Operation Tempura
I was an investigation officer involved in the Tempura fiasco, having been a Central London Police officer for 30 years. I also lived and worked for two years in Kosovo as part of the UN International Peacekeeping Police Force, so consequently have some experience of policing and legal processes, albeit at the coal-face end. However, in a career of 40 years of policing, this is the only occasion I have ever publicly vented my frustrations through a national newspaper.
Regarding the recent CNS article, No decisions re Tempura, about the knowledge that former governor Stuart Jack, the FCO’s overseas territories security advisor, Larry Covington, and Attorney General Bulgin are alleged to have had on the entry to Cayman Net News, I make the following observations.
In the case of the Cayman investigation, for me, it involved the retrieval and examination of records of thousands of emails, texts and phone calls and also the examination of numerous hard drives. This historical work is massively time consuming but nonetheless has on many occasions proved fruitful in securing convictions. To find out now that all of this work may have been pointless is just staggering and such a waste of resources and public funds. This new information would also mean that I was also involved in the unnecessary arrest of a high court judge, a former politician and the suspension of senior police officers, which could have all been avoided. Isn’t there enough serious crime to be investigated without being sent on a fool’s errand?
Your recent article refers to a complicated issue. With respect, it is not. Let’s have the truth and keep it simple. Why all the court battles in an effort to suppress information coming out? Why hide the truth? The issue has only been made complicated for the general public because of the lack of information. Why is the governor using the lawyers to make decisions on what should and should not be investigated? Where could that particular dangerous road lead to?
Category: Viewpoint
Got to say this is about the dumbest comment I've ever seen. Is this guy Kemp really admitting that he engaged in a systematic, and probably illegal, interception of people's personal communications? And what's this from John Evans about him shredding computer discs during the investigation? There's something very screwy going on here.
Needlecase, great statement. Regarding "crime" issue on this island, I recallalong with Ezzard Miller many MLA members spearheaded the CCTV idea. For once both parties came together to address the crime issue here, all to now find we still have the crime issue but losing our freedom in the process. We will soon become sick of too much security in Cayman and it will be too late. I don't understand them… risk is healthy, both mentally and physically. We don't need to have camaras all over the place to keep us safe. They are not going to stop crime. We live everyday with taking risk. This applies to our health, our children, people we meet. It is impossible to be immune from every kind of germ that there is, and it is just like crime. A philosopher said, the greatest risk is not to risk at all! But I guess we are so much into fearing crime that we prefer to lose our privacies in the process. This is sad. EZZARD, ARDEN, MLA MEMBERS : PLEASE OVERTURN ALL LAWS THAT HAVE NO OVERSIGHT, SNOOPS, AND INVADES THE PRIVACY OF INDIVIDUALS ! THIS IS YOUR COUNTRY ! THINK OF IT – THE SAME WAY YOU MLA MEMBERS USE INFORMATION TO CATCH CRIMINALS, IS THE SAME WAY INFORMATION CAN BE USED AGAINST YOU TO FRAME YOU. THINK !
Love your style Needlcase you seem to know what is going on, some wearing their colonial bifocals and in love with the crown jewels will never get it. Yes it was an experiment or dry run for global domination the recolonization of our freedoms and the internet itself. Those wrapped up in this like Mr Bridger probably never knew the bigger picture,Those enormous dumps of information that made the news on offshore Tax havens were actually bi products of this program( Tempora) and were actually converted into a strategy to force tax havens to the G8 dinner table as appetizers. Well instead of our Political strategist and experts at finance who rush off to London to repair the "Damage" as they put asking the right questions instead of begging for an Overdraft to spend more money. You know they must have a real laugh when these guys show up and leave these meetings because they simply don't have a clue of what is going on. Yet we have people here who know their S#@%* but because of political lines drawn in the sand some choose to hold up in there little cliques of ignorance hoping it will all disappear from their little horizon. Meanwhile those who are responsible make a clean get away with bags of money and their new diplomatic postings. The new boss know nothing about previous deeds which then get locked away in secrecy . BAM! Hall & Oats Starting all over again gonna be rough"
Sign Dexter Lab
It isn't complicated – greed, grudges and ego are to blame for the fiasco called Operation Tempura but you'll never get them in the dock.
Two employees with grudges against Desmond Seales and access to his office agreed to search (as a proxy for the police) for evidence that a) Seale's was receiving privileged information from a serving police officer and b) said police officer was passing information to a jailed criminal mastermind. Or what passes for a mastermind on Cayman.
With no hard evidence against him Seale's turned the tables on his accusers and spoke of illegal entry and conspiracy.
Instead of handing out a few bollockings and leaving it there, where it should have lain with all the other tittle-tattle, boasting and back-biting of a small community someone talked the Governor into having a big full blown police corruption enquiry.
That someone had to be Bridger IMHO: expensive (and inconclusive) police corruption investigations were his UK stock-in-trade.
Bridger's standard approach was 'Squeal or No Deal' – rat out the others and we won't prosecute you. In Cayman that was like quenching a fire by throwing on more logs. I bet they were queuing round the block to work off old grudges.
XXXX
IMHO Bridger was on auto-pilot and, except in regard of opportunities for making easy money, failed to take account of the fact Cayman is, as they warn you, DIFFERENT.
He is now paying the price professionally because he instigated the ludicrous and expensive legal circus that was Tempura, with many clowns but few laughs.
He had his chance – in my opinon he created the chance – and he blew it.
Compensate Burman and let's move on.
Good comment except for the suggestion that I had any sort of grudge against Desmond.
In fact it was my part in the investigation that undermined the allegations against him and we continued to work well together (ironically, I was still his crime reporter and investigative reporter) until my work permit expired in mid-April 2008. It was only after I left that the acrimonious and libelous material started appearing in Net News and that was prompted by what Mr Seales (and I can understand his viewpoint) regarded as an act of disloyalty when I left his employment but stayed on Grand Cayman for over three months at Martin Bridger's request. I was only allowed to stay on while technically unemployed because of my supposed status as a 'required witness' but in truth Martin Bridger was just keeping me around because Tempura was skating on such thin ice he feared that if I went back to the UK they wouldn't seeme again.
Following standard police protocols, Operation Tempura should have been wound up in either December 2007 or January 2008 when it was clear all the complaints were unfounded. With due respect to Lyndon Martin, we’d already dismissed most of his allegations as completely unsubstantiated in November 2007 but by then other forces were at work. Bridger, Stuart Kernohan, John Yates or whoever felt they were in overall charge of the investigation should have simply interviewed those involved and said something along the lines of, " You got it wrong, nothing happened and this is now closed," but it never happened. Instead what we saw was the circus coming to town.
The bottom line is that with retirement only a few months away someone was offered CI$747 a day plus to prolong a job indefinitely and they grabbed it with both hands. Would I have turned it down? The answer to that involves bears, bodily functions and woods. As you say – GREED!
Beware of friends who say they are doing something 'for your own good'.
Bearing in mind what's happening in the UK right now the odds are that anyone who can prove that their emails, texts, phone calls and hard drives were subject to what looks like illegal searches will be queuing up with their hands held out for compensation. I think Mr Kemp has just opened up another expensive can of worms here. Remember he worked as an employee of CIG answering to the then head of the Portfolio for Internal & External Affairs – not as an employee of the FCO or the Met – so the tab for this will again have to be picked up by the people of the Cayman Islands.
Hmmm, $590 per day? Or $73.75 per hour. For that sort of money, S McF, A A, or any of our "top advocates" would not even consider taking your call. Paying someone competent who trawls through the dirt to find any gold (or confirm the lack of gold) a quarter (?) of what others charge to argue that "black is only a slightly darker shade of white, or that gray is actually completely monochrome" does not seem that excessive.
How cna you compare a policeman with a "top advocate"? lol.
Who cares about this story! The real story is the NSA's PRISM espionage software that reads directly from Facebook's servers, tracking your every movement on your iOS device, all day long, for the rest of your life. As far as I know so many Caymanians communicate and post alot of private stuff on facebook. It is out of control, and of course the government snoopers have used it to their advantage.
One man bold nough to speak the truth . Give him an OBE before he gets a black eye
Well well Mr Kemp i do say Nsa Leaker Mr Snow has put a whole new light on this "TempOra"situation i suggest some of you DODo Brain Caymanians please read his dislosure careful and get a grip Still believe mother looking after us eh still we have some of our illustrious politicians running around signing away erryting we have left. Now the truth has snared or trapped quite a few? It is clear an investigation is now need into this nasty little situation even if it is a white wash Cayman needs at least and explanation for our 10 million contribution is worth that much or shall we sit in our benevolence and blissfulness of mother know best. I hope you can explain that to our children after this place goes down beneath the waves of our blue Caribbean Sea. i wonder where this secret HQ is that they keep bring up or eluding to ??????????????
The culture of secrecy extends beyond the family unit in Cayman and is firmly entrenched in Government and the FCO.
The "paper eating monster" ate the evidence?
Tempura was a brave and important start to challenging the corruption which has infected every level of Cayman's piblic life. It should be seen as a great moment in history.
Mr. Kemp, although you may feel that your article is straight-forward, it somewhat skirts the issue(s). What exactly is your criticism? Is it that: (a) the Governor is unwilling to release information that would shed light on the whole affair (b) the whole affair ought never to have taken place I believe that (a) is the answer, but again, it's a bit confusing.
At a salary of $590 per day + expenses, its easy to see why so many emails, text messages, hard drives, mosquito traps, bird droppings etc. would have to be examined.
A British spy agency taps the network of cables that carry the world’s internet and telephone communications to secretly collect vast streams of private information, documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden has revealed.
The GCHQ agency scoops as much as it can from Facebook posts, email messages, internet histories and calls while tapping into the global fibre-optic network with little legal oversight, according to a report from the Guardian newspaper.
The activities are detailed in two documents leaked to the newspaper by Snowden, the former NSA and CIA worker who revealed America was spying on millions of foreigners and US nationals without their knowledge under the Prism scheme. The GCHQ scheme is billed as wider-ranging than Prism, with less legal oversight.
Snowden provided the Guardian with two GCHQ documents, titled Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation, which detail howan operation codenamed “Tempora” has for 18 months gathered, stored and analysed vast amounts of data, while also passing information to its US counterpart, the National Security Agency.
"It's not just a US problem,” Snowden told the newspaper. “The UK has a huge dog in this fight. They are worse than the US."
Intelligence superpower
The Guardian says the programme has turned the UK into an "intelligence superpower"…
SOURCE: http://www.aljazeera.com
Interesting how the operations have the same name, or is it the same. Last year we passed a legislation giving the governor and commissioner of police powers to tap people's phones on the island. But … have they been doing this all along? How much have they stored? Who is Cayman have they targetted? We have to ask these questions with the new shocking revelations from Edward Snowden. 🙂
Yes, even worse is that Scooby Doo and his bunch of friends are scrolling through emails, text messages and these blogs trying to identify who is saying what. Now that the Premier has taken over so many of the former Internal and External Affairs responsibilities the idle minds are probably now working overtime, "catching gapseeds". I hope they take time and read the low opinion that the general public has of them.
Ah yes, Brains @ 16:28, your sources are the Guardian and Aljazeera. So we know there is no arguing with your impeccable sources. Christ! Or Allah! (if you prefer it).
Couldn't agree with you more!!
John, you say – "In the case of the Cayman investigation, for me, it involved the retrieval and examination of records of thousands of emails, texts and phone calls and also the examination of numerous hard drives. This historical work is massively time consuming but nonetheless has on many occasions proved fruitful in securing convictions. To find out now that all of this work may have been pointless is just staggering and such a waste of resources and public funds…"
But John, this work or operation has not been pointless.
Since we have this uproar from the U.S. on drones and NSA leaks, the UK I suspect, will want to keep its OTs under social control. Like I said before, anyone who believes Cayman is a free democracy is smoking pot.
And just like they use the TERRORIST word as a front to spy on civilians in the U.S., here, they use CRIME. Not only are they hooking local officers up on lie-detection machines and flying hilocopters over our homes, they are installing over 200 to 300 CCTV camaras islandwide, and as peaceful as Cayman is, saying it will help reduce a country sickened with crime, as if we are the worse island to live on.
I wont be surprise one bit if they have intercepted enough phone conversations here already. All you need is to show them money and the phone companies will expose our privacy for the bait. If its happening in the US and UK, what make you think that we are not good for being tested on like gunea pigs.
Look at today's CayCompass. I must question just who is spying on who? "More CCTV Camaras Inside 911 Center"
lol… guinea pigs! you still caught up with the release of research mosquitoes nah true?! conspiracy theorist eh? for your information snowden is a traitor and if you think that national security or crime is nothing to be monitor, then you should be in another country not here.
So let the smearing of Snowden begin, the natural course of events when one wants to discredit a leak or source. But its really not about Snowden. Nor is it about conspiracy theories or any trivial fact the government or media apparatus would have us believe. The real issue is our freedom / privacy we give up for national security.
Its about the GCHQ, a UK global iniative which has collected vasted amount of data from our emails, facebook, and phone conversations. Just what created it, what it does and how, and what to do about it. How does it stems in the Cayman islands, are we being used by certain uk elites, and do we have politicians who are not sold out to them. Snowden was just a messenger, he's not a traitor, he's a human being. Don't shoot him or be so naive because he speaks truth which applies to the us.
My greatest fear is our MLAs complacency about our rights and privacy? Are they going to sit down and allow Cayman to become a police state where everybody is spying on everybody?
And the truth shall set you free
Why have they wasted so much time and money? Cayman deserves to know the truth after spending millions of tax payers funds.
Thank You Mr. Kemp
For what?
This is our questions also. Why is such a huge point being made over this. It makes us that much more concerned as to what happened.
….is that the Mr Kemp that was paid $590 a day plus expenses ?
The just to clarify who the author of this is – John Kemp was one of the three investigators recruited with Martin Bridger under the contract approved by John Yates and the Metropolitan Police Authority in February 2008. We met and spoke briefly on a couple of occasions, once while he was shredding computer discs in the Fort Street offices.
On that contract (see Section 7.16 of the un-redacted audit, which is in the CNS library), between June 2008 and January 2009 he received a total of CI$107,000 from CIG. How much he received in total is still unknown because the completion of the audit was never allowed to be completed.
When the Auditor General, Dan Duguay, investigated Tempura and Cealt in 2009, John Kemp’s name was removed from the final document. It was only my FOI requests that uncovered the original draft revealing who had received these huge payments. They also produced a statement from the Metropolitan Police admitting that, despite what the Auditor General had been told, the contracts had actually been decided in London with no CIG involvement.
As Mr Kemp says there’s a lot being kept secret here but that secrecy extends right across all the organisations and personnel involved, including the various Met and private investigation teams.
I think the process of finding out what happened could be started right here. Mr Kemp, who authorised 'the retrieval and examination of records of thousands of emails, texts and phone calls and also the examination of numerous hard drives'? This work has always been understood to have taken place but this the first time anyone has actually admitted it. This is particularly significant in the light of a statement by the RCIPS that all the original Tempura documentation, presumably including the records of at least some of Mr Kemp's work, has gone missing.