and/or legal case on collusion and mistreatment was accepted or
rejected. Such a total denial offends justice and propriety.”
10. In this case to withhold the name of the telecommunications operator does not offend
justice, for that identity forms no part of either party’s case and is not relevant to any
issue which the Tribunal has to decide. Rule 6 (1) delineates the boundaries of
information which may be disclosed. It is a fair point that, viewed in isolation,
disclosure of the correspondence with one operator which took place in 1998 and
2002 may not in itself directly damage the interests of national security, but it would
violate the principle under which the telecommunications operators are required to
operate under s. 94 and thus damage confidence in the secrecy of the system.
Disclosure of the identity of one operator would lead to argument that the identity of
others should then be revealed. The answer to any question whether a
telecommunications operator had been made subject to a direction under s. 94 could
only be neither to confirm nor deny.
11. For these reasons the Tribunal dismisses the application made by the Claimant for a
direction that the relevant correspondence in GCHQ/13 should not be redacted. The
relevant correspondence should be excluded from GCHQ/13 and, in its place,
redacted copies of the correspondence should be substituted which effectively ensure
that the identity of the telecommunications operator is not disclosed.
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