Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
coffin_dodger wrote:Is it possible that Murdoch had some super-damaging info (from the various nefarious activities of his phone-tapping, dustbin-pillaging minions) that would really blow the lid off things if it were to come out?
This has become somewhat of a witchhunt on the Murdoch empire, in my opinion. Every other newspaper in the UK was doing the same thing, yet no one else has been spotlighted like Murdoch. The Leveson Enquiry strikes me as an insider 'investigating' his own people with a resultant whitewash (apart from Murdoch) as a foregone conclusion.
Rupert Murdoch and the Conspiracy Machine
..Running through all of these stories, with striking consistency, are networks of class power. None of this criminality would have been possible were it not for the relationships between the Murdoch press, politicians, the police, judiciary and sections of the business establishment. And those relationships themselves were predicated on the power accumulated by Murdoch's awesome media dominion. Yet, something about the nature of these relations lent itself to illicit practices. The history of News International's involvement in criminal conspiracies is not one of aberrant crookedness, defying the integrity and professional standards of the industry. Somehow it is inscribed in the very network of relationships that makes media power what it is today. It is in the structures of news production itself. ...
The result is a lattice of mutual dependencies, networks of power in which the dominant currency is information - or, more accurately, ideological signification. The dependency is, in effect, one between different sectors of power which monopolise and strategically disburse different kinds of information. The journalistic dependency on the aforementioned sources is only reinforced by the existence of a competitive newspaper market, where a number of papers vie for access to the same streams of information. And in a context of declining profitability and reduced readership such as has been the case in the UK market for some time, there is a premium on the novel, dramatic, and thus far occluded. At the same time, the institutions they depend upon have a definable interest in creating illicit flows of disavowable information, whether to create issues around which they can mobilise opinion and organise existing projects, or to vilify and disorient opponents.
Rebekah Brooks and her husband among six arrested by phone hacking police
Rebekah Brooks and her husband are among six people who have been arrested this morning on suspicion of conspiring to pervert the course of justice by police officers investigating allegations of phone hacking.
By Matthew Holehouse8:54AM GMT 13 Mar 2012
The former editor of the News of the World and her husband Charlie, the racehorse trainer and Telegraph columnist, were arested at their home in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, sources said.
Ms Brooks, a former editor of The Sun, had been on bail after being questioned by detectives last summer on suspicion of phone hacking and corruption.
Mark Hanna, head of security at News International, was named by Sky News as one of those held.
Police from Operation Weeting arrested six people at addresses in London, Oxfordshire, Hampshire and Hertfordshire.
The five men, aged between 38 and 49, and one woman, aged 43, were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.
The co-ordinated arrests were made between 5am and 7am by officers from Operation Weeting, the Metropolitan Police's investigation into the illegal interception of voicemails.
They are being interviewed at police stations in Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, and central, east and south west London.
Officers are searching the properties where the arrests were made.
One man, 48, was arrested at a business address in east London.
The 43-year old woman and the 49-year old man were arrested at their home addresses in Oxfordshire and are being interviewed at separate police stations.
It takes the total number of arrests under Operation Weeting to 23.
The investigation was launched in January 2011 after the Metropolitan Police received new information from News International, the publishers of the News of the World, the Sun, the Times and the Sunday Times.
It is being led by deputy assistant commissioner Sue Akers and has 91 officers working on it.
She has told the inquiry into press standards that there was a "culture of illegal payments" at the Sun newspaper.
Ms Akers, who is in charge of three linked inquiries into phone hacking, illicit payments and computer hacking, told Lord Justice Leveson the payments appeared to have been authorised at a "senior level".
This week it was announced that the Attorney General is looking into concerns the policewoman could have prejudiced any potential trials.
Mrs Brooks, who resigned last year as News International chief executive amid the furore over phone-hacking allegations, "fostered" Raisa the horse after it retired from active service in 2008.
She paid food and vet bills until Raisa was rehoused with a police officer in 2010, months before fresh investigations began into illegal activities at the News of the World.
Mrs Brooks is the only suspect being questioned who had already been arrested under Weeting, a source said.
The arrest is potentially embarrassing for David Cameron, who earlier this month was forced to make further admissions about the extent of his relationship with Mr and Mrs Brooks.
After it emerged that Scotland Yard had lent an ex-police horse, Raisa, to Mrs Brooks, the Prime Minister conceded the animal had been among his mounts on rides with Mr Brooks - a friend from their Eton schooldays.
Asked whether the horse riding was emblematic of those overly close ties, Mr Cameron said: "I have known Charlie Brooks, the husband of Rebekah Brooks, for over 30 years.
"He is a good friend and he is a neighbour in the constituency. We live a few miles apart."
Asked about the arrest. a Downing Street spokeswoman said: "The Prime Minister is travelling to Washington. It is an operational matter for the police. You wouldn't expect him to comment on it."
Previous arrests under Operation Weeting include Ian Edmondson, the former News of the World assistant editor; Neville Thurlbeck, the former chief reporter; Neil Wallis, the former executive editor; Rebekah Brooks, the former News International chief executive; and Stuart Kuttner, the former managing editor.
Previous Operation Weeting arrests for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice include Cheryl Carter, the long-standing PA to Rebekah Brooks; Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator; and Ross Hall, the former NOTW reporter.
Questions for News Corp over rival's collapse
Software company NDS allegedly cracked smart card codes of ONdigital, according to evidence to be broadcast on Panorama
Part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation empire employed computer hacking to undermine the business of its chief TV rival in Britain, according to evidence due to be broadcast by BBC1's Panorama programme on Monday .
The allegations stem from apparently incriminating emails the programme-makers have obtained, and on-screen descriptions for the first time from two of the people said to be involved, a German hacker and the operator of a pirate website secretly controlled by a Murdoch company.
The witnesses allege a software company NDS, owned by News Corp, cracked the smart card codes of rival company ONdigital. ONdigital, owned by the ITV companies Granada and Carlton, eventually went under amid a welter of counterfeiting by pirates, leaving the immensely lucrative pay-TV field clear for Sky.
The allegations, if proved, cast further doubt on whether News Corp meets the "fit and proper" test required to run a broadcaster in Britain. It emerged earlier this month that broadcasting regulator Ofcom has set up a unit called Project Apple to establish whether BSkyB, 39.1% owned by News Corp, meets the test.
Panorama's emails appear to state that ONdigital's secret codes were first cracked by NDS, and then subsequently publicised by the pirate website, called The House of Ill Compute – THOIC for short. According to the programme, the codes were passed to NDS's head of UK security, Ray Adams, a former police officer. NDS made smart cards for Sky. NDS was jointly funded by Sky, which says it never ran NDS.
Lee Gibling, operator of THOIC, says that behind the scenes, he was being paid up to £60,000 a year by Adams, and NDS handed over thousands more to supply him with computer equipment.
He says Adams sent him the ONdigital codes so that other pirates could use them to manufacture thousands of counterfeit smart cards, giving viewers illicit free access to ONdigital, then Sky's chief business rival.
Gibling says he and another NDS employee later destroyed much of the computer evidence with a sledgehammer. After that NDS continued to send him money, he says, until the end of 2008, when he was given a severance payment of £15,000 with a confidentiality clause attached. An expert hacker, Oliver Koermmerling, who cracked the codes in the first place, says on the programme that he, like Gibling, had been recruited on NDS's behalf by Adams.
The potentially seismic nature of these pay-TV allegations was underlined over the weekend, when News Corp's lawyers, Allen & Overy, sought to derail the programme in advance by sending round denials and legal threats to other media organisations. They said any forthcoming BBC allegations that NDS "has been involved in illegal activities designed to cause the collapse of a business rival" would be false and libellous, and demanded they not be repeated.
On the programme, former Labour minister Tom Watson, who has been prominent in pursuit of Murdoch over the separate News of the World phone-hacking scandals, predicts that Ofcom could not conceivably regard the Murdochs as "fit and proper" to take full control of Sky, if the allegations were correct.
James Murdoch, who is deputy chief operating officer of News Corp and chairman of BSkyB, was a non-executive director of NDS when ONdigital was hacked. There is no evidence, the BBC says, that he knew about the events alleged by Panorama.
Gibling told the programme: "There was a meeting that took place in a hotel and Mr Adams, myself and other NDS representatives were there … and it became very clear there was a hack going on."
He claimed: "They delivered the actual software to be able to do this, with prior instructions that it should go to the widest possible community … software [intended] to be able to activate ONdigital cards. So giving a full channel line-up without payment."
Gibling says that when fellow pirates found out in 2002 that he was being secretly funded by NDS, THOIC was hastily closed down and he was told by Adams's security unit to make himself scarce.
"We sledgehammered all the hard drives." He says he was told to go into hiding abroad.
Kommerling says he was recruited by Adams in 1996. "He looked at me and said 'Could you imagine working for us?'"
Kommerling was told the NDS marketing department were "looking into the competitors' products" and he cracked the codes for the system used by ONdigital, which came from the French broadcaster Canal Plus.
Later he recognised the codes cracked by his own NDS team, when they got out on to the internet. They appeared on a Canadian pirate site with an identical timestamp: "The timestamp was like a fingerprint," he says.
NDS published its own response to the programme's allegations before transmission, saying: "It is simply not true that NDS used the THOIC website to sabotage the commercial interests of ONdigital/ITV digital or indeed any rival."
NDS admits Gibling was in its pay, but says it was using THOIC as a legitimate undercover device. "NDS paid Lee Gibling for his expertise so information from THOIC could be used to trap and catch hackers and pirates," NDS said.
The company does not dispute the allegations that it got its own hands on ONdigital's secret codes, which was not itself illegal, and that the material was passed on to Adams, its security chief. But NDS says there is an innocent explanation "as part of the fight against pay-TV piracy".
According to NDS: "All companies in the conditional access industry … come to possess codes that could enable hackers to access services for free." This is for the purpose of "research and analysis". They claim that it was part of Adams' job to "liaise with other pay-TV providers" and therefore "it was right and proper for Mr Adams to have knowledge of … codes that could be used by hackers".
The company added: "NDS has never authorised or condoned the posting of any code belonging to any competitor on any website." Adams has denied he ever had the codes.
In 2002 Canal Plus, which supplied ONdigital with its smart card system, sued NDS in a US Court, alleging that NDS had hacked its codes. But no evidence about a link to ONdigital emerged: the case was dropped following a business deal under which Murdoch agreed to purchase some of Canal Plus's assets.
ONdigital briefly became ITV Digital before it went under.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/ma ... v-panorama
gnosticheresy_2 wrote:Puts the recent revelations about cash for access from the Sunday Times in a new light*.
Tory donors can have dinner with David Cameron for £50,000
Joe Murphy
26 August 2010
David Cameron is personally raising cash for the Conservative Party by offering to attend dinners with businessmen who pay a £50,000-a-year donation.
The Prime Minister and senior Cabinet ministers are willing to parade themselves to wealthy donors at functions ranging from drinks after the weekly Question Time in the Commons, to campaign launches.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/poli ... 06988.html
gnosticheresy_2 wrote:*for those that missed it, journos from the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times set up sting that recorded treasurer of the Tory party saying he could set up a private dinner in Downing Street with Cameron (and wife) for a 250k donation. Story came out on Sunday, this comes out today (Monday). R Murdoch's twitter timeline (yes really) was also quite interesting reading over the weekend.
Exclusive: Corrupt police officers are accused of deleting intelligence reports from the national police computer on the orders of criminal gangs in a secret report passed to the Leveson inquiry.
The confidential report produced by the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) in 2008, found that private investigators, linked to organised criminals, used corrupt serving and former police officers to delete intelligence records from law enforcement databases and access details of police operations. The report has been seen by Channel 4 News Home Affairs Correspondent Andy Davies.
The eight-page report, which has been passed to the Leveson inquiry into police corruption and media ethics, warns of "rogue" private investigators "providing organised crime groups with counter-surveillance techniques" and attempting to discover the identities of informants and witnesses under police protection.
The details in the report entitled "Private Investigators: The Rogue Element of the Private Investigation Industry and Others Unlawfully Trading in Personal Data" have never been disclosed publicly before, because the report is labelled "exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act 2000".
Soca analysed five UK Law enforcement operations leading up to 30 September 2007. The report says: "Four of the operations provided examples of corrupt individuals including serving and former police officers, a bank employee, employees in a communications service provider, a public service employee, and a HM Prison Service Employee. All of these were used by private investigators to facilitate access to information."
The former head of anti-corruption at the Met Police, Bob Quick, told Channel 4 News: "There were occasions where cases involved officers removing evidence, destroying evidence.
"This was infrequent but when it occurred it was serious. There were indications that that relationships existed with private investigators and ex-police officers who were suspected of corruption."
"If police operations against serious criminals are being undermined then that's very significant for justice and safety in this country."
It is not clear what action has been taken in the wake of these findings. The Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, Keith Vaz MP, told Channel 4 News on Thursday: "What we will have to do, and I will discuss this with colleagues on the committee, is to call in the then Home Secretary (Jacqui Smith) to ask whether or not she knew about what was going on, and certainly ask Soca to come in because this is signed off by Soca - they're supposed to be there to protect us from serious and organised crime. "
"If they knew that there was this widespread deletion of information, and the connection between private investigators and police officers who were involved in inappropriate action, it's very important that they come before the committee and explain themselves, as a matter of urgency."
The confidential Soca report details illegal acts by (unnamed) private investigators which go far beyond the sphere of privacy, describing how criminal gangs used private investigators to access police computers, enabling them to see - and even delete - evidence linked to live cases.
Under the heading Perverting the Course of Justice, the report records two operations providing:
"examples of private investigator activities which threaten to undermine the criminal justice system, as follows:
a. accessing the Police National Computer to perform unauthorised checks;
b. accessing internal police databases including those containing serving officers' private details;
c. unauthorised checking of details of vehicles involved in surveillance on PNC (Police National Computer);
d. accessing details of current investigation against a criminal or criminal group;
e. checking premises and vehicles for technical equipment deployed by law enforcement;
f. identifying current law enforcement interest in an organised crime group;
g. deleting intelligence records from law enforcement databases;
h. providing organised crime groups with counter-surveillance techniques;
i. accessing their own or associates' recorded convictions;
j. attempting to discover identity of CHISes (Informants)
k. attempting to discover location of witnesses;
l. attempting to discover location of witnesses under police protection to intimidate them;
m. accessing DVLA databases."
Currently there is no regulation of the private investigation industry, despite the fact that the Private Security Industry Act 2001 allowed specifically for licensing to be introduced. Anyone can undertake private investigative activity regardless of skills, experience or criminality. No one knows how many private investigators are operating in the UK. Estimates vary between 2000-10,000.
Soca warned the Home Office in its 2008 report: "The ability of the investigators to commit such criminality is supported by the absence of regulation in the industry, an abundance of law enforcement expertise either through corrupt contacts or from a previous career in law enforcement, easy access to specialist experts and abuse of legally-available technology."
A Home Office spokesperson told Channel 4 News: "We are considering whether to regulate private investigators. In the meantime they are subject to the law on intercepting communications like everyone else."
It is not known what Lord Leveson intends to do with this report of much wider police corruption than he is currently investigating.
http://www.channel4.com/news/new-police ... ret-report
DAILY MAIL (INCLUDING WEEKEND MAGAZINE): SPENT £143,150 ON 1,728 REQUESTS
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http://www.itv.com/news/2012-03-28/do-n ... t-publish/
Phone-Hacking Scandal Comes to the U.S.
Apr 11, 2012 10:39 AM EDT
In an exclusive interview, a London lawyer reveals his plans to take on Murdoch on behalf of clients who believe their phones were hacked in America.
Lewis has been Rupert Murdoch’s prime antagonist in the crisis rocking the mogul’s media empire in Britain. His 2007 lawsuit on behalf of a hacked soccer official kicked the scandal into gear, and he broke it open this summer with his suit on behalf of the parents of Milly Dowler, the murdered schoolgirl whose phone was hacked by Murdoch journalists when she disappeared. The uproar surrounding the Dowler revelations caused Murdoch to shutter his legendary News of the World tabloid, and he agreed to a landmark, multimillion-dollar payout to settle the family’s legal claim.
When Lewis went toe-to-toe in those negotiations with Murdoch, there came a moment, he says, when Murdoch finally blinked—and it was when Lewis threatened that, in his words, “we would take it to America.”
Now Lewis says he is mounting a U.S. challenge to Murdoch all the same. In an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast, Lewis confirmed for the first time that he plans to file three separate lawsuits on behalf of clients who believe their phones were hacked while they were on U.S. soil. At least one of the cases, Lewis adds, involves allegations that the phone of a U.S. citizen was hacked. “This is getting wider,” Lewis says. A spokesperson for News Corporation declined to comment.
Lawyers and Murdoch opponents have been searching hard for U.S.-based cases since the scandal reached a head this summer. For one, they could bring the public-relations nightmare closer to home for News Corp., the parent company for Murdoch’s media conglomerate, which is headquartered in New York.
Analysts say the company has worked hard to limit the damage to its U.K. arm, News International, whose newspaper business accounts for just a fraction of the News Corp. bottom line. “News Corp. has so far tried to keep matters in the U.K. and has moved toward a policy of settling all cases as speedily as possible,” says Claire Enders, a London-based media analyst who follows News Corp. closely. “Mark Lewis launching these lawsuits in the U.S. brings the issue of phone hacking into News Corp.’s backyard, where they have the potential for significant embarrassment. And the people who are going to get the most embarrassed by this are the Murdochs in New York.”
Murdochalypse Comes To America: Is Fox News Next To Fall?
byNews CorpseFollowforMedia Watch
The scandal that is devouring Rupert Murdoch's international media empire has thus far resulted in numerous arrests of public officials in Britain and top-level Murdoch executives. It led to the closure of Murdoch's tabloid, News of the World. It tarnished the reputations of the Murdoch ruling family to the point that the once heir apparent, James Murdoch, was forced to resign from the chairmanship of both News International and the British Sky Broadcasting satellite network.
This cesspool of criminality and debased ethics has grown from what News Corp once tried to dismiss as a "single rogue reporter" to a corporate-wide syndicate of corruption.
Brought to you by...
News Corpse
The Internet's Chronicle Of Media Decay
Nevertheless, News Corp has somehow managed to contain the damage to its European assets. That is quite a feat considering that any reputation for misbehavior on the scale seen here ought to rub off on the rest of the enterprise responsible for it. The main sticking point has been that the scandal had not crossed the Atlantic to America.
Well that shield may have just been pierced. Mark Lewis, a British attorney who has represented several figures in the News Corp hacking affair, including the family of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, is coming to America with a caseload that includes alleged victims of Murdoch's Mafia who are citizens of the United States. The Daily Beast reports that...
...Lewis confirmed for the first time that he plans to file three separate lawsuits on behalf of clients who believe their phones were hacked while they were on U.S. soil. At least one of the cases, Lewis adds, involves allegations that the phone of a U.S. citizen was hacked.
If Lewis has American clients who were subjected to the same sort of illegal intrusions that were a core part of News Corp's British operations, this is a whole new ballgame. Even though the national borders ought not to protect Murdoch from repercussions arising from his sleazy business practices, that protection will become moot if it is proven that the same activities were perpetrated on these shores.
It remains to be seen if Lewis has the goods on Murdoch, but it is hard to believe that disreputable press entities like Fox News and the New York Post would consider themselves above their British cousins, especially when many of the managers at the U.S. branches transferred to their stateside posts from the corrupt News International executive suites. And if Lewis doesn't have the goods now, he may shortly acquire them as the investigation continues.
Even though this scandal has already ensnared News Corp executives and English police officials and politicians, it may just be beginning to heat up. Stay tuned.
Times of London Sued in Hacking Scandal
By ALAN COWELL AND RAVI SOMAIYA
Published: April 13, 2012
LONDON — As Britain’s hacking scandal shows little sign of easing, a high-profile London lawyer who has been closely involved in pursuing cases involving Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloids said on Friday that his firm was suing the upmarket Times of London over e-mail hacking for which the newspaper has apologized.
The lawyer, Mark Lewis, said in an interview Friday that the “claim has been issued,” and that he would soon be filing a comprehensive statement of case against the London newspaper, also part of Mr. Murdoch’s British newspaper group, News International. The suit, filed Tuesday, concerns a case in which a reporter who is no longer with the newspaper hacked into the e-mail account of Richard Horton, a police detective who ran an award-winning blog under the pseudonym NightJack. The claim, Mr. Lewis said, “is not just on misuse of information or privacy grounds, but also a claim for what lawyers would call deceit,” based on denials the newspaper made. A spokeswoman for News International confirmed the suit had been filed, but declined to comment further.
The blogger’s true identity was not publicly known until an article in The Times of London in 2009 identified him as Mr. Horton.
At a hearing in February of the so-called Leveson inquiry into press ethics and practices, James Harding, the editor of The Times of London, apologized on behalf of the newspaper, saying “I sorely regret the intrusion” into the e-mail account.
His acknowledgment reversed earlier denials by the newspaper.
Britain’s hacking scandal has focused largely on the illicit interception of voice mails, which are at the center of overlapping police, parliamentary and judicial inquiries mainly involving News International, the British newspaper subsidiary of the giant News Corporation.
Investigators are also examining the payment of bribes to public officials at two Murdoch-owned tabloids, The Sun and the now-defunct News of the World.
Hacking into people’s e-mails is a potentially more serious crime than listening to their voice mail messages, and last summer the police opened Operation Tuleta, an investigation into computer hacking that is being held in tandem with one on phone hacking (Operation Weeting) and another on bribing the police (Operation Elveden).
The scandal may be poised to go beyond Britain.
On Thursday, Mr. Lewis, the lawyer, said that he planned for the first time to sue on behalf of alleged victims in the United States, the center of Mr. Murdoch’s global media empire.
In a telephone interview, he said that he would take legal action on behalf of three people — a well-known sports person, a sports person not in the public eye and an American citizen, none of whom he would further identify.
“The News of the World had thousands of people they hacked,” Mr. Lewis said, when announcing the suits in an interview with the BBC, referring to the Sunday tabloid that Mr. Murdoch closed down last year as the hacking scandal engulfed it. “Some of them were in America at the time, either traveling or resident there.”
It was not immediately clear how or whether the action would affect the News Corporation. News International declined immediate comment on the cases.
Mr. Lewis’s clients in the hacking scandal include the family of Milly Dowler, an abducted teenager who was found murdered in an outer London suburb in 2002, and whose voice mail was said to have been hacked after she disappeared. Public outrage at the case helped propel the hacking scandal to new heights in July, leading to the closure of The News of the World.
Reports last year said News International had offered a package of compensation worth some $4.8 million in that case, made up of $3.2 million to the Dowler family, with an additional payment of about $1.6 million to go to charity.
News International has so far paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars in other compensation settlements to dozens of hacking victims. But, the BBC said, more than 4,000 people have been identified by the police as possible victims of phone hacking.
The scandal spread further earlier this month when a British satellite news broadcaster, Sky News, whose parent company is partly owned by News Corporation admitted that one of its reporters had hacked into e-mails on two occasions while pursuing news coverage, the first time that such accusations had spilled into television news.
The acknowledgment came just two days after Mr. Murdoch’s son James resigned as chairman of Sky’s parent company, British Sky Broadcasting, or BSkyB, of which News Corporation owns around 39 percent. Company officials said there was no link between the resignation and the hacking revelations, which were made public only as a result of an inquiry by the newspaper The Guardian.
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