Leslie Silver International Faculty
Applied Global Ethics
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Steve Wright
Steve Wright is a visiting Professor in the School of Information, Associate Director of the Praxis Centre, SSRC Global Security Research Fellow and Associate Reader in SAGE.
Born in Newcastle, he began his academic career in Manchester studying Liberal Studies in Science. The course inspired him to look at the political consequences of innovation, which he followed through with postgraduate study at Lancaster University’s Richardson Institute, looking at ‘New Police Technologies and Sub-State Conflict Control.’ Alas, the work progressed too well and resulted in the intelligence agency of a foreign power, America’s NSA, instructing British Police to carry out the first political raid on a British University in 1977. (Lancaster - motto Omnibus Patet Veritas – ironically ‘Truth Lies Open to All’).
In 1985, he became Head of Manchester City Council’s Police Monitoring Unit, watching the local police force to promote democratic police accountability. Working in the wake of the British Miners’ strike which revealed new policing methods the unit was caught up in some of the cause-celebres of the day, including the Northern Irish Shoot to Kill Policy – the Stalker Affair.
He went on to become Director of the Omega Foundation in 1989, working with Amnesty International and the European Commission to track the transfer of military security and police technologies to the torturing states. Wright consequently acquired a fairly generous travel budget which took him more or less to every continent in the world which he used to develop a better understanding of new technologies of political control and sub-lethal weapons. During this time he began writing for the New Scientist, the Guardian and Le Monde Diplomatique.
In 1998, Steve authored the European Parliament’s widely influential STOA report on the Echelon Global Spy System which revealed the extent to which all communications are read by Yorkshire’s Menwith Hill station, which taps two million calls an hour. The US ‘war against terror’ and its human rights fallout has pre-occupied him ever since and he became chair of the trustees of Privacy International in 2004.
His current work covers information warfare, new border control technologies (he is a trustee of the Mines Advisory Group) and the emergence of weapons of mass paralysis.