At TruePublica our raison d’être has always been to raise awareness of misinformation, disinformation, fake news and propaganda. However, as the website became more successful and garnered a greater readership, we started reporting on government surveillance and all manner of abuses of public office. Today, secretive government spying units have been exposed and this is the shocking story so far.

We started teaming up with news partners over the years and one of them was Big Brother Watch, a UK civil liberties campaign group determined to reclaim our privacy and defend freedoms at a time of enormous technological change. Over time, Big Brother Watch published the results of its investigations, which found our own government at the heart of state surveillance systems that took the view we are all guilty of something and therefore, we all needed surveilling.

There are many cases where the government has lost court cases on this subject.

Since then, things have only got worse. It now appears that, according to Big Brother Watch secretive government units have been monitoring or spying on government critics’ speech online – including MPs, academics, journalists, human rights campaigners and the public – under the guise of combatting ‘disinformation’.

Here is the result of their investigation into what they view as nothing more than spying units dedicated to silencing critical voices of the government.

The secretive government units spying on your speech

Disinformation is a real problem – but it’s also a term at risk of political exploitation by governments. In a democracy, politicians, the press and the public should all be free to scrutinise and criticise the government – without their speech being logged in government reports, wrongly smeared as ‘misinformation’, or suppressed or censored online.

Here are just some of the extracts from that report.

• Green Party MP Caroline Lucas was included in an “Election Disinformation Report” for calling former Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, a liar.

• Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, high profile academics from the University of Oxford and University College London, and journalists including Peter Hitchens and even Julia Hartley-Brewer, all had comments critical of the government analysed by anti-misinformation units.

• Targeted speech included public criticism of the government’s pandemic response – particularly lockdown modelling and vaccine passports – as well as journalists’ criticism of the withdrawal from Afghanistan and MPs’ criticism of NATO.

• Soldiers from the Army’s 77th Brigade, tasked with “non-lethal psychological warfare”, collected tweets from British citizens posting about Covid-19 and passed them to central government – despite claiming operations were directed strictly overseas.