Comment by snthd

>As our [1978] trial started, witness after witness from security sites tried to claim that openly published information was in fact secret. In a typical interchange, one Sigint unit chief was shown a road sign outside his base:

> Q: Is that the name of your unit?

> A: I cannot answer that question, that is a secret.

> Q: Is that the board which passers-by on the main road see outside your unit’s base?

> A: Yes.

> Q: Read it out to the jury, please.

> A: I cannot do that. It is a secret.

>Official panic set in. The foreign secretary who GCHQ had bullied into having us accused of spying wrote that “almost any accommodation is to be preferred” to allowing our trial to continue. A Ministry of Defense report in September 1978, now released, disclosed that the “prosecuting counsel has come to the view that there have been so many published references to the information Campbell has acquired and the conclusions he has drawn from it that the chances of success with [the collection charge] are not good.”

>My lawyer overheard the exasperated prosecutor saying that he would allow the government to continue with the espionage charge against me “over [his] dead body.” The judge, a no-nonsense Welsh lawyer, was also fed up with the secrecy pantomime. He demanded the government scrap the espionage charges. They did.

GCHQ and Me, My Life Unmasking British Eavesdroppers -- Duncan Campbell

https://theintercept.com/2015/08/03/life-unmasking-british-e...