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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."
...I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
What the hell does this have to do my rights online?
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.
By default the government should be open. Encouraging anything less is nothing more than an evil attempt to harm and subdue a free people.
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.
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.
Something tells me this guy's going to end up doing time, no matter how good his book might have been.
Patriots serve in all sorts of less than obvious ways. Sometimes jail time for opposing the state is one of them.
KFG
http://cryptome.org/tomlinson-mi6.htm
If a square is really a rhombus, why aren't all triangles purple?
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.
Do not pass Go.
:)
Do not collect $200.
Do not drop the soap.
(Shamelessly stolen from www.gucomics.com
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
To my knowledge, the book is still banned in Britain.
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...
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.
Can the press print copywrited material?
... if they can afford the consequences.
... anarchist rags, mostly, but during the cold war some papers/magazines printed details on making nukes.
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
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