4 posts tagged “uk”
Sunday, 15 June 2008
More confidential government files were found on a commuter train earlier this week, it has been revealed.
The Independent on Sunday says it was handed the documents, which cover fighting global terrorist funding, drugs trafficking and money laundering.
The files were found on the same day as the BBC was handed top secret papers on al-Qaeda. A Treasury spokesman said the government was "extremely concerned".
The Tories are calling for controls to protect secret official information.
The documents, about a meeting of financial crime experts, apparently include briefing notes for a meeting of the international Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to be held in 11 Downing Street next week.
The papers were found on train bound for London Waterloo on 11 June, the same day that another batch of papers relating to intelligence assessments of Iraq and al-Qaeda were handed to the BBC after being left by a senior official on a train.
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Our enemies don't even need to hack into our computers, they apparently just need to travel on public transport
 Keith Vaz,
Home Affairs Select Committee chairman  |
The Cabinet Office and the Metropolitan Police launched inquiries into the documents handed into the BBC - the latest in a series of blunders involving sensitive official information.
But Scotland Yard said it was not involved in investigating the latest case.
BBC political correspondent Laura Kuenssberg said it was uncertain whether the latest documents were also top secret.
The documents seen by the BBC should not have left Whitehall but it is not yet clear if the new files were permitted to have been taken out, our correspondent added.
"Some of the information is already on the public domain, but another lapse is deeply embarrassing for the government," she said.
A Treasury spokesman said: "We are extremely concerned about what has happened and we will be taking steps to ensure that it doesn't happen in the future."
Documents returned
The Independent on Sunday said it had returned the documents and would not be divulging any details contained in them.
The confidential files were said to include details of how trade and banking systems could be manipulated to finance illicit weapons of mass destruction in Iran.
They also discussed methods of terrorist funding and the potential fraud of commercial websites and international internet payment systems.
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The government needs to get a grip in order to protect this sort of sensitive information and the British public
Dame Pauline Neville-Jones
Tory shadow security spokesman |
Chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, Keith Vaz, said people would be "alarmed" at this latest revelation.
He said that until an inquiry had established how the leaks happened, "no official no matter how senior, should be allowed to take classified or confidential documents outside their offices for whatever reason.
"Our enemies don't even need to hack into our computers, they apparently just need to travel on public transport."
Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, Conservative shadow security spokesman, said: "We've now had eight major breaches that we know of in six months.
"The government needs to get a grip in order to protect this sort of sensitive information and the British public."
She called for "cleared and trusted" supervisors appointed to "supervise handling of government information inside the machinery of government on a daily basis".
The FATF conference is due to begin on Monday at the QE2 Conference Centre in Westminster, opposite the Houses of Parliament.
The FATF was established by the 1989 G7 summit in Paris to spearhead efforts to counter the use of the international financial system by criminals.
It has since expanded to 34 members.
Wednesday, 11 June 2008
Police are investigating a "serious" security breach after a civil servant lost top-secret documents containing the latest intelligence on al-Qaeda.
The unnamed Cabinet Office employee apparently breached strict security rules when he left the papers on the seat of a train.
A fellow passenger spotted the envelope containing the files and gave it to the BBC, who handed them to the police.
The official was later suspended from his job, the Cabinet Office announced.
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith now faces demands for an official inquiry.
Keith Vaz MP, chairman of the powerful Home Affairs select
committee told the BBC: "Such confidential documents should be locked
away...they should not be read on trains.
"I will be writing to the Home Secretary to establish an inquiry into the affair."
The Conservatives backed calls for an inquiry, with their security spokeswoman, Baroness Neville-Jones, describing the loss as the latest in a "long line of serious breaches of security."
Home Office minister Tony McNulty told the BBC he was awaiting the results of the police investigation.
'Damning assessment'
The two reports were assessments made by the government's Joint Intelligence Committee.
One, on Iraq's security forces, was commissioned by the Ministry of Defence. According to the BBC's security correspondent, Frank Gardner, it included a top-secret and in some places "damning" assessment of Iraq's security forces,
The other document, reportedly entitled 'Al-Qaeda Vulnerabilities', was commissioned jointly by the Foreign Office and the Home Office.
Just seven pages long but classified as "UK Top Secret", this latest intelligence assessment on al-Qaeda is so sensitive that every document is numbered and marked "for UK/US/Canadian and Australian eyes only", according to our correspondent.
According to reports, this document may have contained details of names of individuals or locations which might have been useful to Britain's enemies.
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MISSING SECRETS
November '07: Discs containing child benefit records of 25m people lost
December '07: Driving Standards Agency contractor loses records of 3m people
January '08: 600,000 details of would-be recruits lost by Naval officer
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However, it appears that in a serious breach of the rules, the papers were taken out of Whitehall by an unnamed official and left in an orange cardboard envelope on the seat of a Surrey-bound train from London Waterloo on Tuesday.
When a fellow passenger saw the material inside the envelope, they gave it to the BBC.
Not suspended
Reports suggest that the official, described as a senior male civil servant, works in the Cabinet Office's intelligence and security unit, which contributes to the work of the Joint Intelligence Committee.
His work reportedly involves writing and contributing to intelligence and security assessments, and that he has the authority to take secret documents out of the Cabinet Office - so long as strict procedures are observed.
Once the documents were reported missing, a full-scale search had been launched by the Metropolitan Police, amid fears that such highly sensitive material could have fallen into the wrong hands.
Our correspondent said that across several departments in Whitehall on Wednesday evening there is said to be "horror" that top-secret documents could have been so casually mislaid.
Inquiry
Any inquiry is likely to focus on the Cabinet Office, and the security procedures that made it possible for sensitive information to be allowed out of a secure environment.
A spokesman for the Cabinet Office said: "Two documents which are marked as 'secret' were left on a train and have subsequently been handed to the BBC.
"There has been a security breach, the Metropolitan Police are carrying out an investigation."
The spokesman declined to discuss the contents of the documents.
One Whitehall source sought to play down the impact of the breach: "The embarrassment of the loss is greater than the embarrassment of the contents of the documents.
"We don't believe there is a threat to any individuals in what was in these documents if they had got into the wrong hands."
A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: "We are making inquiries in connection with the loss of documents on June 10."
by Paul Majendie
Fri May 9, 2008
LONDON (Reuters) - England is an irritating and insular country full of overweight, binge-drinking, reality TV addicts, a new guide warns tourists.
But in the new Rough Guide to England, the English are also hailed as a nation of animal-loving, tea-drinking charity donors who love nothing better than forming an orderly queue.
Gone, it seems, is the image of a genteel country awash with Englishmen politely tipping their bowler hats, groping through the London fog and being kinder to pets than kids.
The writers confess to bafflement over the quirky English, concluding that of the 200 countries the guide reviews there is none "so fascinating, beautiful and culturally diverse yet as insular, self-important and irritating as England."
They said the English are proud of their multi-culturalism and are united by one thing -- their sense of humour.
But there are constant contradictions. In a country priding itself on patriotism, they have a Scottish Prime Minister, an Italian football coach and a Greek married to the Queen.
They are gently mocked as voracious consumers of celebrity chit-chat and "as a glance at the tabloid newspapers will confirm, England is a nation of overweight, binge-drinking reality TV addicts."
Fri Jan 25, 2008
By Luke Baker
LONDON (Reuters) - The military has concluded that the killing and abuse of civilians by British troops in Iraq was not widespread but the fault of a few rogue soldiers.
Brigadier Robert Aitken, who carried out a three-year investigation into the abuses in 2003 and 2004, effectively gave the army a clean bill of health in a report released on Friday, saying that while a "tiny number" behaved extremely badly, the vast majority showed "courage, loyalty and integrity".
His findings will anger the families of four Iraqis killed at the hands of British soldiers in southern Iraq, including the relatives of Baha Musa, a young hotel worker who died under interrogation with 93 injuries to his body.
Twenty-one British soldiers and officers have been court-martialled over the deaths, but only one soldier has been convicted after he pleaded guilty.
Lawyers representing Musa's family and the families of the others killed have accused the military of protecting its own.
Parallels have been drawn with the humiliation and abuse of Iraqi detainees by U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib prison. In that case, the U.S. military also concluded that the behaviour was the result of a few bad apples rather than broader problems.
In his report, Aitken suggested that army interrogation techniques should be better explained to soldiers and that the army's "core values" should be better instilled in staff, but otherwise concluded that there was no "systematic abuse".
"What we're dealing with is individual instances where people behaved disgracefully," he said.
"The great majority of officers and soldiers who have served in Iraq have done so to the highest standards that the army or the nation might expect of them."
"HOODING"
Aitken's report did hint at shortcomings in the British government's planning for the Iraq war and questioned why interrogation techniques banned 35 years ago were used in Iraq.
Aitken suggested one reason the killings and abuse of Iraqis -- including a group who were bound and beaten by soldiers in events caught on film and later made public -- took place was the pressure on British forces.
"At one level, the paucity of planning for nation-rebuilding after the invasion (a consequence, in part, of the need to give last-minute diplomacy a chance of success), was certainly a factor," he said.
"Uncertainty over the reaction of the Iraqi people to being invaded was probably another: in some areas, we were probably surprised at how quickly the initial euphoria of liberation changed to insurgency."
The report looked at five interrogation techniques -- hooding, wall standing, subjection to noise, sleep deprivation and deprivation of food and drink -- that were banned by Britain in 1972.
Not all of them were used in Iraq, but Aitken said some of them, including hooding, were. His report failed to explain how they came to be used and he said after its release that it was an area that required further investigation.
"I think we should tell everyone in the army that none of the techniques should ever be used, anywhere, period," he said.
