Cayman Islands gets its own electronic surveillance revelation
By Caribbean News Now contributor
Hard on the heels of a recent disclosure by the US National Security Agency in a secret briefing that security analysts can listen to domestic phone calls and also look at email and text messages, local media in the Cayman Islands has reported that British Metropolitan Police officers obtained and reviewed the content of thousands of email messages from both government and private accounts during the course of an ill-fated corruption investigation in the territory.
According to the Caymanian Compass, hundreds of local telephone numbers, including phone numbers used for texting, were also obtained from both government sources and private individuals during the investigation. The content of the conversations in those phone calls and texts was reportedly not reviewed by officers.
However, the contents of the emails were examined after court orders or permission from relevant government agencies cooperating with the investigation were given, according to retired UK police investigator John Kemp. A court order from the UK was obtained for investigators who sought emails from a Yahoo account, he said.
Kemp said the emails he reviewed concerned only those individuals immediately involved in the initial investigation, which dealt with the legality of a September 2007 break in at the offices of a local newspaper, Cayman Net News, by two of its employees in search of what was portrayed as evidence of collusion between the then deputy commissioner of police and the newspaper’s publisher to supply confidential information about sensitive police operations.
The Scotland Yard detectives quickly concluded that no such leak existed.
“It was less than a dozen people [whose emails were reviewed],” Kemp said, adding that all relevant local laws were followed in obtaining email messages. However, he also pointed out that one single email account could contain hundreds or even thousands of communications that would have also been reviewed to determine their relevance, if any, in the police investigation.
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See also iNews Cayman Editorial published June 23 2013 “The Editor Speaks: John Kemp on Tempura” at: http://www.ieyenews.com/2013/06/the-editor-speaks-john-kemp-on-tempura/
