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Ex-MI6 Officer Publishes Banned Novel on Blog
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."
This person isn't in the military per se MIx workers are civil servants (and that is probably what a member of one would be offically) but they have still signed the Official Secrets Act (like all civil servants), and probably have signed much more resricted non-disclosure agreements.
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.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
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 things). However, he could have done it without writing a book, and everything he's done since has shown him to be a profiteering dick-weed. Seriously, does anyone have any respect for this guy or what he has to say these days?
Maybe I've been reading it too much lately, but I have this image of him being lampooned a la Penny Arcade - "No seriously, listen guys! I have seeecrets. I'll tell you them! Spare some change?".
Meta will eat itself
I call BS.
/. would be a little more skeptical about such a blatant effort to 'guerilla market' someone's crappy book.
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."
-Styopa
That is the same argument the British government put forward when Peter Wright did the same for MI5 in his "Spycatcher" book. Mr. Wright had been a faithful servant of the secret services for many years, and responsible for some very major intel breakthroughs, including some that were critical to the British war effort against the Axis. He, however, had good reason to believe that the highest levels of MI5 had been infiltrated by the Soviets, and he decided to take action.
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.
But in the US our freedom of the press is supposed to be unlimited. Which is why the state needs secrets... because anyone who finds them out can often publish them with impunity.
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 information that is protected or damaging. Of course "damaging" can be construed in different ways, and we certainly have lawsuits on the matter. And that is a "Good Thing"(tm).
Have you read my journal today?
However, I feel that the line should be drawn with certain things. You shouldn't give information that would jepordize the lives of servicemen and women by disclosing precise positions of military units (*cough*Geraldo Rivera*cough*), and you shouldn't give information that would jepordize the safety of active duty field agents by disclosing their identity (the whole Valarie Plame incident - yeah that information should not have been leaked, but they reporter shouldn't have published it - someone could have gotten killed over the whole mess).
Zagreus sits inside your head, Zagreus lives among the dead, Zagreus sees you in your bed and eats you in your sleep.
This is the pernicious thing about the Official Secrets Act. According to the Economist anyway, it sets the default for all government information to "secret". Publish the menu for the Whitehall cafeteria and you're theoretically violating the act. The Economist published the price of a cup of tea and said this made them criminals.
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 think that there has been a bit of a misapprehension here. I am in no way suggesting that the government of Britain is a sinister totalitarian regime, or anything of the sort. I am sorry that you seemed to take the comment of a stranger on the internet as such an offense to your national sentiment - of course, I am assuming that you are a Briton, the only reason I can find for your ire. On the other hand, it seems you have also assumed I am American (c.f. "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..."), which I am in fact not. As a matter of fact, although I am not resident there, I hold a British passport.
After reading your comment I tried to do some checking of the things I remembered off the top of my head, and I will readily admit that possesion of the book was never illegal in Britain. However, two publishers were invited to tea with the MI5 spooks, and decided not to publish the book - one of them, however, passed it on the their Australian branch, which then brought it out.
In any case, the minutiae of the legal battle are not the central point of what I was trying to get at. I was simply trying to illustrate a case where "state secrets" were kept in the dark not because they were dangerous but because they were embarrasing to the government. I was attempting to make the point that sometimes it is not unpatriotic to violate the State Secrets Act, and that if this blogger is such a case then I wholeheartedly endorse the dissemination of his "secrets."
Once again, I regret to have caused you and your family such distress, but next time perhaps you should argue about the points relevant to the discussion at hand, rather than get carried away by a detail of no consequence to the philosophy of the case (however, a detail that I freely admit was erroneously worded, since "banned" is not the same as "had its publishers pressured into silence").
With nuclear weapons, the laws and court cases have varied. Some good references on "born classified" are at Federation of Atomic Scientists" and Wikipedia. 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...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks