Environmental campaigners in Scotland have been spied on for years by private surveillance contractors. Many of them have been trained by former military staff, who are given a free hand to operate outside the law. They are collecting higly sensitive personal data in ways that would land a legitimate operator in jail very rapidly.
Farmed salmon is Scotland’s most lucrative food sector: it does not occupy such a widely coveted position without being controversial. Early fish farms in Norwegian fjords were used as a model for similar developments in Scotland. However, Norway’s deeper fjords have stronger currents that prevent uneaten food from accumulating beneath the caged fish. The Scottish experience, on the other hand, has seen abject failures, leading to financial crises in the sector.
Rather than lose face, salmon farming investors hired the surveillance skills of an Afghanistan veteran. The ex-soldier targeted former fly fishing guide Corin Smith and another campaigner, Don Stanford after the pair filmed appalling conditions of young farmed salmon. They were crawling with jellyfish larvae, called sea lice. These parasites affect both wild and farmed salmon alike: in the later chronic stages, the skins of the infested fish become red and blotchy, making them unsaleable for many end uses. A reliable way of shifting sea lice infested fish is to turn it into smoked salmon and look the other way when the bins go out. Instead of resolving the technical issues which dogged the irretrievably blighted fish farms, the investors paid huge sums of money over many years for surveillance operatives to dig out any personal information on the environmentalists, who were campaigning in the public interest. It is ironic that Scotland’s biggest food export earner should have a skeleton like that in its cupboard.
