UK secrecy laws are, in John Kiriakou’s view, even tougher on whistleblowers and dissent than their American equivalents. Britain’s Official Secrets Act and Terrorism Act, he says, mean that merely saying you “support Palestinian human rights” can bring prosecution, or being stopped at an airport and told that while not under arrest, you are “also not free to go.”[1][2] He cites three friends, one a former British ambassador, stopped and threatened under those acts, calling the regime “draconian” — at least in the U.S., he says, the Espionage Act gives “a fighting chance.”[3] He pairs Britain’s treatment of pro-Palestinian speech, connected to the BDS movement, with a Florida law making similar social-media posts illegal, under which Miami police visited a woman over a Facebook post.[4][5]
In separate interviews, Kiriakou has criticized the UK’s Official Secrets Act specifically for squelching free speech and freedom of the press, arguing it makes just about anybody vulnerable to prosecution over something they say that is deemed sensitive, even without a security clearance.[6] He has said the UK situation is worse than the American one because British law imposes real criminal penalties on journalists even for expressing an opinion at odds with the government’s position, not merely for revealing classified information.[7]