Annie Macron

And most of the groups were Trotskyists, not communists, so they had nothing to do with the Soviet Union anyway.

So the whole thing was...

Fairly surreal for a 22-year-old going into this section and looking at this degree of surveillance and this manipulation of history and the impact it had on democracy was astonishing.

But what has frightened me more since moving forward is the fact that MI5 did shut down this area of investigation in 1995.

They then offloaded it to the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, as it was called then, the secret police, and they continued to do this work.

And then they were outed in a scandal in 2010 with the undercover cop scandal, where they were still infiltrating these groups and animal rights groups and environmentalist groups and the rest of it in the most invidious ways.

And this scandal is still rumbling on.

Here's one of the several left-wing organisations infiltrated by covert officers from this new squad in the Met Special Branch.

One in inquiry today said should have been shut down.

This is a unit that operated until 2008, although today's report, which focuses on its first 14 years, says it should have been disbanded in its infancy, that its ends couldn't conceivably justify its means.

I suppose the lesson here is never think that just because you're an activist and you're trying to

improve the world or win a cause or, you know, do something for the better, for the better good, that you're not going to be spied on.

No, and they bloody should.

I mean, look at what Edward Snowden revealed, and that's a decade ago.

So there's this huge intersection between

between the government and the nation state level actors, and the corporations who can be backdoored, and also the criminal hackers who can get their hands on spy weapons, cyber weapons.

So the whole thing intermeshes all the time.

And people should be aware of this and should be concerned about it.

And the fact that I, you know, there's still sort of activist groups organizing on Facebook, I mean, just makes me want to weep.

No way.