Hi Teribus:

It was not legal to photograph the troops in the North of Ireland while I was working there... warning shots were sometimes fired over the heads of journalists... as to censorship here is a part of an article, and the URL, do read the whole thing, but I included some quote, followed by my own experiences...

http://www.newstatesman.com/200010160026

You think there is no pre-publication censorship in Britain? Tony Geraghty's experience suggests otherwise


"A British civil servant in the Ministry of Defence writes a letter to the UK's biggest publisher, "strongly urging" him not to release the paperback version of a book already on the shelves in hardback. The publisher complies, even though the request is just that: an invitation to change course, with no legal backing.The MoD writes again two months later: "We do not feel we can condone paperback publication . . . Having made our concerns known . . . we do not intend to take any further action." A grateful publisher then prepares to release the paperback, a year later than expected. It has just appeared. The British, with no written constitution or First Amendment (short of the European Human Rights Act) to safeguard freedom of expression, hardly noticed this extraordinary exercise of censorship.The book in question is The Irish War, of which I am the author. My experience is a chilling lesson in the use - or, rather, misuse - of the judicial process to bully publishers, editors and authors in the UK. The trouble started two months before the hardback edition appeared in October 1998. The legal department of HarperCollins (my publishers) received a telephone call from a retired rear-admiral occupying room 2235 in the MoD's main Whitehall building. He would later claim that, although on the ministry's payroll, he was not an MoD official. He was acting, he said, as secretary of a committee known as the Defence Advisory Notice Committee (a unit answerable to no one in particular, created ostensibly to advise writers and publishers about security issues). The committee, an official study concedes, "is, in effect, one man - its secretary"
The admiral did not reveal that he was also working on behalf of a shadowy MoD department known as the Secretariat, Home & Special Forces, run from rooms 5106 and 5107 in the same building. His concern was that my references to the work of the SAS and other special forces in Northern Ireland might jeopardise security. He requested sight of the unpublished manuscript.I vetoed that suggestion, conscious that the D-Notice office has a disreputable history of betraying writers innocent enough to trust it. Its former secretaries include Colonel Sammy Lohan, paid £500 a year by MI5 for passing on "titbits" from the Fleet Street newspapers. I myself had received the uncensored, unpublished proof copy of Mark Urban's book Big Boys' Rules - another analysis of special forces' operations in Northern Ireland - after he had entrusted it to the D-Notice team for vetting. ...

The search, by six MoD police detectives (including a woman to keep an eye on my wife) lasted almost eight hours. Everything, including the dirty washing, was examined. The computer, my diary, many of my files (some unrelated to defence) were removed. We then set off for the local police station, in rural Herefordshire. The arresting officers did not know where to find the station, so I found myself guiding them. The station officer did not know how to record my arrest on his computer. As he explained: "We don't get many official secrets cases in Leominster." "Try 'Miscellaneous'," I suggested. It worked. I could now be safely locked in a cell, between long periods of interrogation. I was released after five hours.About 150 miles away, HarperCollins's west London office was also being raided and searched, but no arrests were made. In Surrey, Nigel Wylde, a friend who had won the Queen's Gallantry Medal for defusing IRA bombs in Northern Ireland, was also lifted and questioned, as my alleged source.For the next 360 days or so, I was on police bail. In May 1999, I was charged with breaching Section 5 of the 1989 Official Secrets Act: the first time this law had been exercised. I made a single appearance at Bow Street and faced an Old Bailey trial, plus two years' imprisonment and financial ruin.

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Back in the late 80s, if I remember, I was co-producer of a TV news program, "Behind the Headlines, on WNYC, with a fellow George Augustine. One of the episodes received calls from the British consulate, when civil rights lawyer and former president of the New York City council, Paul O'Dywer, interviewed NORAID organizer Martin Galvin. He promised pressure to get the show pulled, warning that WNYC would not get access to British media. Censorship happens (even in the US) through a number of methods, some of them by government pressure, some of them by application of law.