In January, freelance video journalist Jason Parkinson returned home from vacation to find a brown paper envelope in his mailbox. He opened it to find nine years of his life laid out in shocking detail.
Twelve pages of police intelligence logs noted which protests he covered, who he spoke to and what he wore all the way down to the color of his boots.
It was, he said, proof of something he'd long suspected: The police were watching him. "Finally," he thought as he leafed through documents over a strong black coffee, "we've got them."
Parkinson's documents, obtained through a public records request, are the basis of a lawsuit being filed by the National Union of Journalists against London's Metropolitan Police and Britain's Home Office.
The lawsuit, announced yesterday, along with a recent series of revelations about the seizure of reporters' phone records, is pulling back the curtain on how British police have spent years tracking the movements of the country's news media.
"This is another extremely worrying example of the police monitoring journalists who are undertaking their proper duties," said Paul Lashmar, who heads the journalism department at Britain's Brunel University.
The Metropolitan Police and the Home Office both declined comment yesterday.
Parkinson, three photographers, an investigative journalist and a newspaper reporter are filing the lawsuit after obtaining their surveillance records. Parkinson, a 44-year-old freelancer who has covered hundreds of protests, some of them for The Associated Press, said he and his colleagues long suspected that the police were monitoring them.
"Police officers we'd never even met before knew our names and seemed to know a hell of a lot about us," he said.
Several journalists told AP the records police kept on them were sometimes startling, sometimes funny and occasionally wrong.
