‘I was enraged by the subterfuge and potential blackmail they wanted us to do,’ says former GCHQ employee

A public interest defence should be introduced into the Official Secrets Act to protect whistleblowers and prevent governments from hiding politically embarrassing information, a former GCHQ employee has urged.

Katherine Gun, a former translator for the monitoring agency who leaked details of an operation to bug United Nations offices before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, called for reform of the law following revelations by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Gun was speaking at a conference in London on Friday alongside former employees from the National Security Agency (NSA), FBI and US state department who exposed what they believed was wrong-doing in the US government’s war against terror.

“The Official Secrets Act is one of the most draconian acts,” Gun said. “Both the Blair government and the Obama government have talked about protection for whistleblowers but there has been no agreement.

“We have never seen an attempt to reform the Official Secrets Act and put in a public defence interest. That’s crucial and necessary for whistleblowers to provide a defence on a case by case basis.”

The prosecution against her was dropped, Gun said, because she was planning to argue that what she did was out of necessity and to seek sensitive documents. “It’s important to have a public defence interest as a caveat against the law,” she added.

Referring to the request in 2003 from the NSA to bug the offices of countries on the UN security council before the vote on invading Iraq, Gun said: “I was enraged by the subterfuge and potential blackmail they wanted us to carry out. I went public and it was published in the Observer.”

The conference was organised by ExposeFacts, a newly-founded US campaign aimed at providing better protection for whistleblowers and to protect journalism from surveillance.

Coleen Rowley, a former FBI lawyer who exposed many of the agency’s intelligence failures before the 9/11 attacks in the US, said the lessons learnt afterwards stressed the atrocity might have been stopped if intelligence had been shared between agencies.

“Foremost [among the problems] was the failure to share information with the public,” she said. “We are told that national secrecy is protecting us. It’s precisely the opposite. If we had shared information we could have prevented 9/11.”

Norman Solomon, of ExposeFacts, said: “It’s the official position of the Obama administration that whistleblowing is likely to be worse than [intelligence penetration] by a foreign power. This is a war on journalism and a war on whistleblowing.”

Kirk Wiebe, a whistleblower who worked at the NSA for 36 years, said that when he started working with the agency it ensured that information on “innocent people” that had been intercepted was deleted after 30 days.

“Now the mass surveillance is going on is looking at everything all the time,” he said. “It’s the most insidious threat to global democracy. No nation has been able to do this before.

“They want to stick it in a database so that if they think you were doing something suspicious they can go back and look at it. It’s a dark cloud hanging over each of us.”

A Cabinet Office spokesman said: “The UK firmly supports the right to freedom of expression. We take great care to balance individual rights with our duty to safeguard the public and the UK’s national security.

“If sensitive information about the work of UK authorities to maintain national security is made publicly available or provided to those without authorised access, it could help terrorists to threaten British citizens or impede the efforts of the police and intelligence agencies to keep us safe, and ultimately threaten lives. This is about ensuring that, day in day out, they can do their job of protecting our country and our people.”