UK Police Accused of Using Hackers to Access Emails

It became known that British watchdog is investigating allegations that a secretive Scotland Yard unit may have used hackers to access the private emails of hundreds of protesters. The information was received from an anonymous individual who revealed that the unit cooperated with Indian police. The latter used hackers to break into email accounts of the political campaigners and journalists.



The individual specified that he or she used to work for the intelligence unit engaged in monitoring the activities of political campaigners. His or her concerns were described in a letter to the Green party peer, who passed on the allegations to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC). It is alleged that the hacked passwords were passed to the Metropolitan police unit to regularly check the emails of the campaigners to collect information. Some of the campaigners confirmed that the provided passwords matched the real ones. This proved to be enough to justify a full-scale criminal investigation into the activities of the Metropolitan police.

Besides, the IPCC has been investigating claims that the British extremism and disorder intelligence unit shredded a large number of documents in May 2014 and found out that the documents had been destroyed despite a specific instruction to preserve them for examination by a judge-led public inquiry into the undercover policing of political groups. The same letter from an anonymous individual claims that the shredding has been happening on a far greater scale and was meant to conceal the fact that the police officers were engaged in illegal activities to obtain intelligence on protesters.