A Home Office counter-terror scheme may have monitored children who survived the Grenfell Tower fire, Declassified can reveal.
London-based media agency Zinc Network Ltd was contracted to work with a string of local charities in a bid to deradicalise young British Muslims.
They included Baraka Community Association, a predominately Somali group in West London, which ran support services for young people affected by the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017.
Leaked records show that Zinc Network considered this collaboration to be a counter-terrorism project.
A source at Baraka Community Association with knowledge of the work said: “I believe there was some surveillance going on.”
The source explained that individuals weren’t spied on directly, but there were attempts by Zinc to monitor what young people were saying and feeling in general.
Zinc’s relationship with Baraka started before the Grenfell fire, and was funded by a government counter-terror scheme.
Operating under its old name, Breakthrough Media Ltd, the company provided social media and website support, even sending a camera crew to film its youth sessions.
In the wake of the Grenfell fire, which killed 72 people, Baraka introduced new services to support those affected – while continuing to collaborate with Zinc.
This included drop-in sessions for local families, as well as youth engagement activities like go-karting and water sports.
It also organised day trips to Thorpe park, Chessington, Legoland and Butlins, with priority given to Grenfell survivors.
A source with knowledge of the setup told Declassified: “I think their interest was in our engagement with youth and families… At the time, there were people leaving this country and joining fighting groups in Iraq and other parts of the world, so I think that was the key interest.”
The source explained that the company did not conduct “individual surveillance through Baraka,” because “that is not something that we would ever do”. Instead, they were “interested generally in what is happening locally”.
“What are the young children saying? Is it estimated that they want to join jihad in other countries? Those kinds of topics were the key areas,” the source said.
“They would say ‘what are you hearing from the youngsters when they are talking during the sessions? Do you have any concerns?’”
The small print of Baraka’s website confirmed at the time: “We receive campaigning support from the Home Office who, as a result, is a joint data controller with us.”
Under privacy laws, a “data controller” has “overall control of the personal data being processed”.
Baraka is one of a number of organisations that were associated with Zinc Network’s counter-terror and counter-extremism work at around this time.
Many of these organisations were open about the nature of their work, although in some cases it is not clear how aware individual service users may have been.
The nature of each of these collaborations varied; there is no suggestion that organisations snooped on service users, or acted improperly. Declassified has therefore decided not to name them.
But the scale of the network shows how extensive Zinc’s work for the Home Office was at the time.
The groups included a training and consultancy organisation that works with schools – and promises a “safe space for honest conversations”.
In London, Zinc had links with a youth group for children as young as eight.
Elsewhere, the company appears to have collaborated with a charity which runs advice clinics for refugees, including unaccompanied children.
Several football groups – including one for teenagers – were also listed on Zinc’s project list, along with a restorative justice organisation and at least two charities supporting Muslim women.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a former Zinc employee told Declassified: “The client services team had direct access to the government and also these youth groups and were in regular contact. There was definitely a degree of profiling people according to their ethnicity, their religion and political views.”
They added: “We all felt a little bit sorry for some of the organisations we were working with, because it was sold to them in a really exciting way. They were doing this grassroots work that they don’t have a lot of funding or publicity for. Then, all of a sudden, this agency wants to create all this content around them and promote their work.”
In 2016, the advocacy organisation CAGE International published a 44-page report into the government’s Prevent scheme, which documented the company’s involvement in a number of other groups and media productions.
In one case, Zinc was alleged to have provided reports, interviews, production and scripting services to Ummah Sonic, a youth media brand.
Ummah Sonic gained more than 73,000 followers on Facebook, but made no mention of its backers aside from a brief note on the ‘Privacy & Cookie policy’ page of its website. It confirms that Ummah Sonic was run by the Federation of Muslim Organisations with “campaigning support from the Home Office”.
Ummah Sonic’s website admitted that personal details of anyone who visited the page will be shared with the Home Office, which is again described as a “joint data controller”. This included their IP address, geographical location, length of visit, and any phone numbers used to call.
Leaked documents now suggest that Breakthrough Media (as Zinc was then called) classified this as a counter-terrorism project.
Reports in 2019 by Middle East Eye also revealed that Breakthrough Media was behind a social media platform called This Is Woke, which published viral videos on Facebook. Despite masquerading as a “news” service, it was in fact a counter-terror project funded by the Home Office.
The company was also linked to two motivational online media platforms targeting young women: Supersisters and Stoosh, which promised to create a “safe online environment for young women to tell their stories”. In both cases, they were created by Breakthrough Media, which was under contract to the Home Office.
‘No idea’
After creating these online media platforms, Breakthrough Media used young British Muslims to create video content for them – often calling on established social media influencers.
However, sources say that these individuals were rarely informed about the true nature of the work, or who was funding it.
“They had no idea it was government funded or that it was part of a wider counter-extremism strategy,” a former employee said.
“They were brought in to make this content and be platformed essentially without their consent, and just on the basis they were Muslim.”
When contacted by Declassified, one of the people used by Breakthrough confirmed she had “no idea” the project was linked to the Home Office. She added: “I already understood that all of the media were using me as a tick box exercise to meet their own agendas, albeit often politically motivated.”
A former employee described the relationships as “racist” and “extremely exploitative”.
“You’re taking a marginalised group, using the access they have to other people within the marginalised group, without their consent,” they said. “It might be that if they knew everything they would still want to do it, but they weren’t given the option to make that decision.”
The source added that the company also used social media to target a broad spectrum of people with counter-extremism content.
“We would lump people together using the social targeting options that we had available. A request would come through that we had to target Muslims aged between 18-25, for example, so we would just be profiling a very broad group of the Muslim community based on their religion and ethnicity. There were also options on Facebook to target people according to their political views.
“So it sort of assumed that everyone who is Muslim is a risk. And they are not only being served these ads, but are probably also being monitored according to their online activity and their offline activity.”
In a statement, Zinc Network claimed that Declassified’s investigation was based on “historical allegations” which were “addressed at the time”. The company said: “We evolved our attribution and editorial policies following that period and won’t revisit decade-old operations.”
The Home Office did not respond to a request for comment.
Declassified is still actively investigating this story. We know there is much more to report. If you have information to share with us, please contact: martin [at] declassifieduk.org
