UK Intelligence Services and Police using CHILD SPIES!

The UK Home office wants more powers to be able to use children in covert spying operations against terrorists, gangs and drug dealers.

A committee of the House of Lords exposed the practice while signalling the alarm over government plans to give law enforcement agencies more freedom over their use of children.

Some of the child spies are aged under 18 while some are younger, under the age of 16, the committee says, adding that it was worried about proposals to extend from one month to four the period of time between each occasion that child spies go through a re-registration process.

The committee, chaired by Lord Trefgarne, a former Tory government minister said: “We are concerned that enabling a young person to participate in covert activity associated with serious crime for an extended period of time may increase the risks to their mental and physical welfare,”

In a report published last Thursday The House of Lords secondary legislation scrutiny committee raised concerns over the orders.

Home Office correspondence with the committee, published and documented in the report, suggests that British Intelligence services and Police are getting vast amounts of information from these children and also using them in covert spying operations, assigned to collect information on behalf of the agencies.

The intention behind the change was to remove the obligation for the agency to apply to renew their authorisation “within a very short time” in circumstances including where “the juvenile has not been able to complete the tasking within the initial one-month period”.

The department also stated: “This pressure to obtain results could be unhelpful to the juvenile CHIS [covert human intelligence sources] and also to the law enforcement agency … In some circumstances, this requirement can also act as a deterrent with law enforcement avoiding the use of juvenile CHIS[.]”

Regarding safeguards, the Home Office proposes that authorisation be reviewed monthly by a senior official to ensure the welfare and safety of the child, and to ensure the deployment remains “necessary and proportionate”.

Neil Woods, a former undercover police officer said: “It sounds like infiltration to me, direction and infiltration,” he said. “It’s basically a kid that has been caught the first time, and instead of rescuing them they are sending them back in.

It’s going to rack up the violence because as soon as gangsters think that there are more spies in their ranks then the classic arms race reaction is to increase the amount of terror, to make sure that those people are more scared of the gangsters than they are of the ramifications of the police.”