Reporters’ spy saga gives glimpse of UK surveillance culture

DARLINGTON, ENGLAND >> British journalist Julia Breen’s scoop about racism at her local police force didn’t just get her on the front page, it got her put under surveillance.

In the months that followed Breen’s exclusive, investigators logged her calls, those of her colleague Graeme Hetherington and even their small newspaper’s busy switchboard in an effort to unmask their sources. The two were stunned when they eventually discovered the scale of the spying.

“It just never even crossed our minds,” Breen said in a recent interview in the newsroom of The Northern Echo, in the English market town of Darlington. “I don’t know if I was quite naive, but on a regional newspaper you don’t expect your local police force to do this.”

The Echo’s editor, Andy Richardson, said his small paper’s brush with police spying carries a warning as surveillance laws stiffen up and down the continent .

“This case might be about a relatively obscure newspaper in the northeast of England, but it asks much bigger questions about where we’re headed as democratic societies all across Europe,” Richardson said.

Breen and Hetherington make for unlikely targets of state surveillance. On a wintry day earlier this month, Breen was looking into reports of flooding. Hetherington was writing a story about an attack on a cat. Above them, a flat screen television kept a running tally of the day’s most-clicked stories. “Traffic ‘back to normal’ on A19 northbound,” was No. 1. “Weather pictures: Snow leads to accidents” was a close second.

Nevertheless the Echo has often provided painful reading for Cleveland Police , a department responsible for a Chicago-sized patch of England’s industrial northeast.

The small force has weathered a series of scandals. A minority officer, Sultan Alam, was awarded 800,000 pounds in 2012 (then worth $1.26 million) after allegedly being framed by colleagues in retaliation for a discrimination lawsuit. When the judgment made national headlines on April 16 of that year, Cleveland Police issued a statement insisting the force wasn’t racist.

The next day, an anonymous caller told Breen an internal police report suggested otherwise.

Working the phones, Breen confirmed the story. The following morning her byline was across the front page beneath the words: “Institutional racism uncovered within Cleveland Police .”

It caused a stir, but news cycles change. Breen, who soon went on maternity leave, eventually forgot the episode. Cleveland Police didn’t. Officer Mark Dias confessed to being Breen’s anonymous tipster the day the Echo’s story ran, but higherups wanted to get to the bottom of other leaks. The force secretly began logging calls to and from Breen, Hetherington and a third journalist from another newspaper. Dias was put under surveillance, as was a police union leader and a lawyer associated with the pair. The next month, police seized three days’ worth of calls made to The Northern Echo’s switchboard.

Although none of the seized records included the content of the individuals’ conversations, collectively the length, timing and nature of hundreds of phone calls can be extraordinarily revealing. It was later calculated that the surveillance covered over 1 million minutes of calling time.