Big Brother is watching me

About six months ago I was contacted by Big Brother Watch, the civil liberties campaign group, and asked if I wanted to help with an investigation into the surveillance of critics of the government’s pandemic response by state agencies. Would I submit subject access requests to different Whitehall departments to see if I was among the critics of the government’s pandemic response who’d been monitored by the Counter Disinformation Unit, the Rapid Response Unit, the Intelligence and Communications Unit and the 77th Brigade?

I thought it unlikely, but decided to play along and on Monday night Big Brother Watch published its report revealing that I was one of the dozens of journalists, scientists and MPs who’d been spied on in this way. Others included Peter Hitchens, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Carl Heneghan, Tom Jefferson and David Davis. It’s pretty extraordinary that members of Boris Johnson’s government managed to convince the people working in these agencies, some of them with a background in the security services, that those of us who questioned the wisdom of the lockdown policy and vaccine passports were potentially dangerous actors whom the state needed protecting from.