>Go on then, I'm dying to know. Does anyone have the address for Richard
>Tomlinson's website with all the secret identities on it? I want to check
>out a few chaps I suspect of being spooks.
<http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/19620.html>
Britain Shuts Down Spy Sites by Polly Sprenger
3:00 a.m. 12.May.99.PDT
GeoCities has yanked the Web site of a former spy who has repeatedly threatened to expose the underbelly of British espionage.
Richard Tomlinson has had a rocky couple of years. He was sacked by a British intelligence agency in 1995 and jailed in 1997 for breaking England's Official Secrecy Act. After his release, Tomlinson jetted around the globe, staying out of reach of the British government until he landed in Geneva.
There, Tomlinson used the Internet to launch a personal crusade against what he considers to be the gross inadequacies and illegal activities of MI6, England's international intelligence arm. Now, the British government has again silenced the ex-spy with an injunction to keep him from publishing sensitive information on the Internet.
Tomlinson had maintained a Web site hosted by IP worldcom in Lausanne, Switzerland. On 30 April, the Treasury Solicitor's office obtained an order against Tomlinson, who removed the site rather than risk a violation, according to officials in the Treasury Solicitor's office.
"The injunction was granted following threats from Tomlinson to publish information on the Internet," said a representative of the Treasury Solicitor's office. "The injunction prevents Tomlinson from presenting information on the Internet or any other means."
IP worldcom did not respond to interview requests in time for this article. A week later, Tomlinson launched another site, this time at California-based GeoCities, where he promised to post a map of all the MI6 offices worldwide. Again, the British government was hot on his heels.
Last week, attorneys for the Crown showed GeoCities the Swiss injunction. And GeoCities' legal department brought down the curtain on Tomlinson's site. "We had a notification from the [British government] attorney that we had a Web site that appeared to violate our content guidelines," said Ed Pierce, vice president of legal affairs at GeoCities.
Pierce and his investigative teams determined that Tomlinson was in violation of the user agreement, which contains three broad principles -- no pornography, no hate speech, and no illegal activities -- and terminated the site.
Pierce was unsure what, if any, notification GeoCities sent to Tomlinson, but he said that the former spy would be able to defend the right to publish his site if he chose. Most users found to be in violation of the user agreement never come forward to defend themselves, Pierce added.
"What I don't understand is how it was possible for this to take place in the US without there being a court order," said John Wadham, director of the London civil rights group Liberty, and Tomlinson's solicitor. "There is the issue of due process. Without this due process I can't understand how he can be banned from using that Web site."
But the British government has long been wary of Tomlinson, who has tried several times in the past few years to draw attention to himself and the alleged crimes of MI6.
In November 1997, Tomlinson was charged with violating the Official Secrecy Act as he shopped his memoirs around in the publishing world.
Tomlinson tried to stay an arrest by allegedly telling officials that he had placed an encoded manuscript on two computers somewhere in the world. If Tomlinson didn't signal each machine once a week, the manuscript would automatically be published online. But the manuscript never appeared, and Tomlinson was jailed for four months.
He reappeared in the media in 1998. Nearly a year after the crash of the car carrying Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed, Tomlinson told the French judge investigating the case that driver Henri Paul had worked for British intelligence.
The French government later told the media that Tomlinson's claims were unfounded, and that the ex-spy had approached the judge on his own. On 11 September 1998, Tomlinson notified his solicitor that he had evidence that MI6 had tried to assassinate Slobodan Milosevic. He claimed that in the summer of 1992, a colleague had showed him an MI6 proposal to kill Milosevic.
"I ask you to investigate this matter fully," Tomlinson wrote. "I believe that legal action should be taken ... to show other MI6 officers that they should not assume that they can murder and carry out other illegal acts with impunity." Tomlinson was reportedly on the passenger list but missed being on SwissAir flight 111 that plunged into icy waters off Nova Scotia on 2 September 1998, leading him to speculate that the crash was actually a murder plot.