The British intelligence service, MI5, has admitted that it unlawfully obtained the data of journalist Vincent Kearney on two occasions.<\/p>\n
During a hearing of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) in London, it was heard that it obtained the data in 2006 and 2009.<\/p>\n
Mr Kearney, who is now RT\u00c9’s Northern Editor, worked for the BBC at the time as Home Affairs Correspondent.<\/p>\n
During today’s hearing, Jude Bunting KC, acting for the BBC and Vincent Kearney, said that the concession from MI5 was unprecedented in tribunal proceedings.<\/p>\n
Last year, the BBC wrote to the IPT about alleged PSNI surveillance of phone data linked to Mr Kearney’s work at the time.<\/p>\n
The tribunal is an independent judicial body which provides the right of redress to anyone who believes they may have been the victim of unlawful action by a public body using covert investigative techniques.<\/p>\n
It is believed that this was prompted following information that came to light during a hearing at the IPT last year involving BBC journalists Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey.<\/p>\n
Last December, the IPT ruled that a covert surveillance operation authorised by the PSNI in a bid to reveal their journalistic source was unlawful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The British intelligence service, MI5, has admitted that it unlawfully obtained the data of journalist Vincent Kearney on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22732,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-22731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22731"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22731\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}