I would like to make you all aware that the UKBA is trawling our web sites in order to frustrate some of our attempts to help asylum seekers.
I recently received a letter from Damian Green, Minister for Immigration, through my MP, Keith Vaz. I am a member of the group that ran the Leicester City of Sanctuary voucher exchange scheme. Like other similar groups, we can no longer exchange supermarket gift cards for asylum seekers because of the recent UKBA directive that forbids supermarkets to sell them to Azure card holders. We wanted to explain to Damian Green some of the hardships that enforced cashlessness brings, to justify our scheme and to ask him to overturn UKBAs restriction on the use of Azure cards. We were not hopeful of success but felt we had to try.
The response we received was a typical politician’s reply, it told us nothing that we did not already know and did not address any of the issues we had raised. What WAS interesting, however, was the explicit statement that UKBA had learnt about voucher exchange schemes through information they had found on the web, notably about Sheffield’s ASSIST scheme and projects run by Cities of Sanctuary.
I feel this is a warning and that we should be careful about any information we put in the public domain that would enable the UKBA to think up yet more ways of making life difficult for asylum seekers. It is, I know, difficult to balance the desire to share examples of good (and perfectly legal) practice with the desire not to give UKBA any additional ammunition. I should be interested in your comments.
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Trawling of sites
On a befriending visit to Yarl’s Wood a few years ago I got into conversation with one of the security officers. This was ‘just’ one of the day to day security people, not UKBA. He actually told me the accurate email addresses of three accounts that I had set up. BEWARE, even very little people, like me, are being spied on.
John
Secrecy and openness
This is a difficult one, as the natural response to learning something like this is to want to safeguard useful work by keeping it more hidden, to prevent the government from undermining it.
The potential danger of this is that by avoiding attention, it might be easier to carry on some useful projects, but at the expense of helping to create the broad public conversation that needs to happen for a shift in cultural attitudes towards people seeking sanctuary.
Personally, I’d rather be as public and open as possible about our work (while safeguarding individuals’ privacy of course). If government agencies use that openness against us we need to challenge them publicly to justify their actions rather than allowing them to drive us into a corner.
I’ve also seen how a desire for secrecy has affected some activists in the peace movement for example, who became fearful of ‘infiltration’ and distrustful of newcomers – which obviously has a very destructive effect on groups. I know this is not what you are suggesting, but is a direction best avoided in my vew.