06 March 2021
The Guardian, 6 March 2021.
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"For an agency devoted to secrecy and surveillance, it is an embarrassing slip-up. An inadvertent disclosure on a university document has revealed that MI5 is partly behind what was meant to be a covert bug and drone research project.
Ostensibly, Imperial College’s research was to create a quadcopter system for charging remote agricultural sensors – but MI5’s participation has emerged because somebody involved stated it was the secret second funder of the programme.
Paperwork produced by Imperial initially cited the apparently obscure Government Communications Planning Directorate (GCPD) as a backer – a moniker used in Whitehall as a codename for MI5.
(...)
The researcher’s work was published last September in a peer-reviewed, open-access paper, IEEE Access. It begins by noting: “Remote monitoring under challenging conditions continues to present problems to prospective practitioners.”
What is not clear is whether MI5 has taken any of the development work forward by adding bespoke capabilities in-house. Imperial College said that “this project with agricultural applications is published and open to anyone” and that “none of our research is classified”.
Britain’s spy agencies often use codenames on public documents to conceal the involvement of their work. MI6 uses the cover name Government Communications Bureau, once revealed on an energy efficiency certificate for its distinctive headquarters in Vauxhall, south London. That too had been published in error."
Source: The Guardian, 6 March 2021
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