Gordon Rayner and Duncan Gardham report in the Telegraph.co.uk that UK intelligence agencies are complaining that their officers are being diverted from intelligence work to prepare for lawsuits alleging human rights violations.  One’s view of this may depend on attitudes towards the alleged violations – and an assessment of the specific claims being litigated.

If one has no reservations about Anglo-American treatment of prisoners, it follows that that one might think “highly-trained officers are having to carry out clerical work instead of investigating possible terrorist plots.”

If one assumes that, in fact, the system has, in some cases, gone off the rails, and that it’s possible some of the plaintiffs have real claims, then “clerical work” seems more like part of the necessary tedium which accompanies litigation – and accountability.

At least one British judge believes that the intelligence services haven’t been sufficiently forthright:

one of the judges in the case, Lord Neuberger, removed from the ruling comments that suggested there was a “culture of suppression” within MI5 – a claim which was strongly denied by [Jonathan] Evans [Director General of MI5].

Intelligence officers diverted to deal with legal action from former detainees – Telegraph.

Rayner and Gardham report that intelligence officers

Intelligence officers have already had to scrutinise more than 250,000 documents identified as potentially relevant to the case involving Mr Mohamed and his co-claimants.

Mr Evans has been at pains to stress that MI5 is entirely happy to assist the courts in any way it can. But the amount of man hours having to be diverted to the damages cases is regarded as regrettable by many in Whitehall.

If we examine this more closely, it’s not entirely clear how big a burden this is. We don’t know

(1) how many pages an average document is,

(2) how much duplication is in the dataset

(3) the definition of “intelligence officer” – does this refer to officers who are defendants in the case, who are reviewing the documents in order to prepare their own defenses? Or are they officers or analysts with the appropriate clearances reviewing them in order to determine which can be turned over without risk, which are relevant to the governing discovery orders, which of them – relevance aside – risk exposing sources and methods?

(4) If 250,000 have been reviewed, how many more need to be reviewed? This may be the most important question. If there are only, say, 500,000 unique documents, it’s hard to think that one of the best intelligence services in the world can’t evaluate 500K documents already in their files (that is, not new, raw intelligence which needs the highest level of scrutiny and cross-checking).

We’re unlikely to learn any time soon what sort of electronic discovery system MI5 is using to prepare for this litigation. The similarities between the intelligence process and the investigation/discovery process in litigation suggest that MI5 may have been able to use existing systems in this case; if their existing system isn’t flexible enough, we’d find it disturbing. And we’d like to know which litigation software system they selected.

Intelligence officers diverted to deal with legal action from former detainees – Telegraph.

Cross-posted at Popular Logistics.