On July 23, 2026, a special UK court ruled that MI5 (the UK's domestic intelligence agency) and the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) broke the law when they secretly collected phone records about journalist Vincent Kearney. The surveillance happened across seven separate operations between 2006 and 2018. The court ordered each agency to pay £10,000 in damages to Kearney. This is the first time MI5 has ever been ordered to pay damages by this court (BBC News).

The court that made this ruling is called the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, or IPT. It is a specialist court set up to investigate complaints against UK intelligence agencies. A panel of three judges — Lady Carmichael, Mr Justice Chamberlain, and Stephen Shaw KC — found that the surveillance was disproportionate, meaning it went too far compared to whatever reason the agencies had for doing it. The PSNI ran four of the seven unlawful operations. MI5 admitted in 2025 that it had unlawfully obtained Kearney's phone data on two occasions between 2006 and 2009 (The Guardian).

Kearney is a former BBC Northern Ireland home affairs correspondent who now works as northern editor of Irish broadcaster RTÉ. He brought the case together with the BBC. The case was filed against the Chief Constable of the PSNI, the Chief Constable of Durham Constabulary, and MI5's parent government department (IPT Judgment).

The surveillance was wide-ranging. In one operation alone, the PSNI collected data about 1,580 phone calls or text messages from Kearney's phone. They could see the phone numbers involved and the dates and times of the calls and texts, but not what was actually said in them. The PSNI also built a profile on Kearney that included his car registration numbers and the names of his wife and mother-in-law (The Guardian).

MI5 made at least four requests for Kearney's phone data, trying to find out who his journalistic sources were — in other words, who was giving him information for his stories (Computer Weekly). The PSNI made false claims about Kearney in their own applications to access his data (Doughty Street Chambers). London's Metropolitan Police were also involved in the surveillance alongside the PSNI and MI5 (NUJ).

Kearney's lawyer, Cormac Kehoe, called the surveillance "unprecedented" during the court proceedings (The Guardian).

Kearney decided to take legal action after learning about the case of two other Belfast journalists, Barry McCaffrey and Trevor Birney. In December 2024, the same court found that the PSNI and the Metropolitan Police had unlawfully spied on McCaffrey and Birney. Those two journalists had made a documentary called "No Stone Unturned," which looked into whether police had cooperated with armed groups during a massacre in the period of conflict in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles. McCaffrey and Birney were wrongfully arrested in 2018 after making the film (The Guardian).

PSNI Chief Constable Jon Boutcher accepted the court's ruling and apologised to Kearney. A review he commissioned found that the PSNI had used journalists' phone numbers to check whether police officers or staff were leaking information. The PSNI also spied on lawyers, including Peter Corrigan, as part of the same leak investigations (BBC News; The Guardian).

The broader context here is a pattern that has emerged in the UK: security and police agencies have repeatedly used their powers to access phone data in order to identify journalistic sources, especially in Northern Ireland. The Kearney ruling follows the McCaffrey and Birney judgment, and the court's findings go beyond journalists to include lawyers who were caught up in the same efforts to find leaks.

The fact that the court ordered both a police service and an intelligence agency to pay damages, rather than simply stating that they broke the law, suggests judges are raising their expectations for how carefully these agencies must follow the rules when they target journalists and lawyers. The money involved is small, but the principle carries weight. MI5 has never before been ordered to pay damages by this court, which in the past has preferred to simply declare that a breach happened. The £20,000 total, split equally between MI5 and the PSNI, reflects the court's assessment of how much each agency was responsible for across the seven operations.

The involvement of Durham Constabulary as a named party in the case has not been separately explained in the available facts, though its presence in the case title suggests it played some role in the process of authorizing or handling the data that the court examined.