Courts and bug product

[Ian Batten]

On 14 Feb 2008, at 09:05, PeteM wrote:

> Ian Batten wrote  on 14-02-08 08:26:
>> On 14 Feb 2008, at 07:24, PeteM wrote:
>>> And 1,000 is not such a big number, especially as at least half of  
>>> them were probably in London,
>> That's the case now, clearly.  I wonder if it was the case in  
>> 1975?  The targets would have been union activists, left-wing  
>> politicians, purported IRA sympathisers and so on.  Were they are  
>> centred on London as the targets of today appear to be?  I don't  
>> know: I was busy being 11 at the time.
>
> I'd guess the other way around. In 1975 the targets would mostly  
> have been Warsaw Pact diplomats and businessmen,


OK, but I think we're at cross-purposes, and that might explain the  
disparity between quoted numbers of warrants and claimed numbers of  
intercepts.   Taps of WarPac diplomats and `businessmen' (all of whom,  
by definition, were approved and sponsored by their intelligence  
services) are in my view of the history of 1975 entirely justified and  
entirely unlike taps on UK citizens.   Any WarPac citizen able to  
reside in the UK would have been inherently a target for surveillance,  
and defectors wouldn't be a lot different (as some of them were plants).

[[ I knew one Polish guy as a child, through my parents' climbing  
club.  He was a maths lecturer at Leeds, but went on to become Polish  
defence minister in the 90s.    There were similar people from various  
WarPac countries in most universities.   I would assume that most of  
them would have been interception targets: defector, exile, recruiter  
or agent of influence?   We can probably guess now from what they did  
post '94, but at the time there would have been no way to know. ]]

The question that I'm interested is ``how many people who were UK  
citizens were tapped?''


> the vast majority of whom would be working in London. While today  
> the most numerous targets are probably people who download Jihadist  
> literature; judging by recent cases, many of these are in West  
> Yorkshire and the Midlands.

Last year I sat at a table in a curry house on Stoney Lane (or was it  
Ladypool Road: either Imran's or the Al Frash) discussing unclassified  
aspects of implosion-assembly fission weapons, and later the viability  
of making fission weapons from U233 derived from neutron bombardment  
of Thorium.  This was all public source speculation, of course.  It  
did occur to us afterwards that we were risking a visit from Mr MP5...

ian