Over 40 journalists and lawyers have submitted evidence to an independent review into allegations that the Police Service of Northern Ireland unlawfully spied on journalists and members of the legal profession.
The review, commissioned by the Chief Constable of Northern Ireland Jon Boutcher, is inquiring into allegations that the PSNI collected the phone data of lawyers, journalists and NGOs, breaching journalists’ confidential sources and legal privilege between lawyers and clients.
The inquiry follows disclosures by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal that the PSNI and the Metropolitan Police had unlawfully carried out surveillance operations against journalists Barry McCaffrey and Trevor Birney.
It comes as MPs in the Northern Ireland Affairs select committee are preparing to take evidence next week from the two journalists as part of a one-day hearing into press freedom in Northern Ireland.
Angus McCullough KC, who is leading the review into allegations of PSNI surveillance over 14 years between January 2011 and December 2024, disclosed in a progress report today that 50 individuals and two organisations have submitted evidence to the review. Some 80% of the responses came from journalists and lawyers. A small number, representing 5%, raised issues that fell outside McCullough’s terms of reference.
There was a presumption, he wrote in a progress report, that individuals who were subject to improper or unlawful surveillance would be informed “subject to legal constraints”.
McCullough, assisted by Matthew Hill, who took part in the Post Office Horizon inquiry, and Rajkiran Arhestey, said he was confident that the review team had been given unrestricted and unsupervised access to PSNI documents and computer systems.
According to the progress report, investigators said they were keen to understand what scope there may be for police officers to bypass the proper statutory processes and whether there was a likelihood of “off the books surveillance”.
McCullough said that surveillance need not be targeted directly against journalists or lawyers for it to have a tendency to reveal legally privileged or journalistic material, including journalistic sources.
The review team has been able to use information in submitted evidence to identify keywords or specific names and contact details to conduct searches of PSNI computer systems to identify cases of surveillance.
“We have also taken steps to ensure, so far as it is possible, that the PSNI are not able to see what we have been searching for,” the report states, in order to guarantee the anonymity of people who have submitted evidence to the review.
Searches of the PSNI systems were “considerably more time consuming” than predicted. Legislation on surveillance and the PSNI’s systems and processes, and repositories for storing data had changed considerably over 14 years.
McCullough said that he rejected proposals to expand the review to assess the PSNI’s monitoring of its own police officers and staff, and could not consider surveillance by MI5, the British Military, or other police forces.
The Investigatory Powers Tribunal found in December 2025 that a former chief constable of the PSNI, George Hamilton, acted unlawfully by signing off on a directed surveillance operation to identify the suspected source of the two Northern Ireland journalists.
Birney and McCaffrey were unlawfully arrested and their property seized after they produced a film exposing police collusion with a paramilitary group that killed 6 innocent people in Loughinisland, County Down, in 1994.
Court received 60 complaints on PSNI in 3 years
The Police Service of Northern Ireland has been referred in complaints UK’s surveillance court, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) nearly 60 times between 2022 and 2024.
The tribunal has ordered the PSNI to disclose internal documents 28 times, and has made 4 adjudications in cases involving the PSNI over the same period, according to figures disclosed by the Northern Ireland Policing Board.
Chief constable, Jon Boucher, admitted in a report published during the course of the legal proceedings that it had placed over 500 lawyers and 300 journalists under surveillance. Those targeted included more than a dozen journalists working for the BBC.
The IPT is considering a claim that the PSNI unlawfully spied against former BBC journalist, Vincent Kearney, during his work on a 2011 Spotlight documentary investigating the independence of the police watchdog in Northern Ireland.
Campaigners have claimed the McCullough review does not go far enough and have called for the government to set up a public inquiry into police surveillance of journalists in Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.
Computer Weekly has submitted evidence to the McCullough review.
