Army spied on lockdown critics: Sceptics, including our own Peter Hitchens, long suspected they were under surveillance. Now we've obtained official records that prove they were right all along [ UK ]

dailymail.co.u ^ | January 28, 2023 | Glen Owen

[ransomnote]

• Military operatives were part of an operation that targeted politicians and high-profile journalists who raised doubts about the official pandemic response
• READ MORE: Critics slam £14.9bn of 'extraordinary waste' on overpriced, faulty or unused pandemic-era equipment 

A shadowy Army unit secretly spied on British citizens who criticised the Government's Covid lockdown policies, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Military operatives in the UK's 'information warfare' brigade were part of a sinister operation that targeted politicians and high-profile journalists who raised doubts about the official pandemic response.

They compiled dossiers on public figures such as ex-Minister David Davis, who questioned the modelling behind alarming death toll predictions, as well as journalists such as Peter Hitchens and Toby Young. Their dissenting views were then reported back to No 10.

Documents obtained by the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, and shared exclusively with this newspaper, exposed the work of Government cells such as the Counter Disinformation Unit, based in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and the Rapid Response Unit in the Cabinet Office.

Military operatives in the UK's 'information warfare' brigade were part of a sinister operation that targeted politicians and high-profile journalists

But the most secretive is the MoD's 77th Brigade, which deploys 'non-lethal engagement and legitimate non-military levers as a means to adapt behaviours of adversaries'.

They said that British citizens' social media accounts were scrutinised – a sinister activity that the Ministry of Defence, in public, repeatedly denied doing.

Papers show the outfits were tasked with countering 'disinformation' and 'harmful narratives... from purported experts', with civil servants and artificial intelligence deployed to 'scrape' social media for keywords such as 'ventilators' that would have been of interest.

 

[robowombat]

To my knowledge NSA has been doing this in some fashion for over forty years starting with monitoring both a hotlist of phone numbers and surveilling the long distance and overseas phone lines when most was cable traffic. Pretty much well known and mentioned in a number of open sources. Hotlists have been used longer than that going back to the 30’s or so. For instance using a trap to capture every number the German or Soviet embassy phones called and then after refinement hot listing the numbers both to tap conversations and to capture every number these numbers contacted. I think the FBI pioneered this technique. Years ago there were people in DC who would only make important calls from pay phones or move around and use individuals ‘phone for hire residential phones, This stuff used to be a lot of fun when it was basically spy vs spy or spying on commies like Paul Robeson.

[robowombat]

In passing, in early 1974 while working as a contractor for DEA I took part in hotlisting and building a relational network of all numbers called from a Cleveland Ohio restaurant named ‘The Egg and I’. This restaurant had a battery of 20 pay phones completely covering its back wall. It was notorious for bookies and numbers bank operators to use to place bets. Ir also was extensively used by organized crime characters to hide in plain sight and make business calls. The call volume was huge and it took days to sort the honest, the mundane gambling calls from the made guy calls. Eventual a very large relational network was built. It included some surprises, such as an assistant US Attorney who had nmany private calls with a lot of gangland types.