LEIGH DAYNES - Doctors of the World: how we discovered GCHQ was spying on us
Why do intelligence agencies think it's acceptable to identify our humanitarian doctors, nurses and midwives as a threat to national security?
I was in a Brick Lane restaurant on our Christmas work night
out when I received the email from someone purporting to be a Guardian
investigative journalist.
“We’re working on a story which suggests your
organisation may have been the victim of surveillance by an intelligence
agency....”
At the bottom of the email read:
“PS THIS IS NOT SPAM!!”
My colleague reassured me, “it’s spam, ignore it,” and so I
ordered some more poppadoms and tried to do just that. But I had some niggling questions: what would be the point
of spamming in this way? If it was a scam, what could they gain?
The next morning I rang the Guardian to speak with the
journalist. It was him, the email was legit and what he was about to tell me
would send the next few days into a whirlwind. He would not go into fine
details but files leaked by Edward Snowden suggested several humanitarian
organisations, including the one I work for, Doctors of the World
(Médecins du Monde) had been secretly monitored by British and American
security services, GCHQ and the NSA respectively. He asked if we had anything
to comment.
My first thought was if I’d said, written, whispered,
posted, noted or insinuated anything that could be vaguely perceived as a
threat to national security. I imagine this is the kind of irrational fear any
person can feel when they’re told they’ve been spied on. Then he told me that
it was mainly our operations in Africa that were targeted, but it still left an
uneasy feeling.
We do work in some quite sensitive areas, such as Mali,
Somalia, and Algeria. But how could our doctors, nurses and midwives be seen as
in any way a threat to national or international security?
I knew they were not, and guessed this was part of blanket
and overreaching snooping by the security services. They had also targeted
other innocuous organisations such as UNICEF and the United Nations development
programme which made us feel confident enough to put out a statement before
we’d seen a response from GCHQ or the NSA, something which was not forthcoming
even after the story broke.
And boy did it break. It was front page news across the
world including the Guardian, New York Times and the German newspaper Der
Spiegel. I appeared on the BBC evening news while my colleague appeared on the
ITV version. It was everywhere.
We told the media that we were shocked by the allegations
which amounted to a shameful waste of taxpayers’ money; money that would be
better spent vaccinating Syrian children against polio, rebuilding the
Philippines’ shattered health system or in any other place in the world where
help was urgently needed at that time.
We reiterated that our doctors, nurses and midwives are not
a threat to national security and that we’re an independent health charity with
over 30 years’ experience in delivering impartial care in some of the world’s
poorest and most dangerous places. Our aid priorities are indeed
calculated on the basis of need alone and we felt the need to make clear that
this aid is never used to further a particular political or religious
standpoint. Also, like other humanitarian actors, we adhere strictly to the
fundamental principles of independence, neutrality and impartiality in our
work and we have robust anti-fraud and anti-corruption policies and
procedures in place.
So why target us? This question becomes more pertinent when you consider that
such clandestine and unrestrained activities could have serious repercussions
for a charity like ours. Our medical professionals, many of whom are
volunteers, risk their lives daily in countries such as the Central African
Republic and in and around Syria. Any erosion of understanding and trust in our
impartiality and confidentiality not only limits our ability to work but could
put the lives of our staff and volunteers at risk.
And this is the crucial point: we’re able to reach patients
in need in sensitive locations because communities understand we are a neutral
intermediary. If local people think we are in league with the UK or US
government – or even that their information will end up in the hands of these
governments unwittingly – it could risk the whole credibility of our operations
in these countries. Alongside this is the huge issue of doctor-patient
confidentiality. If medical surgeries are being listened in on this would be an
egregious impingement on medical ethics.
We sent a letter to the head of GCHQ, Sir Iain Lobban,
asking him to clarify what information his agency held about us and explain why
this information is held and what it has been or may be used for. This was
the rather terse reply:
“The Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the Act) does not
apply to GCHQ by virtue of s.84, which provides that GCHQ is not a government
department for the purposes of the Act. This means that GCHQ is excluded from
the list of public authorities listed in Schedule 1 and to which the Act does
apply. As such we are not obliged to comply with the provisions and
requirements of the Act and we cannot assist you further.”
So it seems that GCHQ does not need to explain itself. We
assume these revelations have caused the security services to no longer target
our operations but without people like Edward Snowden we have no real way of
knowing if they still are - or how we would be able to stop them if they were.
The recent
victory in the courts by Privacy International shows that GCHQ and the
NSA can be held to account and that it’s the responsibility of us all to
challenge any such overreach by security services when we are made aware of it,
if not through the legal system then by raising awareness via the media as the
Guardian and others did so well.
But as for the charity I work for, we’d rather be
concentrating on helping people who need us, wherever they may be. Much like
mass surveillance, suffering and vulnerability is omnipresent and not going
away any time soon.
