Jules Mattsson
Using the Data Protection Act, Thomas and five other journalists got their hands on their records only to discover the police not only consider them "domestic extremists," but have spied on them for years. The idea of the UK being a police state sounds less and less like a conspiracy theorist's fantasy and ever more like a real thing with the paperwork to prove it.The level of detail the police kept on Thomas is both scary and impressive. "One entry notes my presence at an anti-war demo, describing what I am wearing and what sort of bike I am riding," Thomas wrote in an NUJ blog post about his files.
"You've broken no law, you have no criminal record. Why is this stuff being recorded? Who has got access to it? Who is being provided with it?" Thomas asked his colleagues at a National Union of Journalists (NUJ) meeting about state surveillance at The Guardian on the 16th of October.
To find out, he and the other journalists—all members of the NUJ who work full-time or freelance for The Times, The Guardian, and others—launched a legal claim last week backed by the union. They want their files put before a judge to determine if the secret surveillance is illegal. If the ruling finds it so, they hope it will lead to a wholesale change of police practices and get their records struck.
In addition to those grabs featuring several colleagues being targeted, this is me being followed around a tube stn pic.twitter.com/UutzdYXcgo
— Jules Mattsson (@julesmattsson) November 23, 2014
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