Are We Being Watched?

Authored by Freddie Attenborough via The Critic,

A shadowy state agency with no statutory footing, previously used to monitor perfectly lawful yet dissenting speech during the Covid lockdowns, has been deployed by the Labour Government to monitor social media amid ongoing civil unrest across the UK.

The Counter Disinformation Unit (CDU), now rebranded as the National Security Online Information Team (NSOIT), has been given the task just months after the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee questioned “the lack of transparency and accountability of [NSOIT] and the appropriateness of its reach”, and recommended that the Government commission an independent review of “the activities and strategy” of the unit to report back within 12 months.

Peter Kyle, Labour’s Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology has tasked NSOIT with monitoring online activity following the outbreak of widespread public disorder in the wake of the murder of three schoolgirls in Southport on 29th July.

David Davis, the Conservative MP who previously called for the CDU to be shut down, told the Telegraph he had no real objection to the unit being used to monitor social media during the riots because “it’s perfectly legitimate for the state to monitor things that might incite violence”. 

That’s true, of course – but the question is whether in doing so NSOIT will also be monitoring and flagging for removal online posts that fall well within the law.

Last year, a report by Big Brother Watch unmasked the scale of the digital surveillance system established during the Covid lockdowns, with the government now able to call upon at least three domestic surveillance units, all of which have previously been tasked with monitoring social media posts in the UK, flagging “misleading” content to their Whitehall paymasters who then urge tech platforms to remove them.

These units are the NSOIT in DCMS, the Intelligence and Communications Unit in the Home Office, the Cabinet Office’s Rapid Response Unit (since disbanded, according to the government) and the 77th Brigade, a combined Regular and Army reserve unit within the Ministry of Defence.

NSOIT was originally established to fight what the government calls “disinformation”. 

At first glance that seems like a fairly reasonable remit. After all, disinformation is defined in the dictionary as “false information spread in order to deceive people”. However, at the CDU the word “disinformation” seems to have been peculiarly malleable.

During the Covid lockdowns, the unit’s remit was widened to cover the “inadvertent sharing of false information” — i.e., misinformation, not disinformation. 

Was there any limit to who the CDU would subject to scrutiny? Apparently not.

Conservative MP and former Home Secretary David Davis was among those cited in CDU files as “critical of the Government” after questioning the mathematical reasoning behind Imperial University’s pandemic modelling.

Dr Alexandre de Figueiredo, the statistics lead at the Vaccine Confidence Project, also came to the unit’s attention after publishing work looking at the negative impact Covid passports could have on vaccine confidence.

TalkRadio journalist and lockdown sceptic Julia Hartley-Brewer was included in another “Covid-19 Mis/Disinformation Platform Terms of Service” report after sharing a clip from her radio show alongside which she had written: “Another personal experience of the damage lockdown causes from a @talkRADIO listener. Her fiancé’s business is closed down, her father’s cancer treatment cancelled, and her grandma is scared to even leave her home. This lockdown is a national tragedy way beyond Covid deaths.”

Comments made by Silkie Carlo, the director of Big Brother Watch, on Talk TV at the end of 2021, objecting to vaccine passports and branding proposals as “a vision of checkpoint Britain”, were also logged as problematic.

As to why these posts were considered “problematic”, a spokesman for Logically, the AI-based internet monitoring firm then employed by DCMS to monitor and analyse social media posts, said it sometimes included legitimate-looking posts in its reports if those posts could be “weaponised” by dangerous people, i.e., critics of the government’s management of the pandemic.

“Context matters,” a spokesperson for the company explained. “It is possible for content that isn’t specifically mis- or disinformation to be included in a report if there is evidence or the potential for a narrative to be weaponised.”

The previous Conservative administration claimed NSOIT couldn’t force platforms to remove content, which is true. But what’s also true is that DCMS enjoys a special relationship with several social networks by dint of its “trusted flagger status”, something that inevitably gives it extra weight when flagging content to social media companies.

The legal issues at stake here are particularly troubling. Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) sets out that member states’ interferences with the right to freedom of expression should be defined in law, yet the NSOIT and the other shadowy anti-disinformation units aren’t authorised by an act of parliament and have no formal judicial or law enforcement function. The fact that entirely lawful content is regularly being flagged at the discretion of unaccountable civil servants in this way poses clear and obvious risks to freedom of speech.

As the General Secretary of the Free Speech Union, Toby Young, pointed out last year for the Spectator, even if during lockdown the CDU may not have gone beyond monitoring journalistic activities, in the absence of a statutory footing and all the attendant Parliamentary oversight and democratic accountability, “What’s to stop them going further next time?”

During a debate on the Online Safety Bill in the House of Commons in 2023, the then Minister for Tech and the Digital Economy, Chris Philp, had this to say:

“As far as I am aware we intend to continue with the [CDU]… Clearly, I cannot commit future Ministers in perpetuity, but my personal view – if I am allowed to express it – is that that unit performs a useful function and could valuably be continued into the future.”

In the wake of the ongoing civil unrest and the conversations now taking place online, the question is, is that “useful function” monitoring people committing criminal offences online… or spying on those who question the benefits of unfettered immigration, the UK’s longstanding policy of multiculturalism, or accuse the authorities of “two-tier” policing?