Spies for hire Big Brother tactics used on salmon farm activists

Wildlife activists who exposed horrific conditions at Scottish salmon farms were subjected to "Big Brother" surveillance by spies for hire working for a British army veteran.

- Tom Burgis

One activist believes he was with his young child on at least one of the occasions when he was followed and photographed by the ex-paratrooper Damian Ozenbrook's operatives.

Corin Smith, a former fly-fishing guide from the Highlands who has spent years confronting the multinationals that own the farms, said: "What do I say to my little girl when she asks me what had I done wrong to be followed? What if she feels like she has to look over her shoulder?"

Knowing he had been watched was "an earworm of an idea that gets in your brain and drives paranoia, guilt, anger and stress", Smith said. "This could happen to anyone. It might be happening to you and your family right now. Military types following you around with no purpose other than spying on you to try to find something in your private life that might be useful to whomever pays them."

While a public inquiry is scrutinising spying by police after they infiltrated environmental groups and other campaigns, a Guardian investigation is shining a light on the private spies-for-hire industry. The sector, which one lawyer called "a wild west", ranges from bumbling gumshoes to alumni of the special forces and MI6.

The surveillance of Smith and another wildlife activist, Don Staniford, began after they paddled out and filmed some of the floating cages where millions of salmon are farmed every year to yield Scotland's biggest food export. The footage, posted online and broadcast by the BBC in 2018, showed fish crawling with sea lice. Some had chunks of flesh torn away; others' spines were twisted.

In 2021, Smith discovered an "intelligence report" that the Scottish Salmon Company had commissioned. It was contained in a 653-page response from the business to Smith's request under data protection law for information it held on him.

At the time, the fish-farming corporation was owned by anonymous investors, led by a financier who had made his fortune in Russia.