 Over 30 years of travelling around Britain looking into problems, I've changed trains here many times. I passed a little time on the concourse, watching the insecurity notices as they scroll by, waiting for my train for the next leg of the journey. Coming through York it for rarely for a good reason, it was a landfill or an incinerator or contaminated land. Today it's not much different, but it has a very different purpose. Today it's all about looking into what is not commonly talked about in society, something that governments particularly don't like to talk about. The problem we have today is so often the government refuses to engage in a dialogue. The best way they can get past a problem is just not talk about it. You hear us on the radio all the time, a minister wasn't available for comment. What they mean is a minister didn't want to talk about it because they might actually have to come up with a decent explanation which currently they can't do. They don't have to account for themselves, they can carry on doing what they're doing, they don't have to be accountable to us. And that's bad, that's bad for our democracy, bad for how we make decisions. What is Memwith Hill? If there's a symbol of how our future democracy is a threat, this is it. Memwith Hill is a collection of radios, gold wars. They communicate with satellites, exchanging data between America, the Middle East, the Mediterranean and North Africa. What this place does, it takes data from telephones, from satellites, from listening stations, from all any connected source, pipes it through here and slices and dices it with computers. Memwith Hill is roughly central in the country, not far outside Harrogate on the Harrogate Skipton Road. Originally it was a Cold War listing an intelligence site and over the years its global significance has grown. Now it is a facility specifically run by the National Scourge Agency to sample data from all over Europe, the Mediterranean, North Africa. That was opened up in the 1980s by people like Duncan Campbell who investigated the site and discovered how far intruding to people's privacy and their everyday life. Over the years the site has grown and grown, technology has advanced, technology has changed. I like to think of these as puffballs because just like real puffballs, although these are on the surface, most of the data today goes underground via cable and that has meant some very large investments in the site. Over the last few years its role has been upgraded to take account of the internet, the growth of the internet and digital communications. That poses all sorts of questions, not just an invasion of privacy but who is accountable for that and that's very important when a member is concerned because it exists in a legal black hole. This is a league study related to that previous Guardian report and it just outlines what's happening at the site, the installation of new equipment and training facilities and computers and systems. But look at the top of the page, there are some acronyms. USA, Australia, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand. These are the Five Eyes Network, these are the Anglophone intelligence agencies who got together from the 1950s and pretty much set up a global surveillance system but more importantly, by being an international system they can operate in each other's countries outside the law. As you would expect this is quite a closely guarded site. Around the edge you'll see these signs which contain the base bylaws. They're made under a Victorian military landsat and what they do is restrict what you can and can't do inside the area identified on the map, that's the black line. Members bylaws are actually quite out of date, some of the more recent bylaws are far more restricted what you can and can't do but essentially they're there to stop people doing things that are not wanted like protesting, making a fuss, generally drawing attention to this place which they try and hide and over the years there's been a constant campaign, a constant battle between the desire of the government to keep this place secret and not talk about it and the desire of peace campaigners and privacy campaigners who want to open this place up. If you go to the RAF website you'll see Men With Hill listed as an RAF site. It's anything but it's pretty much run by the Americans for the Americans. What it says on the website again doesn't really tell you what it does. What happens at Men With Hill is a closely guarded secret and although there's been various speculation over the years, this is the Yorkshire C&D report from a few years ago, the legal accountability here is very blurred. It's an American site in Britain. That was really blown open by Edward Snowden. What he leaked at the time told us an awful lot about what the Five Eyes Network did, how far they could invade our privacy using the latest technology and all those communication links which centre on this base. And its role not just in surveillance of people who would consider enemies, but also people we would consider our friends and our business partners. Who is accountable for this place? Who decides what isn't allowed? The Intercept did an investigation and they found that Men With Hill just invaded privacy. It was a key site for what they call capture kill operations or targeted assassination using drones in the Middle East and North Africa. Because what Men With does, hoovering up large amounts of information and identifying people from that information, is essential to the targeted killing operations that the Americans have been running since 9-11. Again, that's not legal. There isn't a war zone and doing things like that outside of war zone is against the law. A few years ago it was stolen and gave an interview to German media and he said quite clearly that the Five Eyes Network exists as a super-national organisation and therefore it doesn't answer to law of any one country. And that's the problem here. We have no ability to enforce our rights against that. In 2001 the European Parliament released a report on the echelon system. At the time I was working in Eastern Europe with journalists and human rights workers and it set the whole scene for how the debate over surveillance and privacy has gone since. The European Parliament pointed out that Germany, which also hosts a similar site in Men With, Britain and the United States all had responsibilities to protect human rights. But because of the secrecy surrounding this place and the concerns over many years, there was no guarantee that our rights were being protected and the anomalous legal situation of this site meant infringing our human rights is extremely easy and very unlikely to ever be punished or restricted. Every Tuesday at Men With there is a protest outside the main gate. I've come here today because it's a very special one for the Global Keep Space for Peace Week as well as the usual Tuesday evening protest. There are speakers and we'll be looking in more detail at what Men With is, what it does and what it means for everyday lives. Now this protest on its own is a really interesting event. It's taken many years to get to this point where they're able to stop each car's abuse and they can stand up back on their own and they can give a message to the people who work in the base. And that's the beginnings of accountability. If these people could work without ever seeing a protest, if the protest was continually quelled, they could go about their business. The whole point of holding a protest like this is that by bringing it to attention of each individual who works at a human level it enables that process of reflection and accountability to begin. And perhaps at some point in the future this could result in a leap forward, a disclosure that could bring greater accountability to this place. This is really what we need at every site. Every site around Britain where the public do not have clear accountability through Parliament, through the government. Then we should be seeking to enforce our rights, our international responsibilities and obligations by undertaking activities like this. At the UN the Nuclear Ban Treaty has just been signed. From now on the nuclear states are unnoticed that there must be change. We can no longer allow a handful of states to dictate world policy just because they have nuclear weapons. And just as landmines, or cluster munitions, the hope is that the Ban Treaty will finally see a nuclear free world. To conclude I'll just give you a quick snapshot of the events of the evening and the talks we had from some very interesting people. So I'm Catherine from Yorkshire CND and I'd just like to welcome you to Stemwell and then with Hill and say thanks for coming in on the dark. I was missing a fine quite warm night but actually now it's raining so even more commendations to you all for coming along. Yeah, this is the beginning of Keep Space for Peace Week. I know there's a protest here every Tuesday which is admirable and brilliant. But also today or this week anyway there are also protests and actions on the same kind of theme really around the world. There's at least 44 separate actions that I know of in different countries and this just goes to show the extent and most of them are American bases or at least have some kind of American content. This shows the extent of this kind of clutch that the US military has around the globe. This is the worst nuclear crisis since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 some say it's worse and it is the greatest threat to world peace at the moment. Tensions have been escalating over the last six months and just now with Trump and Kim Jong-un trading threats of intimidation the situation is in serious danger of spiraling out of control. If North Korea were to shoot down a US plane in disputed airspace imagine what Trump's reaction would be and similarly if Trump decided on a win to bomb the North Korean airfield like it did with Syria a few months ago imagine what Kim Jong-un's reaction would be. Even worse the presence of US military troops in South Korea has not truly helped the regional health peace in East Asia I think. These days the deployment of STAD which is a terminal altitude without defense system but STAD is regarded as a protective measure from North Korea nuclear weapons but in reality not only does not have such capability but also leaves China and Russia to bring arms race their own arms race. So now China has developed their own version of STAD and they are going to deploy in their west sea to protect themselves from American stad in South Korea. So Korean peace activist and consat citizens have strongly opposed to this war scenario and this is a theme of peace week in South Korea. What links consat people in Mesweb Hill here and South Korea people all together is our desire for peace, true peace, not military terms of peace. Those non-nuclear weapon states will really face with the choice of to either put up or shut up either to accept a permanently nuclear armed world and keep their fingers crossed or they could try and do something collectively together to try and change the situation and that's what this group of states have done and done so now successfully. The ambition then is to create a sort of a crisis of legitimacy around nuclear weapons and that's what we need to really do in this country to change how we understand nuclear weapons to frame them as an international liability rather than a national asset as it understood in the UK and other nuclear weapons states. So the cementing of this treaty the codifying it of this humanitarian initiative in a legal form in the UN treaty has been incredibly significant. I mean compounded by the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to ICANN. Which again lends the whole process authority and that's really important. Thanks very much. I like the way that we heard the horrors and the difficulties of what's going on with North Korea and the fears that that's raising but then we heard from somebody who's involved with the South Korean peace movement and I like the fact that we've heard about what's going on in here and in Crowton and how awful that is but yet we've also heard about the positive steps of the global ban treaty and so it just seems like for all the fears and traumas that we've got in the world as peace activists we've got an awful lot to be positive about and work towards. So thanks everybody for coming. Thanks to men with hill accountability campaign and also to Yorkshire C&D who put this on. Thank you.