Ex-MI6 Officer Publishes Banned Novel on Blog 67
SpooForBrains writes "Ex-MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson has been fighting a battle with the UK Secret Services for some time now, over his plans to publish a novel detailing his experience in the service, and over claims that he published a list of MI6 agents online (a claim he denies). The latest salvo in the battle (as reported on The Register occurred on Friday when he published the first chapter of his new novel "The Golden Chain" on Blogspot. He has since put up all the remaining chapters, apparently in an attempt to have them seen before the security services have them taken down."
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"It's just what I do, master..."
This is a smart move... (Score:4, Funny)
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Don't be ridiculous. He might be prosecuted, and if found guilty of violating the relevant laws he might be jailed, but any such action will take place entirely in the open.
Britain, unlike certain a other world power, enforces its national security laws both consistently and openly (no letting people get off scot-free because they're high up in the ruling party; no "extraordinary rendition" and secret torture camps). And we do not perpetrate the barbaric practice of j
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Re:This is a smart move... (Score:4, Funny)
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Moo (Score:1)
Let me guess, this guy believes there should be no such thing as state secrets. The government should be open!
<insert patron deity here> help us all!
Re:Moo (Score:5, Insightful)
If the government believes that any specific data may compromise the lives of any person unduly, the government can be allowed to make its case and fight for the data to remain secret.
Some people seem to forget that this is how it was before WW2 because people were wise enough at the time, and chronologically close enough to historical examples, to know that no government can be trusted unless the people have been allowed to know what it is doing.
Official Secrets Act (Score:4, Interesting)
That's a more serious issue than the question of whether items explicitly classified should be published. Remember, it's easy to get a document classified without showing that it has anything to do with national security.
I dont know about other countries (Score:2)
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Not really. Freedom of the press is more about opinions than information.
Can the press print copywrited material? Can the press print libel? Can the press advertise cigarettes? Can the press print a detailed how to make highly explosive material?
The freedom is for political expression, where the "expression" does not contain inform
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Yes, with impunity if they follow fair use news-worthiness rules. Google it.
Can the press print libel?
Yes. If they source it properly they can even print it without being sued, but unlike in Britain, America does not have prior restraint so they are free to print it
Can the press advertise cigarettes?
Yup. Read magazines much?
Can the press print a detailed how to make highly explosive material?
Yup, and they do it all the time
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Re:Moo (Score:5, Interesting)
He wrote a long report ("The Dossier") and sent it straight to the Prime Minister, who promptly forwarded it to the accused managers for review. They, of course, gave themselves a clean bill of health, and started making life hell for Mr. Wright. Disgusted at how his efforts to help his country were going nowhere, he decided to go public. "Spycatcher" was the result of that decision.
When he attempted to have it published in Britain, his publishers were pressured into dropping the book ("invited to have tea with the Treasury lawyers" is the jargon), and he eventually took it to an Australian firm. The aussies went ahead with the book, and the British government sued him in Australia. The judged ruled in Mr. Wright's favour, noting that the British government's case was entirely laughable and irresponsible.
To my knowledge, the book is still banned in Britain. However, in the rest of the world it became a massive best-seller, and eventually shamed the British government into pushing for reforms of the recruitment process of the intelligence services.
This is another case of a book that was deemed to be full of state secrets, and therefore should be kept hidden. However, how was it beneficial to the government of Britain, or the national security of Britain, to ignore and hush up the fact that their intelligence services were riddled with moles? In some cases, state secrets must be busted open, because sometimes they are only secret because they are embarassing, not dangerous.
I say give this guy a chance. If he's just a fame seeker who is gratuitously spilling secrets to get himself on a best-seller list, shut him down. But if he has something important to say - publish the hell out of his book. Make it visible in every corner of the world and make sure some change comes of it.
Re:Moo (Score:4, Informative)
May I suggest you attempt to verify your knowledge before making accusations like that? In fact, the book was never banned in Britain at all, AFAICT, and has certainly been openly sold in Britain ever since its first publication abroad.
What really happened is more complicated and somewhat less sinister.
Once the British government brought proceedings against Wright in Australia, in June 1986 two British newspapers picked up on the story and published some excerpts. The government therefore obtained a legal injunction forbidding those newspapers (and those two alone) from publishing any more excerpts. In 1987, when the book was published in the USA, a third newspaper attempted to publish excerpts, and another injunction was issued. The three injunctions were then challenged in the House of Lords (the British equivalent of taking the case to the Supreme Court), which initially confirmed them while the case was in progress; but ultimately in October 1988 the Law Lords ruled in favour of the newspapers and overturned all the injunctions.
Note that at no point was possession of the book itself banned in Britain; while it was not published in Britain at first, many copies were imported from the USA, and no attempts were ever made to prevent that or to prosecute any importers.
The "bans" were very specifically limited to publication of excerpts in three newspapers, and those bans lasted less than 2 years before they were overturned by due legal process. So while the government did indeed attempt to censor the book, we're not talking about an oppressive totalitarian regime that decrees what its citizens are allowed to think; we're merely talking about a government being duly diligent in its efforts to ensure national security.
And I seem to recall that even in the USA, with its consitutionally guaranteed right to freedom of speech, you can cause a national scandal by revealing the identity of a CIA field agent...
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YRO?!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Do the editors not realize the rights of military personnel are not the same as civilians? There are some things they can and can't do even after they leave the service.
In any case, I don't really see the relevance of this on slashdot. If you replace blog with book, I don't know how this is news for nerds.
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Come on. As a nerd, don't you have some of that inquisitiveness that divides the nerds from the sheep? You've got a guy here who's decided that the public's right to know outweighs the government's desire for secrecy. Aren't you the least bit curious about the experiences this guy must have had to turn his attitude that way? For your benefit?
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I mean, at a regular job, if you sign a paper saying you won't do X and you do it -- as long as the action wasn't illegal all they can really do is kick you out. But he's already left the army. They can't say the contract is still in effect, it's been voided for some time.
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Now my Grandfather who spent WWII interogating what he described as "odious people" (aka high ranking German officers) and then went
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It's not clear whether you're talking about the US or the UK, but certainly in the UK that's not the case. The Official Secrets Act is a law, and is binding on you whether you know it or not. When you apply for security clearance you do indeed sign a bit of paper confirming y
Specific Secrets vs. Fictionalized Descriptions (Score:2)
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In the US, there's very little information that's "born classified", mostly things like nuclear weapons design, names of secret agents
Nuclear weapons design is not born classified. If I design a device that goes 20kT boom, I can publish it if I want to. It's just the stuff that the US has designed that's classified. Likewise, I might be able to publish a list of secret agents, provided I use no classified sources.
Re:Specific Secrets vs. Fictionalized Descriptions (Score:4, Interesting)
With nuclear weapons, the laws and court cases have varied. Some good references on "born classified" are at Federation of Atomic Scientists" [72.14.203.104] and Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]. Then there's the case of "The Progressive", which published information in ~1976, but it apparently wasn't sufficiently detailed to count as Restricted Data or Formerly Restricted Data, so the Feds lost their case against them. On the other hand, back in the mid-70s, a Princeton student designed an atomic bomb for his junior physics project and his paper got classified and confiscated (though he did get an A on it -- Phillips wasn't some brilliant whiz kid, he was a mediocre student who needed a really good project to get his grades back up.)
Names of Secret Agents - Ex-CIA agent Philip Agee published a list of names of probably CIA agents, derived from non-classified sources, which is why Congress passed a law that says *you* can't do the same thing and then-CIA-honcho George H.W. Bush called people who did that traitors. The law is somewhat narrow - it doesn't look like Scooter Libby necessarily violated it.
Cryptographers ran into lots of problems with it in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s - if you submitted crypto technology for a patent, the NSA could declare it to be classified and rip it off, and you wouldn't be able to publish it - but if you published first, you couldn't get a patent, unless you were very careful about timing (since US patent law, unlike most European patent law, gives you a year from publication to apply for a patent) - the US academic crypto journals were mostly strict and conservative about accepting papers that might get classified before publication. Diffie, Hellmann, Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman had to play games to publish, and they did so successfully. And US crypto export laws, which were designed to keep military hardware from being sold to Commies, had trouble coping with books printed on dead trees, that was clearly covered by the First Amendment, so the PGP folks were able to force the issue by exporting printed copies of their code and having friendly European academics scan it in for them. On the other hand, Raph Levien never got his T-shirts back...
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On the other hand, back in the mid-70s, a Princeton student designed an atomic bomb for his junior physics project and his paper got classified and confiscated
Notice that it was classified after the fact. 'Born classified' would mean that that information is classified by its very existence, even if the government doesn't know about it.
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On Tomlinson - are there actually any disclosures in his novel? It is most probably a publicity stunt.
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As I understood it, the first book was about what a shambolic state MI6 was in back when he was employed there - someone please correct or confirm. If that is the case then I understand why he may have seen this as a good thing to do in the interests of national security (publicity is sometimes the only way to get people to wake up and change thing
Re:YRO?!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
where do you draw the line between what the state has a right to hide and what it must not?
in short: who's watching the watchers?
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Civil disobedience is always an option, and what makes civil disobedience honorable is accepting the consequences of being caught.
where do you draw the line between what the state has a right to hide and what it must not?
The conscience and moral character of the whistleblowers.
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Do you really want people *without* consciences or good moral character working in your government? Of course there will always be bad apples, but shouldn't a requirement of public service (that's what a government is, after all; they don't exist purely for their own right - do they?) be to actual
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Um, yes, that was my point. The thing is, if there is something wrong with the way the government is being operated, you're likely to suffer negative consequences after you report it... you're not going to expect the government to save you from the government?
Must a government rely on a system of martyrs to be accountable?
"The tree of liberty must b
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I'm not talking "took home one too many pens from the office", I'm talking "started putting people on no-fly lists just to meet quotas", or
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The best we've come up with is a mechanism to try and ensure the patriots get vindicated posthumously.
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Of any age.
I'm not saying this is good.
I'm simply saying it's necessary.
Re:YRO?!!! (Score:4, Interesting)
So yes, this isn't really anything to do with 'our rights'. Although he might argue that his are being attacked as just about everyone else, has released books, but only after the MOD has vetted them first.
I dont know how many books have been forced to be edited as a result of the MOD reviewing the books of MIx bosses and SAS solders, but whenever they had misgivings (Andy McNab for instance), it just gave the book more publicity "The book they didn't want to you to see" and such like.
This guy probably has a really boring book, but now it doesn't seem so boring.
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Eh. MI _stands_ for "Military Intelligence", so at the very least they like to think of themselves as military-ish. In any case, changing the words "military personnel" to "intelligence officers" does not change the previous poster's point, as far as I can tell. I don't think CIA employees should be able to publish just any information they want, that they've obtained in the course of their job, so why would MI6 officers be different in that regard?
We're not t
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Their official name is SIS or the Secret Intelligence Service. The name MI6 is more of a nickname then anything else, sort of like calling the (current) Russian intelligence service the KGB.
Apparently MI6 was the liason department between SIS and Military Intelligence during WWII.
The rest of the point stands however.
A more pertinent question... (Score:1)
Something tells me this guy's going to end up doing time, no matter how good his book might have been.
Re:A more pertinent question... (Score:5, Insightful)
Patriots serve in all sorts of less than obvious ways. Sometimes jail time for opposing the state is one of them.
KFG
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The "you" of the title is plural not singular. Our rights online include those among us who are members of the military. And its online 'cause he's publishing it in a blog.
Nobody's forcing you to read the story.
Re:YRO?!!! (Score:5, Funny)
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Heh, that's pretty good! Wish I had mod points right now.
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Power.
KFG
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Anyways, this is about a novel, not a work of non-fic
Smells suspicious (Score:3, Interesting)
One might suspect that the main stream media is gullible and naive enough about the web, but one would hope that
I couldn't have said it better than a comment on the guy's own blog:
"Presumably your book is being banned on the basis of its quality, which is average at best. "Hit with the force of a tsunami" - awful. And a protagonist who doesn't need to work for a living, rather conveniently. I saw The Constant Gardener at the cinema, and this smells like a cheap rip-off. And don't get me started on predictability...
You needn't live in fear of MI6 mate, it's the readers you should be afraid of."
Read the original book (Score:5, Informative)
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The book, "The Big Breach", is available on the site, although Cryptome's page is badly obsolete. (The domain "thebigbreach.com" is in the hands of a squatter and plg-gcie.com has no server.)
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When it's governments versus individuals, I'm in favor of the individuals, excepting when those individuals have been proven to be very bad.
Tomlinson's is a case of one person revealing inconvenient truths about how his government operates. By default, I'm in favor of that.
Joseph Wilson also revealed inconvenient truths about his government [thenation.com], showing
Go straight to prison. (Score:2, Funny)
Do not collect $200.
Do not drop the soap.
(Shamelessly stolen from www.gucomics.com