State secrets unsafe, MPs warn

The law is failing to protect the secrets of Britain's intelligence services, MPs have warned.

Technological advances and an increase in "chequebook journalism" mean the Official Secrets Act is no longer an adequate safeguard against renegade spies who want to tell their stories, they have argued.

The traditional threat of espionage from hostile and foreign governments has not receded

MPs' report

The warning comes in a report by a cross-party Commons select committee on intelligence issues.

It calls for the Act to be reviewed after the general election, with the aim of preventing the unwanted disclosure of highly confidential information.

It says: "The traditional threat of espionage from hostile and foreign governments has not receded, whilst other threats such as chequebook journalism have increased."

The Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, which oversees the work of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, fears that the existing Act provides inadequate means for those who do leak secrets and publish information to be successfully prosecuted.

The report says: "Disclosures are now increasingly being made, sometimes anonymously, on media such as the internet, with no obvious redress by the authorities in the UK.

"The injunctions taken out by the government are civil matters and tend only to prevent disclosure in the UK."

Government thwarted

The recommendations follow a long line of high-profile cases in which the government's will has been thwarted.

In 1985, in what is regarded as the landmark secrets case, Clive Ponting, who had worked at the Ministry of Defence, walked free from court after a jury cleared him of breaking the Official Secrets Act.

Ponting had been charged with leaking an internal MoD document concerning the General Belgrano, the Argentinean cruiser which British forces sank during the 1982 Falklands War, killing 360 people.

Mr Shayler avoided extradition but now faces prosecution.

The government line had been that the Belgrano was threatening British lives when it was sunk.

But the document leaked by Ponting indicated it was sailing out of the exclusion zone, and its publication was an embarrassment for the Thatcher government.

Other memorable cases involve the publication of state secrets.

Peter Wright's book Spycatcher was initially banned in the UK, and in 1997 former MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson was sentenced to a year in prison for passing secrets to an Australian publisher.

David Shayler avoided extradition from France after allegations about the incompetence and inefficiency of the intelligence services were published in the Mail on Sunday.

He has since been charged with three counts of breaching the Official Secrets Act.

The Commons committee, chaired by the Conservative former defence secretary Tom King, said that after the general election its successors should examine the Act with a view to recommending changes.