Your Right To Know: How to use the Freedom of Information Act and other access laws

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Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005)

[…] a vested interest in suppressing information for political convenience make the decision about what is a matter of national security…It is therefore lamentable that all security and intelligence services have been given a blanket exemption from the Freedom of Information Act via s23…..It provides an absolute exemption for information that was supplied directly or […]

Loose cuts and short ends

Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996)

[…] ‘Peter Wright’ was, according to The Times, 10 November 1952, ‘a professor of history in Cawnpore from 1937 to 1939. During the war he was in the intelligence service, and was Press censor at Delhi’. He was expelled by the colonial authorites in Kenya for being too friendly with members of Jomo Kenyatta’s Kenya […]

Cold War stories 2

Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2)

[…] Europe. Ingeborg Philipsen spoke of the Danish Society for Freedom and Culture, established in January 1953 by the former resistance fighter Arne Sejr. Sejr operated a private intelligence group called The Firm, formed in 1948 to conduct psychological warfare in Denmark in connection with the Danish Intelligence Service and the CIA. But Sejr’s interest […]

Re:

Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005)

[…] talked about Saddam Hussein in Iraq…But at that time…..the Democrats had occupied the White House for the previous eight years. So he was not privy to any intelligence whatsoever…he didn’t know what kind of situation the weapons of mass destruction was at that time.’ () About Open Government The first issue of About Open […]

The Libyans and the death of WPC Yvonne Fletcher

Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999)

[…] US; but all carried out by Republican governments. Is it possible that on both sides of the Atlantic the professional diplomats and the rational core of the intelligence community are slowly throwing off some of the vile nonsense perpetrated in the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher years? The release of various official US documents which could easily have […]

The Clash of the Icons

Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1)

[…] to reproduce conversations verbatim, a talent that made him a highly prized asset of the CIA station chief, John Hart, in Saigon. Hart and the CIA’s foreign intelligence staff wanted to know what influential Vietnamese citizens and officials were privately thinking, and plotting; so, through his CIA contacts, Ellsberg was introduced into Saigon’s most […]

Letters

Lobster Issue 10 (1986)

[…] denial had been broadcast throughout the country, and I can only assume that it was believed. After all, one would think that the former Director of Naval Intelligence and the National Security Agency would know with some precision where he was when this country was undergoing its greatest political crisis of this century. Indeed, […]

Friends of the British Secret State

Lobster Issue 16 (1988)

[…] one Soviet employee has ever been busted for involvement with the IRA. On close examination Massie’s story dribbled away into nothing. All he actually had was “Israeli intelligence believes Shabtal Kalmanovitch may know how the network in organised and financed.” Gerard Kemp Another old spook outlet, Gerard Kemp, is still putting his name to […]

Malcolm Kennedy: complaint to Investigatory Powers Tribunal not upheld

Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005)

[…] Tribunal. The IPT is the body set up under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) to hear complaints relating to conduct by the Security and Intelligence agencies, and complaints about phone-tapping. It also deals with claims under the Human Rights Act 1998, s7(1)(a) that a public authority has acted in a manner […]

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