Report: UK tabloid hacked into voicemails

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

Pilger, Project Censored. Total decoy limited hangout.

[Harvey]

It's still early days Hugh. If you tell me the hearings so far are pure theatre, I'll agree, but if all this is what you're suggesting, and we know that everything we've learned so far is the froth on the tip of the iceberg, perhaps someone has miscalculated.

Lulzsec are sitting on 4 gig (?) of emails from The Sun and NI, according to the Guardian.

Presumably most of that will be video and images, otherwise that's a massive amount of email data. I'm sceptical, but we'll have to wait and see.

[Stephen Morgan]

More news. Brooks, as it turns out, was hacked herself when she was editing the Sun by sister-paper NotW, the Sun took messages left for her by the then-Home Secretary David Blunkett about an affair he'd been having and published the story, that was the affair he had with the publisher of the Spectator, Kimberly Fortier. Why he was talking about that to the editor of the Sun is anyone's guess, but she didn't publish it.

Private Eye also has evidence directly linking Brooks to ordering named individuals to be hacked. Piers Morgan's Mirror and the Daily Mail come in for the treatment, too, so hopefully when they've done with Murdoch they can have a crack at them.

[Harvey]

This is interesting.

Phone hacking: Met police to investigate mobile tracking claims

Paul Lewis
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 21 July 2011 12.52 BST

Two police surveillance sources with knowledge of the system said location data was routinely used by police. Both said any corrupt purchase of information would require a fabricated request under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) and therefore the knowledge of a senior officer.

The Met and other forces have central databases where they record Ripa authorisations for audits by the interception of communications commissioner. Police are also compelled to keep Ripa authorisations files under the same rules that compel them to keep evidence connected to criminal investigations, which in some cases can mean paperwork is stored for decades.

Records are also kept by mobile phone providers, with at least one company maintaining an "indefinite" database of Ripa requests since 2009.

This detailed audit trail contrasts with the paucity of evidence in cases of phone hacking, due to the fact that records of phone activity are generally destroyed after 12 months.

The New York Times first reported that the News of the World may have had access to phone-tracking data last week, days before Hoare's death.

It said Hoare, a reporter who was sacked from the News International title in 2005, alleged that his editor Greg Miskiw could locate information about a person's precise whereabouts via their mobile phone number.

Hoare claimed that Miskiw had once helped him locate a person in Scotland, and said the information came from "the Old Bill".

The following day he told the Guardian that reporters would ask a news desk executive to obtain the location of a target: "Within 15 to 30 minutes someone on the news desk would come back and say: 'Right, that's where they are.'"

He added: "You would just go to the news desk and they would come back to you. You don't ask any questions. You would consider it a job done."

Hoare made no reference to which police force may have sold the data, although the Metropolitan police is currently investigating evidence that corrupt officers from within its ranks were selling information to the News of the World.

Mobile phone companies can provide police with real-time location information about the whereabouts of suspects or missing people at 15-minute intervals. More commonly, police request a "cell site dump", which gives a complete historical record of the whereabouts of person's mobile phone.

There are two ways the data is obtained. When a phone is used for a call or SMS message, details of its location are logged. Alternatively so-called "pinging" can be used when a phone is not in use, by sending the device signals and triangulating the results from cellphone masts. The level of accuracy ranges from a few hundred metres to around two kilometres, depending on proximity to the masts.

Mark Lewis, a solicitor who represents phone-hacking victims, said: "I have sources that I can't reveal who tell me they could do it [obtain the data]." He said he had clients who suspected they had been tracked: "One or two were very suspicious about how they had been found – simply because they were where they were not supposed to be."

If police want to monitor the contents of emails or calls to combat terrorism or serious crime they require a warrant from the home secretary.

Far more common however is the interception of communications data, which relates to the "who, where and when" of messages or calls. There is a complex framework through which the data is channelled from phone companies to police.

Phone companies provide data to "police liaison units" – funded by the Home Office – which contain a handful of people with maximum security clearance to deal with incoming requests.

Police in turn have special points of contact (Spocs), who liaise with the mobile phone companies and process the requests.

They are trained and accredited by the National Policing Improvement Agency and given unique pin numbers. There are almost 600 accredited Spocs in police forces on a nationwide register maintained by the Association of Chief Police Officers.

Under Ripa, these gatekeepers require detailed justifications from a senior officer to request phone information as part of an investigation, in a process that can take up to ten days. In emergencies, senior police can request the information orally, but paperwork is retrospectively filed centrally.

Anyone who suspects their phone was inappropriately tracked is able request details from police or their phone provider under the Data

[Harvey]

This just in from the Guardian.

"Post-Enron, new US laws were passed requiring all corporations to keep immutable email archives for legal compliance purposes. These are often provided by independent third parties," he said.

"Depending on whether Lulzsec got their material from this archive, rather than an old News International server, it's possible News Corporation will be able to argue their email archive can't be trusted in court as it's been compromised."

The claimed email cache is said to have been obtained after a hacking attack against News International on Tuesday night during which members of LulzSec apparently broke into computer systems there and redirected readers of the Sun's website to a faked page claiming News Corp chief executive Rupert Murdoch had been found dead.

Different members of the wider Anonymous hacking collective claimed the emails were taken from a seperate hack of News International's offsite backup centre in India. Establishing from exactly which server – if any – emails were obtained could prove crucial to keeping email admissable in a future court case.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technolog....nternational-emails

Hmmm. Things are begining to make sense.

[2012 Countdown]

Hmmm. Things are begining to make sense.

Report: Obama top recipient of News Corp. donations
By Gautham Nagesh - 07/19/11 04:33 PM ET

Political donations by News Corp., its employees and their families were evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, with President Obama the all-time leading recipient, according to a report from the Sunlight Foundation.

The transparency watchdog noted Tuesday that Democrats received 51 percent of contributions while Republicans received 49 percent, despite the firm's highly publicized links to the GOP, such as a $1 million donation to the Republican Governors Association in August.

News Corp. is the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and Fox News, among others. The firm is currently under scrutiny in both the U.S. and U.K. over allegations its subsidiary News of the World hacked into voice mail accounts and bribed public officials.


"Obama being listed as the company’s top recipient might surprise some people because of its highly publicized involvement with his political rivals, like Sarah Palin who was the vice presidential candidate in 2008 and reportedly still under contract with Murdoch-owned Fox News as a paid commentator," wrote Sunlight's Ryan Sibley.

Sibley said News Corp. has spent $8.2 million since 1997 lobbying on issues such as net neutrality and privacy. He also points out the top recipients from the firm's political action committee, News America Holdings, in the 2009-10 election cycle were Reps. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Howard Berman (D-Calif.) and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.).

http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valle ... 2#comments

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Very interesting, from Craig Murray:

What’s in a Name?
...
Did the Met name Operation Elveden as a grim in-joke to indicate they would make sure the accusations never went anywhere?

UPDATE

I have just realised I am definitely right. Operation Weeting is the investigation into the News of the World phone hacking itself. Weeting is the village at the southern end of the notorious Elveden traffic jam.

http://www.craigmurray.org.uk

Ho ho, the police have a sense of humour.

Reminds me of Operation Kratos, the Met's shoot-to-kill policy that resulted in the slaughter of Jean Charles de Menezes. The word kratos means 'power', 'strength' or 'rule', and Kratos was one of the gods who helped chain Prometheus (the rebel) to the rock.

Don't forget Operation Mason, the pre-cognitive investigation into David Kelly's death that started before he even went missing.

Speaking not so much of names, but of language and how it can be sneakily used, doesn't the preliminary post-mortem finding that there was "no third party involvement" in Sean Hoare's death quite blatantly leave open the possibility of second-party involvement? FWIW.

"Depending on whether Lulzsec got their material from this archive, rather than an old News International server, it's possible News Corporation will be able to argue their email archive can't be trusted in court as it's been compromised."

Harvey, it's not looking good on the Lulzsec front. It doesn't make any sense that they won't release the emails, if they have them. News International became able to make the argument about their archives being "inadmissable" the minute the servers were hacked - releasing the contents to the public won't make any difference to that now. I think they might've been bluffing. They're tricksters after all, and only in it for teh lulz. They released some NATO docs about outsourcing contracts to tide us all over (since removed) but, well, that's not what they were claiming to have.

On a lighter note...

[kenoma]

So James Murdoch perjured himself on Tuesday. Silly boy.

From The Guardian:

6.47pm: James Murdoch's account to the Commons culture select committee about his involvement in agreeing the out-of-court settlement with the former head of the Professional Footballers' Association, Gordon Taylor, was "mistaken", according to a statement issued by former News of the World editor Colin Myler and former News international legal manager Tom Crone.

The statement says:

Just by way of clarification relating to Tuesday's CMS Select Committee hearing, we would like to point out that James Murdoch's recollection of what he was told when agreeing to settle the Gordon Taylor litigation was mistaken.

In fact, we did inform him of the "for Neville" email which had been produced to us by Gordon Taylor's lawyers.

The Neville referred to in the statement is Neville Thurlbeck, the paper's former chief reporter. In 2009, documents passed to the culture committee revealed that he read transcripts of 35 hacked telephone messages between Gordon Taylor and Jo Armstrong, a legal advisor at the PFA.

They were sent in an email to the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire by an unnamed junior reporter on the paper on 29 June 2005. In the email, the reporter says "Hello, this is the transcript for Neville". The committee was told by Guardian reporter Nick Davies this was Neville Thurlbeck.

At the select committee hearing on Tuesday, James Murdoch told Labour MP Tom Watson that he was not aware of the email when he signed off the payment to Taylor:

Mr Watson: James – sorry, if I may call you James, to differentiate—when you signed off the Taylor payment, did you see or were you made aware of the full Neville e-mail, the transcript of the hacked voicemail messages?

James Murdoch: No, I was not aware of that at the time.

Mr Watson: But you paid an astronomical sum, and there was no reason to.

James Murdoch: There was every reason to settle the case, given the likelihood of losing the case and given the damages—we had received counsel—that would be levied.

[Plutonia]

LulzSec The Lulz Boat
We're currently working with certain media outlets who have been granted exclusive access to some of the News of the World emails we have.
6 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply

[kenoma]

James Murdoch appears to be properly fucked by this latest revelation from Myler and Crone.

Clearly, the decision forced upon the Murdochs to stop paying Glenn Mulcaire's legal fees has had huge repercussions. Anyone in News International who thought they could depend on hush money from the Murdochs is quickly realizing those nod-and-wink understandings no longer apply.
It's every man for himself now. You can see how high the stakes are if you remember that Crone, by accusing J Murdoch of perjuring parliament, is implicating himself in the same crime:

Mr Crone gave evidence to MPs on phone hacking in 2009, and said then: "At no stage ... did any evidence arise that the problem of accessing by our reporters, or complicity of accessing by our reporters, went beyond the Goodman/Mulcaire situation."

.
.
.

LulzSec The Lulz Boat
We're currently working with certain media outlets who have been granted exclusive access to some of the News of the World emails we have.
6 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply

They're not doing that anymore.

[Byrne]

(there are some wierd lost pages/re-directs going on with 'UK tabloid hacked into voicemails' news searches on google)

News Corp.'s The Sun Fires Editor Over Phone-Hacking Connections
By Lucas Shaw at TheWrap

Thu Jul 21, 2011 9:52am EDT

A former News of the World executive has been fired from his current job at the Sun due to allegations related to phone hacking, the BBC is reporting.

Matt Nixson, features editor at The Sun, maintains his innocence, but reports say he has been let go because of evidence from emails that he knew something about phone hacking.

News Corp. has issued a statement saying that Nixson was dismissed in relation to "previous work" at News of the World.

Nixson is apparently latest victim of a scandal that continues to spread throughout News Corp.'s holdings. Though Nixon was reportedly fired for his work at the World, even Rebekah Brooks, former chief executive of News International said that hacking was practiced by most if not all the tabloid publications.

The Sun is also the paper that computer hacking group LulzSec hacked last week, redirecting visitors of their homepage to a fake story alleging that News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch died.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/ ... 8220110721

[kenoma]

(there are some wierd lost pages/re-directs going on with 'UK tabloid hacked into voicemails' news searches on google)

News Corp.'s The Sun Fires Editor Over Phone-Hacking Connections

News International are playing games here with news management - just after their director is implicated in perjury, they ostentatiously frogmarch some minion out of the premises for obscure reasons...

[kenoma]

And meanwhile, Newsnight reports the first cases in which lawyers were hacked for non-'journalistic' purposes. Seems they were listening in on Mark Lewis, lawyer of the Dowler famliy, to forward their own legal strategies rather than simply for gathering tabloid dirt.

[kenoma]

More on that non-journalistic hacking of lawyers who were defending clients with cases against NOTW from The Guardian :

11.51pm: I've just spoken to Mark Lewis, the lawyer for Milly Dowler's family, who has tonight told the police that he believes he was put under surveillance by News International because of his work representing phone hacking victims.

He reported his concerns to the police after Newsnight informed him today that they had heard from a reliable source that the lawyer's phone had been hacked around December last year, and he had also been followed by a private detective.

"I've now reported this to the police and made a formal complaint," said Lewis.

"It feels like walking into a John Grisham novel. Clients leave messages on my phone. It's not about trying to get a story now it's about getting information that could affect court cases."

He said that earlier this year the lawyers representing alleged victims of phone hacking had shared their suspicions that they were themselves being targeted by the News of the World.

"Things seemed to be happening to our phones and our computers," said Lewis.

He added that an alleged victim of phone hacking whom he represents had also been the victim of "blagging" - where someone phones up people and organisations pretending to be someone else.

"One of my clients thinks she was being blagged and those phone calls are now the subject of a police inquiry," said Lewis.

Highly significant, because by its nature this incident of hacking could never be the decision of one journalist, editor or even paper. It had nothing to do with producing a muckraking story. This is a company using the most blatantly illegal means available to pervert the course of justice.
If this is proven, the Murdochs are finished.

EDIT:This is also hugely significant because the hacking was happening just 8 months ago, long after News International were supposed to have cleaned up their act.

[Harvey]

Highly significant, because by its nature this incident of hacking could never be the decision of one journalist, editor or even paper. It had nothing to do with producing a muckraking story. This is a company using the most blatantly illegal means available to pervert the course of justice.
If this is proven, the Murdochs are finished.

EDIT:This is also hugely significant because the hacking was happening just 8 months ago, long after News International were supposed to have cleaned up their act.

And another one bites the dust, this time The Sun features editor Matt Nixson. I agree, I just can't see how the Murdochs can survive this, but I think all we've seen are a few surface ripples of much larger stirrings in the abyss.