groups, Amnesty International and the Committee on Administration of Justice last week called for an independent inquiry into spying on journalist by MI5, following disclosures that MI5 unlawfully monitored the phone data of BBC journalist Vincent Courney.
Boutcher said that he could not answer for colleagues in the intelligence services, but that there were frameworks in place, such as the Investigatory Powers Tribunal to provide accountability.
The policing board heard that the relationship between the PSNI and the Security Service, MI5, was governed by an Annex in the St Andrews Agreement, the peace deal which led to the restoration of the Northern Ireland Assembly in 2006.
Under the agreement PSNI officers are co-located with Security Service personal to ensure that “intelligence is shared and properly directed within the PSNI” . The PSNI runs the “great majority” of national security agents in Northern Ireland, under the direction of MI5.
The Investigatory Powers Tribunal is investigating ten complaints brought against the PSNI by journalists, lawyers and NGOs over alleged unlawful surveillance.
They include cases brought by the BBC and former BBC journalist Vincent Kearney and former BBC Spotlight reporter, Chris Moore, who exposed MI5’s involvement in the Kincora boys home.
Boutcher has written to seven people in the wake of the McCullough report, which found that the PSNI had unlawfully accessed their phone data. Another journalist impacted is no longer alive.
UTV journalist Sharon O’Neill is taking legal action after police covertly attempted to identify a confidential source in 2011. Hugh Jordan, journalist at the Sunday World, has also been informed that his phone data was accessed.
Boutcher has also apologised to human rights lawyers, Peter Corrigan and Darragh Mackin of Phoenix Law after they were subject to unlawful surveillance.
McCullough is due to produce a second report, expected next year, reviewing the progress of the PSNI at implementing 16 recommendations, and complaints against the PSNI currently being considered by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal.
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Tesla Loses Its EV Crown to BYD as Sales Keep Dropping
Unlike Elon Musk with his list of broken promises, the stats don’t lie. Tesla has lost the title of the world’s largest maker of EVs to Chinese automaker BYD. The signs have been there for a while, with BYD besting Tesla sales in Europe a number of times during 2025. Now it’s official on a global basis.
Despite being blocked from entering the US market, BYD’s seemingly unstoppable rise continues as its EV sales rose last year by 28 percent to 2.25 million. In contrast, Tesla announced today it delivered 1.64 million vehicles in 2025—its second annual decline in a row, and a 16 percent year-over-year decline for the fourth quarter. This is not merely the China brand edging ahead of Tesla in the electric vehicle race; it’s a marked shift.
Last week, BYD stated that in 2025 it sold 4.6 million “new energy vehicles” (which includes both full EVs and plug-in hybrids) globally, with more than a million of these being exported cars. Its passenger vehicle exports specifically were up more than 145 percent year-on-year.
The news comes after a frankly disastrous year for Tesla that saw the high-selling Model Y, crucial for both Elon Musk and his car company, get a half-hearted refresh that bombed, failing to reverse sales woes. It was also a year that disclosed just how few people bought the much-berated Cybertruck; in March, yet another recall revealed the company had apparently sold less than 50,000 electric pickups since customer deliveries began 14 months previously. Musk had told investors Tesla would sell 250,000 Cybertrucks per year.
With Tesla sales down in the US and in free fall in Europe, Musk turned to US president Donald Trump for help. Trump obliged by morphing the White House South Lawn into a makeshift Tesla showroom, claiming he would himself purchase a racy Model S Plaid. But by June it was reported Trump might be selling the car after publicly falling out with Musk.
Just last month, EV news site Electrek reported that Musk’s SpaceX had bought tens of millions of dollars worth of Cybertrucks that supposedly Tesla can’t sell. (You can see the pickups all lined up at SpaceX in this video.) If true, that move would significantly bolster Tesla’s financial performance in 2025’s fourth quarter, providing at least some respite for the automaker after the US ended its EV tax credits at the end of the third quarter.
“Tesla still has formidable assets, brand recognition, manufacturing know-how, and a strong installed base,” says Andy Palmer, former COO of Nissan and former CEO of Aston Martin Lagonda. “The challenge is that the market has matured while the product line has not moved fast enough. People are struggling to justify spending on a Tesla when other brands, including those from China, are delivering more innovative and advanced products.”
Tech
Welcome to the Future of Noise Canceling
This blurring of the lines between audio and health devices looks set to be a trend across the industry. “We really want to make sure that we take care of our customers’ hearing,” says Miikka Tikander, the Helsinki-based head of audio at Bang & Olufsen. Tikander points to recent data about the decline in hearing health in young adults and reports that there was a lot of emphasis from manufacturers on ANC and hearing health at the AES’ Headphone Technology conference in Espoo, Finland this August.
“Apple has a big lead in that area,” he says. “We want to make sure that our headphones can adapt, make this choice [on when to block out sound] on your behalf, if you let it, of course. Some people don’t like that idea, but if there’s a noisy event in your surroundings, the headset can take care of it, just tune it out a bit and get you back to normal listening once you are away from that noise.”
Enter the “Sound Bubble”
Hearvana AI is one startup looking to go much further than the AirPods’ current suite of noise canceling and ambient noise features. Cofounded by Shyam Gollakota, a computer science & engineering professor at the University of Washington, and two of his students, Malek Itani and Tuochao Chen, Hearvana recently raised $6 million in a pre-seed round which included none other than Amazon’s Alexa Fund.
One of the startup’s first big innovations was “semantic hearing,” which was the first project they approached, around three years ago. The team built a hardware prototype—a pair of on-ear headphones with six microphones across the headband, connected to an Orange Pi microcontroller—to test out a model that had been trained to recognize 20 different types of ambient sounds. This included things like sirens, car horns, birdsong, crying babies, alarm clocks, pets, and people talking, and then allowed the user to isolate say, one person’s voice as a “spotlight,” and block out all the other frequencies.
“So I’m going to the beach and I want to listen to just ocean sounds and not the people talking next to me, or I’m in the house vacuum cleaning but I still want to listen to people knocking on the door or important sounds, like a baby crying,” explains Gollakota, who is based in Seattle. “And that’s what we solved first. This was the difference between a vacuum cleaner and a door knock. They sound pretty different, right?”
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