News Of The World bugging claim & Police cover up

[Treetop Flyer]

A thread been made about this? It looks like a very big story.

Murdoch paid £1m to gag phone hacking victims and the police knew about it but put the information in a sealed file. In the file is evidence of then Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott's voicemail being hacked and he wasn't informed.

If a lot of people affected by this sue then it could cause a lot of damage. It's always been known to be a dodgy paper so about time. This is the guy who's tried his damndest to put The Independent out of business many times, he cares not a jot about news or the world.

Intae them!

Story in Guardian

Originally Posted by Guardian

Rupert Murdoch'sNews Group Newspapers has paid out more than £1m to settle legal cases that threatened to reveal evidence of his journalists' repeated involvement in the use of criminal methods to get stories.

The payments secured secrecy over out-of-court settlements in three cases that threatened to expose evidence of Murdoch journalists using private investigators who illegally hacked into the mobile phone messages of numerous public figures and to gain unlawful access to confidential personal data including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemised phone bills. Cabinet ministers, MPs, actors and sports stars were all targets of the private investigators.

Today, the Guardian reveals details of the suppressed evidence which may open the door to hundreds more legal actions by victims of News Group, the Murdoch company that publishes the News of the World and the Sun, as well as provoking police inquiries into reporters who were involved and the senior executives responsible for them.

The evidence also poses difficult questions for:

• Conservative leader David Cameron's director of communications, Andy Coulson, who was deputy editor and then editor of the News of the World when, the suppressed evidence shows, journalists for whom he was responsible were engaging in hundreds of apparently illegal acts

• Murdoch executives who, albeit in good faith, have misled a parliamentary select committee, the Press Complaints Commission and the public

• The Metropolitan police, who did not alert all those whose phones were targeted, and the Crown Prosecution Service, which did not pursue all possible charges against News Group personnel

• The Press Complaints Commission, which claimed to have conducted an investigation but failed to uncover any evidence of illegal activity.

The suppressed legal cases are linked to the jailing in January 2007 of News of the World reporter Clive Goodman for hacking into the mobile phones of three royal staff, an offence under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. At the time, News International said it knew of no other journalist who was involved in hacking phones and that Goodman had been acting without their knowledge.

However, one senior source at the Metropolitan police told the Guardian that during the Goodman inquiry, officers had found evidence of News Group staff using private investigators who hacked into "thousands" of mobile phones. Another source with direct knowledge of the police findings put the figure at "two or three thousand" mobiles. They suggest that MPs from all three parties and cabinet ministers, including former deputy prime minister John Prescott and former culture secretary Tessa Jowell, were among the targets. News International has always maintained that it has no knowledge of phone hacking by anybody acting on its behalf.

A private investigator who had been working on contract for News Group, Glenn Mulcaire, was also jailed in January 2007. He admitted hacking into the phones of five other targets, including Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers Association. Among those phones Mulcaire hacked into were the Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes, celebrity PR Max Clifford, model Elle MacPherson and football agent Sky Andrew. News Group denied all knowledge of the hacking, but Taylor last year sued them on the basis that they must have known about it.

In documents initially submitted to the high court, News Group executives said the company had not been involved in any way in Mulcaire's hacking of Taylor's phone. They specifically denied keeping any recording or notes of intercepted messages and claimed they had not even been aware of the hacking. However, at the request of Taylor's lawyers, the court ordered the production of detailed evidence from Scotland Yard's inquiry in the Goodman case and also from a separate inquiry by the Information Commissioner into journalists who dishonestly obtain confidential personal records.

The Scotland Yard files included paperwork which revealed that, contrary to News Group's initial denial, Mulcaire had provided a recording of the messages on Taylor's phone to a News of the World journalist who had transcribed them and emailed them to a senior reporter; and that a News of the World executive had offered Mulcaire a substantial bonus payment for a story specifically related to the intercepted messages. Several famous figures from the world of football are among those whose messages which were intercepted. Andy Coulson was editing the paper at this time. He told the Guardian this week that he knew nothing about Taylor's legal action, which began after he resigned from the paper.

The paperwork from the Information Commission revealed the names of 31 journalists working for the News of the World and the Sun, together with the precise details of government agencies, banks, phone companies and others who were conned into handing over confidential information on politicians, actors, sportsmen and women, musicians and television presenters, all of whom are named in the paperwork. This is an offence under the Data Protection Act unless it is justified by public interest. Senior editors are among the journalists who are implicated. This activity occurred before the mobile phone hacking, at a time when Andy Coulson was deputy, and the editor was Rebekah Wade, now due to become chief executive of News International. The extent of their personal knowledge, if any, is not clear: the News of the World has always insisted that it would not break the law and would use subterfuge only if essential in the public interest.

Faced with this evidence, News International changed their position, started offering huge cash payments to settle the case out of court, and finally paid out £700,000 in legal costs and damages on the condition that Taylor signed a gagging clause to prevent him speaking about the case. The payment is believed to have included more than £400,000 in damages, dwarfing the largest previous payment for breach of privacy in the UK, the £60,000 paid by the News of the World for filming Max Mosley naked with prostitutes. News Group then persuaded the court to seal the file on Taylor's case to prevent all public access, even though it contained prima facie evidence of criminal activity.

The Scotland Yard paperwork also provided evidence that the News of the World had been involved with Glenn Mulcaire in his hacking the mobile phones of at least two other figures from the world of football. They, too, filed complaints, which were settled earlier this year when News International paid a total of more than £300,000 in damages and costs on condition that they, too, signed gagging clauses.

The Guardian's understanding is that the paperwork disclosed by Scotland Yard to Taylor is only a fraction of the total material they gathered on News Group's involvement with Glenn Mulcaire. And it is a matter of record that the Information Commission has refused to release paperwork which implicates national newspaper journalists in thousands of apparently illegal acts.

The secrecy around the cases continues. Gordon Taylor declined to make any comment. Clive Goodman, now out of prison, said: "I'm not going to talk. My comment is not even 'no comment'." A spokesman for News International suggested the case did not exist: "This particular case means nothing to anyone here, and I've talked to all the people who would be involved." However, the Information Commission confirms that it disclosed material for the case, and the Guardian has pieced together a detailed account of the evidence.

The company later said: "News International feels it is inappropriate to comment at this time."

[Westy]

I feel it is inappropriate to comment at this time.

[Treetop Flyer]

My comment is not even 'no comment'

[erithromycin]

Charlie Brooker was talking about 'The Dark Arts' in Newswipe a couple of months ago, and Private Eye have been asking questions about this sort of thing for a while. Anyone remember the Prince Charles 'tampon' story from a while back? That was signal interception, rather than accessing voicemail by 'hacking'. One of the important notes is that while it is unauthorised access, there's currently few if any mobile phone providers who will inform you of unsuccessful attempts to access your voicemail remotely. One imagines that these are tracked, or could be, but so many 'comms providers keep track of things that never become data it's hard to say if they're salveagable.

Obviously illegal, but one wouldn't have thought it impossible to prove. Beyond guessing PIN for remote access, there's all sorts of things you can do a laptop and a phone, from spoofing numbers (see the theory that has the Mumbai attacks as escalation efforts for an injection attack) to appear to be the phone paired with the mailbox, to repeated attempts at code-breaking, in the unlikely event that the PIN was changed from 1234*, and then past that to things like Bluetooth sniffing. All of these things would require negotiation (at a computing protocol level) and that will at some point have required storage. Many will be lost in volatile sources, but there's a chance that virtual memory or similar will have caused them to be disk imaged. So not impossible to prove, but difficult. This isn't wizardry, but it is spod-tastic.

So, why did the original investigation peter out?

Discounting conspiracy, the investigating unit were concerned with Royal privacy, and may simply have stopped once they'd established what happened there. Why they ended up with it speaks more to Met internal politics than much else. Or, and here's where there's more interesting things going on, there's the tacit understandings around 'The Dark Arts':

Many of the investigators who do this sort of thing for the papers, serving as legal cutouts sometimes to insulate papers from the consequences of their illicit behaviour, are ex-police. Work of this kind (and this kind of access to mobiles) is useful to the Intelligence Apparat. Cop shows talk about "untraceable mobiles", and that's mostly nonsense. They interact with networks - they are inherently traceable - that's why you can ring them and ring from them. Let people who are idiots (terrorists) know this, and that jig is up.

Then there's the other angle. The Met have been fucking about. There's stories of specialist officers taking hundreds of pounds out on credit cards that were designed to cover operational exigencies and eliminate bureacracy**. Effectively theft from petty cash, compounded by interest. MPs expenses scandal would pale, but I haven't heard much about it. No thread on here that I can see. There needn't be genuine conspiracy here, just a tacit quid pro quo with the Murdoch rags; scratch our back by leaving this story alone, and we'll draw a line under this. It's mutually assured destruction without the parades on May Day.

1234* is the 'security' pin on most TV Set Top Boxes, most voicemail, and a large number of credit cards. It's one of my PINs, despite my pretensions to elite.
**We already let them dress in black, and London's got loads of trains. I'm just saying.

[Treetop Flyer]

That's quite interesting, what you said about PIs mostly being ex cops and yeah they surely would have bargaining chips considering they've played the game from the inside and out. Do you think this will peter out or is it the proverbial can of worms?