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Message: <blockquote data-quote="scolairebocht" data-source="post: 147542" data-attributes="member: 8">On 5 December, 1974, The Times correspondent, Robert Fisk noted that this system was ‘the most advanced to be adopted by the security forces in Northern Europe’. Experiments had already been carried on in Britain for a short time: without being aware of it ordinary people had their car registrations noted and recorded on computers.A civilian expert on counter-insurgency and an associate member of the Institute for the Study of Conflict, Professor Paul Wilkinson, recalled that “a vast amount of intelligence gathered by means of “P-Tests”, “random personal details” by late 1974 on 40% of the population was stored in the centralized master intelligence computer at Lisburn Army Headquarters”. This information was supplemented by ‘head-checks’ conducted to scrutinize all occupants of a house; and extensive open and covert photographic surveillance as well as random house searches...In April 1977, Gerry Fitt, MP and leader of the SDLP...reinforced the point of his objection to the computer manned by the army at Thiepval Barracks, in concluding: ‘It’s like something you’d find in the Soviet Union or South Africa – Big Brother is watching.’...The new element in this intelligence network, and a danger to all civil liberties, lay in the fact that the data recorded and used was no longer concerned only with ‘known terrorists’ or ‘suspects’, but a third category: ‘potential terrorists’. Considering the conception which prevailed over the counterinsurgency strategy, this category could include the whole nationalist community.In common with the official recognition of the introduction of the SAS, the computer used in the war against Irish Republicans was utilized long before it was officially acknowledged. Nevertheless, only after the 1975 Truce, with the new Ulsterization phase, did computer techniques take on their full importance. In Thiepval Barracks at Lisburn, half a million files were on record, that is, around one third of the total number of the Northern Irish population or the equivalent of the total number of adults in the nationalist community, plus sections of the extremist Loyalist groups. The computer system was linked to the Operations Rooms of the divisional head quarters of the three Army Brigades active in the North (8th Brigade in Derry, 3rd Brigade in Lurgan, and 39th Brigade in Lisburn) and to control sections of each battalion, known as Forward Operational Control (FOC). Each battalion had access to VDUs (visual display units) equipped with transmitters and receivers, which allowed them to send and receive information without risk of Republican interference, as in the past. Each Company or sub-unit HQ could thus request and receive all necessary operational information from the central computer by radio from Intelligence clerks in charge of each battalion’s Forward Operational Control. Exactly as Kitson had suggested.‘Big Brother’s’ 500,000 files were separated into four distinct, though interconnected sections: Firstly, the P-Section: referring to all personal details, age, address, physical description, special characteristics, routine, places usually frequented, details of all recorded moves (e.g. place and time of passing through a mobile or static check-point), and all additional information and cross-references to family, parents and friends.The second section was patterned directly on the filing system inaugurated by Colonel Trinquier in Algeria. His screening method, in the framework of the ‘Urban Protection Scheme’, simply modernized by way of electronics and replaced the index-card files. This entailed filing street names, from street directories, electoral lists and phone books, and observation by patrols on the ground. The name and occupation of the subject are noted, as well as the reference code concerning all inhabitants supposed to live under the same roof, as well as details of alleged or expressed political opinions. A door-to-door census was set up by soldiers who endeavoured to note everything, including the family dog’s name. Frequent searches allow an up-dating of information. There is a special distinctive coded note for each house, giving the colour of the paint on the door, or even wall-paper in a key room.The third section is a vehicles index. Prior to this integrated system, this was the only computerized filing system manned by the RUC. Today, the police, in turn, have access to Army data. The colour and registration number, are noted, as well as a coded reference to the way this car must be treated when passing through a check-point. All cars are involved here; even the religion of the owner is noted. The Army explained that it was important to be able to locate a car which may be a stranger to an area, and could be booby-trapped. This index is, of course, linked with the P-section data, thus enabling the car owner’s name to be instantly traced.The fourth section is complementary to the vehicle index. This is the VCP, Vehicle Check-point Index, giving the times and places of cars checked by RUC or Army Patrol, in mobile or static check-points, where cars are stopped at random. The registration is recorded and checked against the VCP index. This provides valuable information: it allows for the reassembling of the whole pattern of a vehicle’s movements, actual journeys and a profile of potential activities. Thus, permutations of the four sections can be made to exploit intelligence according to the operational need.In addition to the Lisburn military computer system, all information netted by Social Services, beginning with the Northern Ireland Health Service, is added to the Army data. At the end of 1978, social workers received precise directives on the way to fill-in Personal Data Forms for each person dealing with the Social Services. This file included date of birth, sex, marital status, profession or unemployed situation, with a reference number, as well as a geocode of seven numbers which enabled the computer to locate any address within the vicinity of half-a-dozen houses in a street. This was exactly what Colonel Trinquier had organized in Algeria, except that he had no help from computers.In 1978, John McGuffin who was the first to publish an article, ‘Big Brother Is Here Too’, referring to this filing system, noted that superficially, all this resembled what Kitson called ‘low quality intelligence’, but, when connected to other information sources, a very comprehensive profile emerged on any given person within the State.The link-up between the Health Department and other Social Services, had been envisaged in a memo written by Sir Roland Moyle, Minister of State in Northern Ireland (1974-76) then Minister of State for the Health Service until 1979. This memo dealt with the development of Personal Health and Social Services in Northern Ireland, and in paragraph No.58, entitled ‘Research and Intelligence’, stressed that his department had established a research and intelligence unit led, in 1978, by Dr R. Walby, whose ultimate aim was to equip itself with a computer to satisfy all those workers within the services, ‘and many outside’ ‘all those who need access to the same data banks’. It was to be geared towards offering computerized data banks with up-to-date files on ‘health and all vital events of the population’; although restricted and confidential, this information would be accessible to all ‘authorized users’.Obviously then the army and the police benefited from medical evidence and related information. To take but one instance: in November 1977, during the course of a raid against the Short Strand area of Belfast, a dozen young Nationalist women were arrested. The RUC Special Branch was able to make use of the information they had acquired about a miscarriage one of the women had suffered six months earlier, in a manner that brought her close to a nervous breakdown, and finally pressurized her into signing a confession in which she said she had belonged to Cumann na mBan, the IRA’s women’s wing and had taken part in military operations against the British Army. ...The British public remained incredulous and insensitive to the computer octopus embracing Northern Ireland, failing to reflect that its expansion would inevitably lead it to British soil.”(4)</blockquote>

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