From Julian Fowler at the BBC:
The landmark ruling was made by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) in a case brought by Barry McCaffrey and Trevor Birney.
It found that the actions of police when mounting an undercover surveillance operation were disproportionate and undermined the domestic and international protections available for the media.
The PSNI has been ordered to pay £4,000 to each journalist, the first time the IPT has made a ruling for damages against a police force for unlawful intrusion.
A covert sting operation in 2018 targeted a civilian employee of the Northern Ireland Police Ombudsman.
They were suspected of passing secret documents to the journalists which appeared in a documentary called No Stone Unturned about the Loughinisland killings.
The film revealed how the police had colluded in protecting loyalist gunmen who murdered six Catholic men as they watched a World Cup football match in the County Down village in 1994.
Barry McCaffrey and Trevor Birney were arrested with their homes and offices being raided.
They later won a court case which found that warrants used to search their homes had been “inappropriate”.
The High Court judge said they had acted properly in protecting their sources in a lawful way and the PSNI later paid damages amounting to £875,000.
The journalists brought their case to the IPT at the Royal Courts of Justice in London arguing that there were repeated and unjustified attempts by the police to identify their sources.
During the tribunal hearing in October, the PSNI’s lawyers denied there has been a cynical attempt to deliberately circumvent the long-established legal protections for journalists and their sources.
In a written judgment, the IPT rejected police claims that the surveillance operation had only been designed to target the Police Ombudsman official.
The IPT ruled that former PSNI Chief Constable Sir George Hamilton had failed to meet the necessary legal standard and neglected the need for heightened scrutiny of surveillance applications in cases involving journalists.
Further disclosures to the IPT revealed that the Metropolitan Police had accessed the phone records of Barry McCaffrey and former BBC journalist Vincent Kearney in 2012.
This data was subsequently shared with the PSNI.
The BBC and Mr Kearney are pursuing separate action through the IPT.
Police documents revealed how Barry McCaffrey was repeatedly described as a “suspect” who associated with “other criminal suspects”.
That the police should not be spying on journalists is up there with don’t eat yellow snow, or don’t stick a fork in the toaster. What the absolute frig where the peelers playing at? What are we, East Germany? Is this some Stassi cosplay?
It should be a pretty obvious rule of public relations not to spy on and arrest the very people you rely on to communicate your message to the public.
This is a major scandal for the PSNI; it shakes trust in them to the core. Well done to Barry McCaffrey and Trevor Birney for fighting this one. You have done a great service to the public by exposing these activities.
The PSNI needs to make up its mind. Are they a modern police force there to protect and serve the public, or is a ragbag collection of wannabee spooks more interested in covering up the more nefarious historical activities of the RUC?
There needs to be a clean break between the RUC and PSNI. They can’t keep getting caught up in these toxic historical cases that ruin the public’s trust in them and make their own officers even more disillusioned with the job.
I help to manage Slugger by taking care of the site as well as running our live events. My background is in business, marketing and IT. My politics tend towards middle-of-the-road pragmatism, I am not a member of any political party. Oddly for a member of the Slugger team, I am not that interested in daily politics, preferring to write about big ideas in society. When not stuck in front of a screen, I am a parkrun Run Director.
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