Report: UK tabloid hacked into voicemails

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Re: Report: UK tabloid hacked into voicemails

Postby Plutonia » Mon Jul 18, 2011 5:07 pm

Crikey!

Hacking whistleblower dies, not suspicious: police

(AFP) – 57 minutes ago

LONDON — A whistleblower in the phone-hacking scandal, former News of the World reporter Sean Hoare, was found dead at his home Monday but there appeared to be no suspicious circumstances, police said.

Hoare alleged in interviews with The New York Times newspaper and the BBC last year that the tabloid's former editor Andy Coulson, who went on to become press chief to British Prime Minister David Cameron, knew about voicemail hacking.

He was found dead early Monday at his home in Watford, north of London, Hertfordshire Police said in a statement.

"At 10:40 am today police were called to Langley Road, Watford, following the concerns for welfare of a man who lives at an address on the street," the force said.

"Upon police and ambulance arrival at a property, the body of a man was found. The man was pronounced dead at the scene shortly after.

"The death is currently being treated as unexplained, but not thought to be suspicious. Police investigations into this incident are ongoing."

The Guardian newspaper said Hoare had long-term drink and drug problems.

Hoare claimed that Coulson knew about the paper's staff eavesdropping on private messages.

"Everyone was doing it," he told the US paper. "Everybody got a bit carried away with this power that they had. No one came close to catching us."

His claims were passed to Scotland Yard but they said he declined to give evidence.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/ar ... 863427.6e1
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Re: Report: UK tabloid hacked into voicemails

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jul 18, 2011 5:18 pm

2.30pm on Tuesday.

what time is that in the U.S. please?
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Re: Report: UK tabloid hacked into voicemails

Postby Plutonia » Mon Jul 18, 2011 5:20 pm

Monday, July 18, 2011 at 5:19:49 PM EDT

In Washington DC.
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Re: Report: UK tabloid hacked into voicemails

Postby Harvey » Mon Jul 18, 2011 5:38 pm

Plutonia wrote:Monday, July 18, 2011 at 5:19:49 PM EDT

In Washington DC.



The old one's are the best! :thumbsup
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Re: Report: UK tabloid hacked into voicemails

Postby AhabsOtherLeg » Mon Jul 18, 2011 5:42 pm

Harvey wrote:Brooks will turn out to be heavilly implicated in phone hacking, 'evidence' both damning and mitigating will be 'found.' She'll take one for the company.


You'll like this, from just around an hour ago on the Guardian site:

Police examine bag found in bin near Rebekah Brooks's home

Former NI chief executive's husband denies bag – containing computer, paperwork and phone – belonged to his wife

Amelia Hill
guardian.co.uk, Monday 18 July 2011 20.54 BST
Article history

Detectives are examining a computer, paperwork and a phone found in a bin near the riverside London home of Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of News International.

The Guardian has learned that a bag containing the items was found in an underground car park in the Design Centre at the exclusive Chelsea Harbour development on Monday afternoon.

The car park, under a shopping centre, is yards from the gated apartment block where Brooks lives with her husband, a former racehorse trainer and close friend of the prime minister David Cameron.

It is understood the bag was handed into security at around 3pm and that shortly afterwards, Brooks's husband, Charlie, arrived and tried to reclaim it. He was unable to prove the bag was his and the security guard refused to release it.

Instead, it is understood that the security guard called the police. In less than half an hour, two marked police cars and an unmarked forensics car are said to have arrived at the scene.


Police are now examining CCTV footage taken in the car park to uncover who dropped the bag. Initial suspicions that there had been a break in at the Brooks' flat have been dismissed.

David Wilson, Charlie Brooks's official spokesman, told the Guardian that Charlie Brooks denies that the bag belonged to his wife. "Charlie has a bag which contains a laptop and papers which were private to him," said Wilson.

"They were nothing to do with Rebekah or the [phone-hacking] case."

Wilson said Charlie Brooks had left the bag with a friend who was returning it, but dropped it in the wrong part of the garage. When asked how the bag ended up in a bin he replied: "The suggestion is that a cleaner thought it was rubbish and put it in the bin." Wilson added: "Charlie was looking for it together with a couple of the building staff.

"Charlie was told it had gone to security, by which stage they [security] had already called the police to say they had found something.

"The police took it away. Charlie's lawyers got in touch with the police to say they could take a look at the computer but they'd see there was nothing relevant to them on it. He's expecting the stuff back forthwith."


Rebekah Brooks was arrested on Sunday under suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications, and of corrupting police officers. She is due to appear before the Commons culture, media and sport select committee today on Tuesday afternoon.


Bizarre.

RIP Sean Hoare.

And a possible RIP to Cameron's career... even the Torygraph openly hates him now (though they always did, a bit, for being "soft". They'd much prefer Osborne, but their ideal is probably Ken Clarke). Tommorrow's front page:

Image

Rumour has it that Anonymous/Anti-Sec have ripped a load of Sun/NOTW emails, and will drop them tommorrow. They've also posted what they claim is one of Rebekah Brooks' email accounts and passes. Not sure if that's true or not. Not checking it neither!

Jesys, they've hacked The Sun's website and announced Rupert Murdoch's death! :lol: Will grab a screenshot.
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Re: Report: UK tabloid hacked into voicemails

Postby Plutonia » Mon Jul 18, 2011 5:52 pm

Inbeforeahab!

Image

(it's a redirect from the Sun's site)
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Re: Report: UK tabloid hacked into voicemails

Postby AhabsOtherLeg » Mon Jul 18, 2011 5:56 pm

Plutonia's image posting skills have proven weak, so I hereby claim my RIGHTFUL scoop!

Image

Might be a redirect, but it's still genius. Especially considering that the Sun's real major story at the moment is a person with a nipple on the sole of their foot.

Is that the David Kelly death scene they are using...?
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Re: Report: UK tabloid hacked into voicemails

Postby Harvey » Mon Jul 18, 2011 6:01 pm

I think it is. Jesus. LOL! :D
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Re: Report: UK tabloid hacked into voicemails

Postby AhabsOtherLeg » Mon Jul 18, 2011 6:07 pm

Tommorrow's going to be insane. This is all insane.
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Re: Report: UK tabloid hacked into voicemails

Postby Harvey » Mon Jul 18, 2011 6:11 pm

Maybe the scriptwriter took a trip before writing the second act. I suppose it's anyone's guess where all this shit goes now but first and foremost expect to be disapointed.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
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Re: Report: UK tabloid hacked into voicemails

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jul 18, 2011 6:11 pm

on edit

It will be broadcast live on Current TV at 8:30am tomorrow
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Report: UK tabloid hacked into voicemails

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jul 18, 2011 6:48 pm

Troubles That Money Can’t Dispel
By DAVID CARR
Published: July 17, 2011

“Bury your mistakes,” Rupert Murdoch is fond of saying. But some mistakes don’t stay buried, no matter how much money you throw at them.

The News Corporation spent $655 million to settle claims against its newspaper insert business.

Time and again in the United States and elsewhere, Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation has used blunt force spending to skate past judgment, agreeing to payments to settle legal cases and, undoubtedly more important, silence its critics. In the case of News America Marketing, its obscure but profitable in-store and newspaper insert marketing business, the News Corporation has paid out about $655 million to make embarrassing charges of corporate espionage and anticompetitive behavior go away.

That kind of strategy provides a useful window into the larger corporate culture at a company that is now engulfed by a wildfire burning out of control in London, sparked by the hacking of a murdered young girl’s phone and fed by a steady stream of revelations about seedy, unethical and sometimes criminal behavior at the company’s newspapers.

So far, 10 people have been arrested, including, on Sunday, Rebekah Brooks, the head of News International. Les Hinton, who ran News International before her and most recently was the head of Dow Jones, resigned on Friday. Now we are left to wonder whether Mr. Murdoch will be forced to make an Abraham-like sacrifice and abandon his son James, the former heir apparent.

The News Corporation may be hoping that it can get back to business now that some of the responsible parties have been held to account — and that people will see the incident as an aberrant byproduct of the world of British tabloids. But that seems like a stretch. The damage is likely to continue to mount, perhaps because the underlying pathology is hardly restricted to those who have taken the fall.

As Mark Lewis, the lawyer for the family of the murdered girl, Milly Dowler, said after Ms. Brooks resigned, “This is not just about one individual but about the culture of an organization.”

Well put. That organization has used strategic acumen to assemble a vast and lucrative string of media properties, but there is also a long history of rounded-off corners. It has skated on regulatory issues, treated an editorial oversight committee as if it were a potted plant (at The Wall Street Journal), and made common cause with restrictive governments (China) and suspect businesses — all in the relentless pursuit of More. In the process, Mr. Murdoch has always been frank in his impatience with the rules of others.

According to The Guardian, whose bulldog reporting pulled back the curtain on the phone-hacking scandal, the News Corporation paid out $1.6 million in 2009 to settle claims related to the scandal. While expedient, and inexpensive — the company still has gobs of money on hand — it was probably not a good strategy in the long run. If some of those cases had gone to trial, it would have had the effect of lancing the wound.

Litigation can have an annealing effect on companies, forcing them to re-examine the way they do business. But as it was, the full extent and villainy of the hacking was never known because the News Corporation paid serious money to make sure it stayed that way.

And the money the company reportedly paid out to hacking victims is chicken feed compared with what it has spent trying to paper over the tactics of News America in a series of lawsuits filed by smaller competitors in the United States.

In 2006 the state of Minnesota accused News America of engaging in unfair trade practices, and the company settled by agreeing to pay costs and not to falsely disparage its competitors.

In 2009, a federal case in New Jersey brought by a company called Floorgraphics went to trial, accusing News America of, wait for it, hacking its way into Floorgraphics’s password protected computer system.

The complaint summed up the ethos of News America nicely, saying it had “illegally accessed plaintiff’s computer system and obtained proprietary information” and “disseminated false, misleading and malicious information about the plaintiff.”

The complaint stated that the breach was traced to an I.P. address registered to News America and that after the break-in, Floorgraphics lost contracts from Safeway, Winn-Dixie and Piggly Wiggly.

Much of the lawsuit was based on the testimony of Robert Emmel, a former News America executive who had become a whistle-blower. After a few days of testimony, the News Corporation had heard enough. It settled with Floorgraphics for $29.5 million and then, days later, bought it, even though it reportedly had sales of less than $1 million.

But the problems continued, and keeping a lid on News America turned out to be a busy and expensive exercise. At the beginning of this year, it paid out $125 million to Insignia Systems to settle allegations of anticompetitive behavior and violations of antitrust laws. And in the most costly payout, it spent half a billion dollars in 2010 on another settlement, just days before the case was scheduled to go to trial. The plaintiff, Valassis Communications, had already won a $300 million verdict in Michigan, but dropped the lawsuit in exchange for $500 million and an agreement to cooperate on certain ventures going forward.

The News Corporation is a very large, well-capitalized company, but that single payout to Valassis represented one-fifth of the company’s net income in 2010 and matched the earnings of the entire newspaper and information division that News America was a part of.

Because consumers (and journalists) don’t much care who owns the coupon machine in the snack aisle, the cases have not received much attention. But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t a useful window into the broader culture at the News Corporation.

News America was led by Paul V. Carlucci, who, according to Forbes, used to show the sales staff the scene in “The Untouchables” in which Al Capone beats a man to death with a baseball bat. Mr. Emmel testified that Mr. Carlucci was clear about the guiding corporate philosophy.

According to Mr. Emmel’s testimony, Mr. Carlucci said that if there were employees uncomfortable with the company’s philosophy — “bed-wetting liberals in particular was the description he used” Mr. Emmel testified — then he could arrange to have those employees “outplaced from the company.”

Clearly, given the size of the payouts, along with the evidence and testimony in the lawsuits, the News Corporation must have known it had another rogue on its hands, one who needed to be dealt with. After all, Mr. Carlucci, who became chairman and chief executive of News America in 1997, had overseen a division that had drawn the scrutiny of government investigators and set off lawsuits that chipped away at the bottom line.

And while Mr. Murdoch might reasonably maintain that he did not have knowledge of the culture of permission created by Mr. Hinton and Ms. Brooks, by now he has 655 million reasons to know that Mr. Carlucci colored outside the lines.

So what became of him? Mr. Carlucci, as it happens, became the publisher of The New York Post in 2005 and continues to serve as head of News America, which doesn’t exactly square with Mr. Murdoch’s recently stated desire to “absolutely establish our integrity in the eyes of the public.”

A representative for the News Corporation did not respond to a request for comment.

Even as the flames of the scandal begin to edge closer to Mr. Murdoch’s door, anybody betting against his business survival will most likely come away disappointed. He has been in deep trouble before and not only survived, but prospered. The News Corporation’s reputation may be under water, but the company itself is very liquid, with $11.8 billion in cash on hand and more than $2.5 billion of annual free cash flow.

Still, money will fix a lot of things, but not everything. When you throw money onto a burning fire, it becomes fuel and nothing more.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Report: UK tabloid hacked into voicemails

Postby 8bitagent » Mon Jul 18, 2011 7:01 pm

Plutonia, here's MSNBC's take on it



Report: Phone-hacking whistleblower found dead

A former reporter at the News of the World who was the first named journalist to allege a high-ranking editor was aware of phone hacking by staffers has been found dead, the Guardian reported Monday.

Sean Hoare reportedly worked on the Sun and the News of the World with Andy Coulson before he was dismissed in 2005 for problems related to drinking and drugs. He was found dead Monday morning at his Watford home, according to the Guardian's report.

Coulson, who most recently served as Prime Minister David Cameron's media chief, succeeded Rebekah Brooks as editor of the News of the World in 2003. Coulson resigned from his government post in January and was arrested earlier this month in the scandal.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43797504/ns ... ws-europe/

I love this "Death of journalist not being treated as suspicious, police say "

"The death is currently being treated as unexplained, but not thought to be suspicious," according to a police statement. "Police investigations into this incident are ongoing."

MEANWHILE...

Murdoch family and top aides tried to cover up hacking before news broke
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43799980/ns ... ork_times/

I love it...DC Madam found it, "not suspicious".

Terrence Yeakey, the heroic cop who rescued people from the OKC rubble and later decided to go public on bombs in the building...found shot, stabbed, beaten in an alley "ruled a suicide".
Gary Webb? Shot twice in the head...nothing suspicious! Former damn head of the entire CIA William Colby decides to help expose the Franklin Coverup scandal, found dead in his lake with no lifevest and his breakfast still on the table.
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Re: Report: UK tabloid hacked into voicemails

Postby AhabsOtherLeg » Mon Jul 18, 2011 7:24 pm

Harvey wrote:Maybe the scriptwriter took a trip before writing the second act. I suppose it's anyone's guess where all this shit goes now but first and foremost expect to be disapointed.


Oh, I know, nothing too fundamental will change. Even if the Coalition collapsed, what would we get instead?
Labour - the guys who promised to cut the same amounts, but a bit slower and quieter, and have long ago shown their insatiable drive to privatize. And the smile leaves my face whenever I remember that Cressida Dick is likely to be Met Commissioner during the Olympics. It's like hearing Ian Blair is coming back, and Tony might be coming with him.

We shouldn't miss the things that are getting pushed through while our eyes are averted either - Ken Clarke's been busy expanding the role of the private sector in our prison system (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12923706) and a little law change now allows the Coalition to run literal "LibCon" coalition candidates at any upcoming election: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politic ... dates.html

Not smiling about Sean Hoare either. He seems to have been very afraid in his last days:

Last night a friend and neighbour claimed Mr Hoare had become increasingly reclusive and paranoid in recent weeks. ‘He would talk about someone from the Government coming to get him and he was always hiding in the flat with his curtains drawn and he’d say to me, “If anyone comes by, don’t say I’m in”.

‘He was physically going downhill. He was yellow in colour and wasn’t looking well for the last month.

‘He had a constant struggle with alcohol and talked to me about how much he had put his wife through.

‘He did say something about phone hacking and I think that was his main worry. He had definite concerns with the media. He did mention he was paranoid and would mention conspiracy stuff.’


From the Mail. Don't want to jump to any conclusions on it yet, as his mate from the Guardian admits that Hoare's breakfast in his working days, for many many years, consisted of a JD and coke (not Pepsi or Coca-Cola... coke), and apparently a doctor who examined his liver back then told him that he must already be dead. But it's often only the folk with nothing to lose who'll stand up and speak out. McMullan doesn't look too healthy either. Must be the "monastic lifestyle" of the dedicated hack, I suppose - a sort of ascetic hedonism.

For Hugh: Hoare lived on Langley Road.
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Re: Report: UK tabloid hacked into voicemails

Postby Harvey » Mon Jul 18, 2011 7:31 pm

Elephants in media living rooms:

To ping the geographic location of a cell phone, you need the cellphone operators co-operation. case closed.

THEATRE
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