Report: UK tabloid hacked into voicemails

[seemslikeadream]

What's on the other side of this new consciousness - well, that's for us to decide!

I can't wait.

countdown has begun -
Strong quake hits N. Japan, tsunami warning issued March 9,2011
March 9, 2011

[semper occultus]

one of Murdoch's board members involved in Patriot Act :

The Americans who are trying to rescue Rupert Murdoch

www.telegraph.co.uk


Clockwise from left: Rupert Murdoch, Chase Carey, James Murdoch, Elisabeth Murdoch, Viet Dinh and Joel Klein
By James Quinn, and Richard Blackden
9:29PM BST 09 Jul 2011

Law professor Viet Dinh played a central role in 2001 in drafting the Patriot Act, the US government's legal response to the September 11 terrorist attacks that saw surveillance powers increase dramatically.
Mr Dinh, who was born in Vietnam, teaches at Washington's Georgetown University and has sat on News Corp's board since 2004.

[crikkett]

What's on the other side of this new consciousness - well, that's for us to decide!

I can't wait.

countdown has begun -

SLAD, what day are we in, according to this chart/theory?
I can't find my notes.

[gnosticheresy_2]

Another mainstream commentator (who I have a lot of respect for) who is "almost there". Just a little bit further along Paul, you think things are interesting now? Just you wait....

(left out quite a few of the links, I'm assuming people on RI know who Chomsky is

Murdoch: the network defeats the hierarchy

Rupert Murdoch has dispensed power, terrorized politicians and shaped politics

The Murdoch empire fractured, a Conservative prime minister attracting bets on his resignation, the Metropolitan Police on the edge of yet another existential crisis and the political establishment in disarray.

A network of subversives would have counted that a spectacular result to achieve in a decade, let alone in a single week. But it was not subversives that achieved it - the wounds are self-inflicted.

As the News of the World scandal gathered momentum it became clear, by midnight on Thursday, that this was not just the latest of a series of institutional crises - the banks, MPs expenses - but the biggest. For this one goes to the heart of the way this country has been run, under both parties, for decades.

Like the Wizard of Oz, Rupert Murdoch's power derived from the irrational fright politicians took from his occasional naked displays of it”

It is like a nightmare scripted by Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Zizek: key parts of the political machinery of Britain are wavering.

The strength of the Murdoch newspaper and TV empire was that it occupied the commanding heights a kind of journalism that dispenses power, intimidates and influences politicians and shapes political outcomes.

The other rival power node is Jonathan Harmsworth's Daily Mail and General Trust - which sets the agenda for all other news media in the UK but lacks the global reach.

Conrad Black's Daily Telegraph once occupied the third peak, but in terms of influence has been a shadow of its former self in terms of influence since the old proprietor went to jail, and then - under new owners - broke the MPs expenses scandal.

The primary function of these journalistic centres of power is to dispense approval or disapproval to politicians. A News International journalist is reported to have said to Labour leader Ed Miliband: "You've made it personal with Rebekah so we're going to make it personal with you."

That is the kind of power that, until about 1500 on Thursday, journalists in that circle could wield.

Manufacturing consent

But not any more: for all the difficulties Mr Cameron had with the immediate question - of judgement over the employment of Andy Coulson; of what did he ask and when - it is clear that he intends to make a strategic break with the press barons. Likewise, Mr Miliband had already burned his bridges.

If Britain's senior politicians are serious about that break then it will signal - without a single law being passed - a major change in the country's de-facto constitution.

In economics journalism, we have learned to study what the Financial Times writer Gillian Tett calls "the social silence": the subject that everybody at high-class cocktail parties wants to avoid.

After Lehman Brothers collapsed, we realised that the unasked question had been the most important: "on whose books do the increasingly toxic debts of the housing market stand?" The answer was "in the shadow banking system", but we only knew it existed when it collapsed.

Few were surprised to see a man who once ran the government's information operation arrested
The political equivalent of that question is the one everybody has been asking journalists and politicians this weekend: why do all politicians kow-tow to Mr Murdoch; what is it that makes them incapable of seeing the moral hazards of the relationship?

Nobody outside the Murdoch circle knows the full answer, but I suspect it is quite prosaic: like the Wizard of Oz, Mr Murdoch's power derived from the irrational fright politicians took from his occasional naked displays of it. The Kinnock "light bulb" headline was probably the signal moment. He was powerful because people believed he had the power, and that editors like Mrs Brooks and Mr Coulson probably had a file on everybody bigger than MI5's, and so you should never, ever, cross them.

Now there is a school of social theory that has a name for a system in which press barons, police officers and elected politicians operate a mutual back-scratching club: it is termed "the manufacturing of consent".

Pioneered by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, the theory states that essentially the mass media is a propaganda machine; that the advertising model makes large corporate advertisers into "unofficial regulators"; that the media live in fear of politicians; that truly objective journalism is impossible because it is unprofitable (and plagued by "flak" generated within the legal system by resistant corporate power).

At one level, this week's events might be seen as a vindication of the theory: News International has admitted paying police officers; and politicians are admitting they have all played the game of influence ("We've all been in this together" said Cameron, disarmingly). The journalists are baring their breasts and examining their consciences. The whole web of influence has been uncovered.

Market logic

But what challenges the theory is first, the role of the social media in breaking the old system. Large corporations pulled their advertising because the scale of the social media response allowed them to know what they are obsessed with knowing: the scale of the reputational threat to their own brands.

We do not yet know the scale of the Twitter and Facebook campaign on companies to pull their ad spend. A sense of it can be gleaned by the 150,000 submissions to Ofcom over the BSkyB takeover.

It was the present and future threat to advertising revenue and to investment that forced Mr Murdoch to kill the News of the World.

As Mrs Brooks told the journalists, she has "had sight of the future" on this: she and James Murdoch know the full scale of what is to be revealed about the NOTW, and may have judged that it would lead, inevitably, to the total collapse of its ad revenue as any criminal proceedings played out in court.

Those bemoaning the "unnecessary" closure of the NOTW ignore the market logic. Even if the guilty parties had long ago moved on, the NOTW was essentially the same product.

The current senior management of NI are having to admit to post-crime "errors of judgement" revolving around their attempts to pay hush-money to the perpetrators and failure to investigate.

Given what may now happen in the courts, it had to go as a brand to prevent gangrene to the whole of Newscorp: the Church of England's investment fund has demanded the sacking of senior NI managers with immediate disinvestment in the entire Newscorp group as the sanction.

Though Twitter played its part, as in Egypt it was the interplay between social media responses and the mainstream television networks that toppled the giant.

If the BBC, ITN and Sky had - like Egyptian state TV on 25 January - just ignored the furore, Mrs Brooks and Mr Cameron may, even now, have been sitting down to Sunday lunch somewhere in Oxfordshire.

But the UK broadcast media has - unlike in the US - effective regulation. Instead of a culture of partisanship there is a culture of impartiality. There are infuriating (for those who work here) checks and balances. And there is a regulator as well as "self-regulation".

I would add, even the most "constructed" of TV and radio journalism looks natural and spontaneous compared to the machine-written prose of tabloid newspapers: I have become convinced that the Facebook generation, when it reads such newspapers at all, does so ironically, much as it watches Big Brother. That is, even though you can make a business model out of selling scandal sheets about the famous, you cannot manufacture consent with it anymore.

In addition, even as the tabloid press has money out of the "sexploits" of the famous, mainstream TV drama - including that produced by Mr Murdoch studios - has come to revolve around a single theme: the supposed rampant corruption of the entire political, media, police and legal systems.

Once it was only at places like National Theatre, with plays by David Hare and Howard Brenton, where you could see such stories aired (Hare's Pravda, about Murdoch's takeover of the Times, is worth re-reading; the script was sent by the playwright to the Culture Secretary as a submission in the BSkyB case.) Now it is everywhere, from the Batman movies, to The Matrix, to the Bond movies - leave aside series like State of Play.

It has been remarked (by Richard Bacon, I think) that these scandals are like The Wire, working series by series through every institution. But the last series of the Wire is five years old. We know the whole story already.

Nobody under the age of 50 is remotely surprised to see a man once trusted to run the information operation of the British government arrested, or to see the Met admit that "a small group of officers" took payment.

Institutions weakened

Finally, the political influence that was supposed to stop the system crumbling, itself has crumbled. We are told Tony Blair pleaded with Gordon Brown to call off Tom Watson MP from his crusade over the original hacking allegations. It did not work.

Tom Baldwin, Ed Miliband's spin-doctor purposely selected from the Murdoch empire to hone Labour's message in the direction of Wapping, warned Labour "not to conflate phone-hacking and BSkyB". Mr Miliband's Bloomberg speech on Friday contradicted that approach.

Rupert Murdoch's resilience relies on the few handpicked lieutenants and family members holed up in London and New York”

One part of the Chomsky doctrine has been proven by exception. He stated that newspapers that told the truth could not make money. The Guardian, whose veteran reporter Nick Davies led the investigation, is indeed burning money and may run out of it in three years' time.

But a combination of the Guardian, Twitter and the public-service broadcasters, including Sky News, proved stronger than the power and influence of Rupert Murdoch, and for now the rest of Fleet Street has joined in the kicking.

(It should be said here that the Daily Telegraph's role in the exposure of the MPs expenses scandal laid the groundwork for this moment. The Telegraph proved you can attack major sections of the political elite, who had assumed impunity, and win.)

Now three institutions stand weakened: Mr Murdoch is facing the collapse of his BSkyB bid; a Conservative Party, cut adrift from him, faces a moment of internal re-appraisal; and in the cappuccino joints around New Scotland Yard there is apprehension over whether the Met can survive another systemic kicking so soon after the MacPherson report.

Of all these institutions, it is the one with least resilience among the mass of people that stands in greatest danger. The Conservative Party has branches, summer fetes, jumble sales and social roots going back centuries; the Met is, tonight, dressed in its stab vests and fuelled by stale McDonalds, dealing with traumatized victims of urban mayhem on housing estates few politicians would dare to visit after dark.

But Rupert Murdoch's resilience relies on the few handpicked lieutenants and family members holed up in London and New York. It is a classic "Weberian hierarchy" - a command structure stronger vertically than horizontally.

Six months ago, in the context of Tunisia and Egypt, I wrote that the social media networks had made "all propaganda instantly flammable". It was an understatement: complex and multifaceted media empires that do much more than propaganda, and which command the respect and loyalty of millions of readers are now also flammable.

Where all this leaves Noam Chomsky's theory I will rely on the inevitable wave of comments from its supporters to flesh out.

But the most important fact is: not for the first time in 2011, the network has defeated the hierarchy.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14093772

[coffin_dodger]

@ crikkett - here ya go...

http://www.mayanmajix.com/9_wave_chart.html

[justdrew]

isn't it about time for Rupert to be found with his wrists slit in a public park?

[seemslikeadream]

What's on the other side of this new consciousness - well, that's for us to decide!

I can't wait.

countdown has begun -

SLAD, what day are we in, according to this chart/theory?
I can't find my notes.

I don't think anyone knows

all I know is I'm living every precious moment in the moment cause reality is not what I once thought it was

if nothing weird happens in October it won't matter to me cause I'm already gone


For my own part, I have never had a thought
Which I could not set down in words
With even more distinctness that which I conceived it.
There is however a class of fancies of exquisite delicacy
Which are not thoughts and to which as yet
I have found it absolutely impossible to adapt to language.
These fancies arise in the soul,
Alas how rarely, only at epochs
Of most intense tranquillity
When the bodily and mental health are in perfection.
And those mere points of time
When the confines of the waking world
Blend with the world of dreams.
And so I captured this fancy
Where all that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

[Searcher08]

I remember someone describing meeting him at a party and saying he (Murdoch) found it very funny the scary image people had about him, when actually Rupert's defining characteristic was that he was the world's greatest... GOSSIP!

[Stephen Morgan]

I'd be a great gossip if I was eavedropping on everyone.

He won't turn up dead. Coulson, maybe.

[Nordic]

Yeah, that'd be like Karl Rove turning up dead.

[seemslikeadream]

Rebekah Brooks Savaged In Final News Of The World Crossword Clues
........
One big sign? The final crossword puzzle in the News of the World, which was shut down thanks to the phone hacking scandal that has plunged Murdoch's News International into one of its gravest crises ever. Some very fishy clues managed to sneak their way past the editors (or, rather, managed to sneak their way in with the consent of the editors).

Some of the clues in the paper's Quickie crossword include "Brook," "stink" and "catastrophe."

Another crossword included the clues "criminal enterprise" and "string of recordings," which could reference both the hacking scandal and the leaked recordings of Brooks' chat with News of the World staffers. There was also "woman stares wildly at calamity." The answer to that particular clue? "Disaster." Other answers included "menace," "deplored," "stench" and "tart."

Moreover, The Guardian spotted a rather direct attack on Brooks that was posted in the Irish offices of the News of the World: a picture of her head on Adolf Hitler's body, complete with drawn-on Hitler mustache.

[gnosticheresy_2]

Now it gets really interesting. 9/11 victims? Oh dear, oh dear oh dear

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp could face $100m bill for US investigation into 'police payments'

Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation empire could face a bill of more than $100m (£62m) if US authorities launch an investigation into corruption following allegations that the News of the World routinely made payments to police officers totalling more than £100,000.

If convicted the company would face a fine many times that size, lawyers have warned.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) have been increasingly aggressive in bringing cases against corporations under America's Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). They have so far imposed penalties as high as $800m on companies – such as Siemens – where there has been evidence of persistent and unaccounted for bribery.

FCPA experts told The Telegraph it would be "very surprising" if the DOJ didn't take action against News Corp, and would be likely to do so this week. Any FCPA probe against News Corp would damage its reputation and could further destabilisie James Murdoch's position as Rupert Murdoch's heir apparent.

Experts said it would be likely to involve a "systematic and all encompassing" investigation of every one of its business units worldwide, to uncover unlawful bribery, legitimate payments wrongly accounted for, and to check whether sufficiently robust anti-corruption measures are in place.

News Corp would have to bear the cost of the probe, which sources said would "easily cost north of $100m" and tie the organisation up in red tape for between two and four years.

In 2008, the DOJ ordered Avon Products to carry out a worldwide investigation after there was evidence of bribery in China. The probe, which is still ongoing, has so far cost the cosmetics giant $154m, according to filings.

Mike Koehler, an FCPA expert and law professor at Butler University, said: "Enquiries often start with a limited set of facts but very quickly morph into an examination of the entire business. They tend to be very cumbersome and because they are newsworthy they cause a lot of reputational damage."

Thomas Fox, a lawyer and FCPA expert based in Houston, added: "It may be difficult to understand how expensive and all-encompassing FCPA is. If you don't have anti-corruption policies in place that's the first strike against you and it's downhill from there."

According to Mr Fox, US authorities have stepped up the number of convictions from five in 2004 to 74 last year, and convicted companies have been fined between $77m and $800m depending on the number of breaches

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/news ... ments.html

[seemslikeadream]

Blair accused of trying to silence Murdoch critic

By Martin Hickman and Cahal Milmo

Monday, 11 July 2011

The MP who led the Commons campaign to expose phone hacking was reportedly told he would be 'pursued for the rest of his life'

Tony Blair urged Gordon Brown to persuade the Labour MP who led the campaign to expose the phone-hacking scandal to fall silent, according to a report yesterday.

The Mail on Sunday stated that "well-placed" sources said Mr Blair had sought to encourage Mr Brown to ask his supporter Tom Watson to back off. A "friend of Mr Brown" was quoted as saying: "There is no doubt about it, Tony wanted Gordon to intervene." Mr Watson, who claimed last week that News International had entered "the criminal underworld", was reported to have been told that Rebekah Brooks, News International's chief executive, "will pursue you for the rest of your life".

Earlier this year, another Labour MP, Chris Bryant, said in a Commons speech that a senior figure allied to Mr Murdoch had warned his friends that speaking out about the scandal would not be forgotten.

Members of the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee claim they were warned off calling Ms Brooks to give evidence to them in the committee's inquiry about phone hacking.

News International last night made no comment in response to the claims about Ms Brooks' alleged attempt to put pressure on Mr Watson to back off.

A spokesman for Mr Blair, who enjoyed a cordial relationship with News International's proprietor Rupert Murdoch, denied the claim by the Mail on Sunday. The spokesman said: "The allegation is categorically untrue." Mr Brown's office declined to comment.

Mr Watson told The Independent: "Senior people told me that was the case but I have not spoken to Tony or Gordon about it."

[Harvey]

Murdoch was a great white in a sea of sharks. There's enough of his blood in the water now and other large predators are hungry. Which big fish can possibly occupy his niche if he becomes sufficiently weakened?

That's one hell of a power vacuum...

And it's a little unnerving how inevitable all this already begins to seem. Know what I mean?

[seemslikeadream]

Phone hacking scandal: Twelve face prison - three are police
By David Collins 11/07/2011

At least nine journalists and three police officers are facing prison over the News of the World phone-hacking and corruption scandals.

Some of the 12 have already been questioned and bailed and Scotland Yard sources said it was "very likely" there would be further arrests soon.

And it emerged yesterday that a 2007 internal News International report indicated hacking was more widespread than previously thought. But it is claimed the evidence was not given to police until June this year.

Senior Met police officer John Yates has promised that any police found to have been paid cash for stories by the newspaper would be jailed.

It is claimed that three corrupt Met police officers - listed under false names in the News of the World's cash records - were bunged around £120,000.

Last night Assistant Commissioner Yates was urged to resign over his failure to uncover the extent of hacking at the former newspaper.

Mr Yates was asked by the Met Commissioner to review the case in July 2009 after a previous investigation had led to just one journalist - royal editor Clive Goodman - being jailed.

But he decided within the space of one working day that there was no fresh material that could lead to further convictions.

Former Home Office Minister David Mellor said: "The police accepted what News International said, that it was one rogue reporter.

"I believe in justice. I believe in law and order, and the institutions of this country doing things properly.

"My final word about Mr Yates is he should go."

Mr Yates said yesterday his decision not to reopen the inquiry had been "really c**p one" and added: "I am accountable and it happened on my watch and it's clear I could have done more. I have regrettably said the initial inquiry was a success. Clearly, it looks very different."

The original investigation into phone hacking in 2006/07 was led by Andy Hayman, Britain's former senior anti-terrorist officer.

At the time the married dad-of-two had a close relationship with Nikki Redmond, who worked at the Independent Police Complaints Commission.

In testimony submitted to Parliament, Mark Lewis, the Milly Dowler family's solicitor, suggests Mr Hayman was unwilling to investigate hacking because he feared his alleged affair with Mrs Redmond would be exposed by the paper. Police have secured computers and other evidence in the News of the World's deserted newsroom in Wapping, East London.

But detectives suspect the paper of covering up information when the scandal first emerged in 2005/06.

The internal News International report in 2007 also stated money might have been paid by journalists to corrupt police officers.

Documents also reveal a cabal of six journalists - Goodman, Alex Marunchak, Greg Miskiw, Neville Thurlbeck, James Weatherup and Ian Edmondson - had dealings with Glenn Mulcaire, the private detective paid more than £100,000 a year by the newspaper to hack phones. Mr Weatherup, Mr Thurlbeck and Mr Edmondson were arrested in April and freed on bail until September.

Goodman - along with the paper's former editor Andy Coulson - was arrested on Friday and bailed until October.

Mr Marunchak has already gone on record to deny any wrongdoing. Three other journalists who knew about Mulcaire's activities also face possible charges.

Mr Coulson was questioned on Friday about alleged payments to corrupt officers while he was editor. There is allegedly a cache of emails and cash records which reveal Mr Coulson discuss ed payments totalling £120,000 to three pseudonyms who are thought to be police officers.

They also appear to show that phone hacking went beyond the activities of a single rogue reporter, which was the newspaper's claim at the time.

Murdoch’s Troika
by Gwynne Dyer

The troika hurtles across the frozen plain. The wolves are close behind, and from time to time a peasant is hurled from the sleigh in the hope of letting the more important people escape. But nothing distracts the pack for long, not even when the occupants of the sleigh move up the pecking order and throw a couple of minor aristocrats to the wolves.

Wait! What’s this? They have thrown a newspaper to the wolves? An entire newspaper, with two hundred full-time employees and hundreds more freelance contributors? How do they think that that will help them to get away?

The troika is called News International, the newspaper wing of Rupert Murdoch’s globe-spanning media empire. The paper that has just been sacrificed is the News of the World, a Sunday tabloid that claims to have more readers than any other paper in the English-speaking world.

The NoW makes a tidy profit, but this Sunday’s edition will be its last. After 168 years, the institution that pioneered the art of persuading the emerging class of semi-literate English people to buy newspapers has been shut down by its owners.

Semi-literates were consumers too. If it took a steady diet of salacious and scandalous stories about the rich and/or famous to get them to read a newspaper, the publishers of the NoW were always willing to provide it. The advertisers flocked in and the “News of the Screws”, as the magazine Private Eye dubbed it in the 1970s, flourished like the green bay tree.

It used to get its salacious and scandalous stories by paying celebrities’ friends to betray them, or just by going through celebrities’ garbage in search of letters, receipts, etc. Starting as long ago as the late 1990s, however, the NoW also started hacking new communications technologies, even though that was against the law.

Over the past decade the NoW has paid various shady characters to hack the voice-mails, e-mails and other electronic data of literally thousands of people, from members of the British royal family to Z-list celebrities. A few of them, suspecting they had been hacked, launched lawsuits against the paper, and the whole shabby enterprise began to unravel.

The first peasants to be thrown from the troika were the NoW’s royal correspondent, Clive Goodman, and the private eye he had paid to hack into the royal family’s e-mails, Glenn Mulcaire. Both men went to prison in 2007. The management at the NoW insisted that they were just a couple of “bad apples” – but it paid their legal expenses, and probably much more besides, in order to buy their silence about any further hacking.

The stone-walling worked for a while, as the police soft-pedalled the investigation (the NoW had been paying them for stories, after all). But details of the hacking continued to leak out anyway, and during this year several more senior NoW journalists have been arrested for questioning, including former editor Andy Coulson.

James Murdoch, the 80-year-old Rupert’s son and heir apparent, was moved from London to New York in March, at least partly to put him beyond easy reach of the British legal system. (He was ultimately responsible for the NoW at the time of the crimes.)

Last week it was revealed that the NoW had been hacking not only celebrities’ voice-mails, but also those of a murdered schoolgirl, of the grieving families of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan, and of victims of the terrorist attack in London in 2005. Public disgust was intense, and it was clearly time to throw the wolves a really big meal.

The obvious candidate was Rebekah Brooks, who was the editor of the NoW in the early years of phone hacking (2000-03). She is now the chief executive of News International, and a close personal friend of Rupert Murdoch, so firing her would create the impression that Murdoch’s empire was serious about cleaning house. Instead, Rupert Murdoch closed the News of the World itself down.

His son James made the announcement, lamenting the loss of a paper with a “proud history of fighting crime, exposing wrong-doing and regularly setting the news agenda for the nation.” How true. Why, in its last edition it had a front-page story about Florence Brudenell-Bruce’s revelation that her new boyfriend, Prince Harry, was “fantastic in bed.” The only picture they could find to illustrate the story, alas, showed her in her underwear.

News International isn’t really going to lose money by closing the NoW. It will be replaced almost immediately by a new Sunday edition of its weekday stable-mate, the Sun: new web addresses for thesunonsunday.com and TheSunOnSunday.co.uk were registered last week. As British Justice Secretary Ken Clarke pointed out: "All they're going to do is rebrand it".

But why didn’t they just blame it all on Rebekah Brooks and fire her? Because if Rebekah Brooks goes down, the next person in the line of fire will inevitably be James Murdoch himself. That cannot be allowed to happen, because he is leading News Corporation’s bid for control of British Sky Broadcasting, which would give it utter dominance in the British media and huge profits.

So leave Brooks out there to draw fire at least until the British government approves the BSkyB takeover bid. Then, if necessary, she can be thrown out of the troika too.

BBC: Tabloid's pay to protective service put royal family's security at risk

By Douglas Stanglin, USA TODAY
Updated 19m ago

The embattled British tabloid at the center of a phone-hacking scandal put the royal family's security at risk by allegedly paying royal protection officers for contact details of senior members of the British royal family, the BBC reports.

BBC business editor Robert Peston says emails uncovered in 2007 by News International, the parent company of the now defunct tabloid News of the World, contain evidence that a reporter paid the equivalent of $1,600 dollars to police officers in the royal protection branch for information and phone details of the British royal family.

"There was clear evidence from the emails that the security of the royal family was being put at risk," the source said. "I was profoundly shocked when I saw them."

Equally astonishing, Peston reports, is that the "unambiguous signs of criminal activity" were not given to police for investigation when they surfaced four years ago.

An initially police inquiry, now discredited, blamed phone-hacking incidents on rogue individuals and not top editors of the newspaper.

As the scandal multiplies almost daily. Rupert Murdoch, head of the News Corp. that owns the tabloid, is in London to try to contain the damage. Publication of the News of the World ceased on Sunday.

This weekend Murdoch publicly backed News International CEO Rebekah Brooks, who was editor of the News of the World at the time of the phone-hacking incidents, despite widespread calls from parliament that she resign.

Although phone hacking, involving mainly celebrities and some royal aides, has been known for years, outrage erupted in recent weeks following allegations that the newspaper hacked the phone of private individuals, including a 13-year-old girl who had been kidnapped and murdered.

Since then, reports have surfaced of payoffs to police and of hacking of voice mail of victims of a London terrorist bombing and soldiers killed in combat.

The scandal has also put at risk Murdoch's attempt to finalize the controversial takeover of the BSkyB pay TV operation. Shares of BSkyB plunged 6.7% today.