New Law makes Whistleblowing Illegal in the UK

It was the afternoon of May 17 2023 and I had just arrived at London’s Luton Airport. I was on my way to the city of my birth to visit my family. Before landing, the pilot instructed all passengers to have their passports ready for inspection immediately upon disembarking the plane. Just then, I noticed a six-strong squad of stone-faced plainclothes British counter-terror officers waited on the tarmac, intensely studying the identification documents of all travelers.

As soon as the cops identified me, I was ordered to accompany them into the airport terminal without explanation. There, I was introduced to two officials whose names I could not learn, who subsequently referred to each other using nondescript callsigns. I was invited to be digitally strip searched, and subjected to an interrogation in which I had no right to silence, no right to refuse to answer questions, and no right to withhold pin numbers for my digital devices or sim cards. If I asserted any rights to privacy, I faced arrest and up to 48 hours in police custody.

I chose to comply. And so it was that over the next five hours, I sat with a couple of anonymous counter-terror cops in an airless, windowless, excruciatingly hot back room. They fingerprinted me, took invasive DNA swabs, and probed every conceivable aspect of my private and professional life, friend and family connections, and educational background. They wanted to know why I write, say and think the things I do, the specifics of how I’m paid for my investigative journalism, and to which bank account.

I had been detained under Britain’s 2019 Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act, which the UN has branded draconian and repressive. Under its Schedule 3 powers, anyone entering British territory suspected of “hostile activity” on behalf of a foreign power can be detained, interrogated for six hours, and have the contents of their digital devices seized and stored. “Hostile acts” are defined as any behavior deemed threatening to Britain’s “national security” or its “economic well-being.”

More disturbingly, Schedule 3 is suspicionless. Under its terms, “it is immaterial whether a person is aware that activity in which they are or have been engaged is hostile activity, or whether a state for or on behalf of which, or in the interests of which, a hostile act is carried out has instigated, sanctioned, or is otherwise aware of, the carrying out of the act.” It must be quite an elaborate conspiracy when conspirators do not even know they’re conspiring.

It turns out the British state wrongly believed The Grayzone had a relationship with Russia’s notorious FSB security service. They based their assumption not on any evidence, but on our knack for producing factual investigative journalism based on documents passed to this outlet anonymously, via burner email accounts. Such activity is common practice for Western media outlets, rights groups, and much venerated “open source” investigative outfits like the US-government sponsored Bellingcat. If I and the rest of The Grayzone made any mistake, it was in publishing material the US-UK national security state does not want in the public domain.

Now, the British government is taking its war on investigative journalism to a new level through its little-known National Security Act. Under this law, authorities in London have granted themselves the power to surveil, harass, and ultimately imprison any British citizens they wish on similarly suspicionless grounds. Dissidents of every stripe must now worry that everything they do or say could land them in jail for lengthy terms, simply for failing to toe London’s rigid national security line.

Among the top lobbyists for these authoritarian measures is Paul Mason, the celebrity journalist who posed as a leader of the British left until The Grayzone unmasked him as a security state collaborator hellbent on destroying the antiwar movement from within.

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