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.
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In the months that followed Breen’s exclusive, investigators logged her calls, those of her colleague Graeme Hetherington and even their modest-sized newspaper’s busy switchboard in an effort to unmask their sources. The two were stunned when they eventually discovered the scale of the spying.
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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 naïve, but on a regional newspaper you don’t expect your local police force to do this.
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The Echo’s editor, Andy Richardson, said his paper’s brush with police spying carries a warning as surveillance laws stiffen up and down the continent.
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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.
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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.
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Nevertheless the Echo has often provided painful reading for Cleveland Police, a department responsible for a Chicago-sized patch of England’s industrial northeast.
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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…