Report: UK tabloid hacked into voicemails

[kenoma]

Elephants in media living rooms:

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

THEATRE

And Tom Alexander, CEO of Orange and T-Mobile (and before that the founder of Virgin Mobile) resigned today, "to pursue other interests".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14187420

[Harvey]

S'what I'm afraid of.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Elephants in media living rooms:

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

You mean the cell-phone provider's cooperation, or the permission of the person carrying the phone? "Pinging" wouldn't be much use in tracking criminals if the cops needed to ask their permission first. Why would drug dealers move to Pay As You Go mobiles and even old-style phone boxes to do their business if it was impossible to track a regular mobile without their knowledge or cooperation?

The police can get the cell-phone provider's cooperation pretty easily - Hoare's claim was that the journos were paying cops circa £500 a time to ping celeb's phones on their behalf, or pretending to be British Telecom engineers so as to get the providers to do it for them directly. There have been suggestions that the NOTW and other papers have insiders at the phone companies too, just like the police/Special Branch/MI5, etc. do.

And Tom Alexander, CEO of Orange and T-Mobile(and before that Virgin Mobile) resigned today, "to pursue other interests".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14187420

Farewell, Tom Alexander. We hardly knew ye!

Reminds me of the way Jeff Kindler left Pfizer, immediately and without explanation, after Wikileaks revealed their illegal drug testing and dirty tricks campaign against the Attorney General of Nigeria. I seem to remember a few other of their top execs stepping down at the same time. Wonder if we'll see more telecoms guys wanting to "spend more time with their families."
http://www.law.com/jsp/cc/PubArticleCC. ... 2476082081

[Harvey]

Elephants in media living rooms:

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

Farewell, Tom Alexander. We hardly knew ye!

Ar, Tom lad, Arrrr....

[Harvey]

And what be more you lags, The Company Behind Cell Phone Tracking In America Is Selling Its Technology To Foreign Governments

LOL

The Company Behind Cell Phone Tracking In America Is Selling Its Technology To Foreign Governments

For several years, AT&T and T-Mobile have installed TruePosition software on their phones to tell police where customers are if they're in danger.

According to Wired, TruePosition grabs about 60 million locations annually from 911 calls, and the company has recently branched out into homeland security across the globe.

[seemslikeadream]

Did Fox News have a 'Brain Room' for phone hacking at its New York office?

His allegations received little traction at the time and they were never properly substantiated.

Resurfacing: Dan Cooper, former Fox News executive, made allegations about a 'Brain Room'

But now suggestions by a former executive of Fox News that it had a ‘Brain Room’ in its New York headquarters where employees could easily view private telephone records are re-emerging.

Dan Cooper wrote in 2008 that his own phone records had been hacked by the TV station and Fox News chief Roger Ailes was running a room for counter-intelligence efforts and other ‘black ops’.

His allegations have resurfaced this week after the phone-hacking scandal that has dragged the name of News Corporation through the mire and caused huge problems for Rupert Murdoch.

‘Most people thought it was simply the research department of Fox News,’ he wrote in a blog post.

‘But unlike virtually everybody else, because I had to design and build the Brain Room, I knew it also housed a counterintelligence and black ops office. So accessing phone records was easy pie.’

Just two months ago his allegations were mentioned by journalist Tim Dickenson in Rolling Stone magazine, who said Mr Ailes had created a ‘brain room’ which required security clearance to get in.

[Harvey]

...Hoare's claim was that the journos were paying cops circa £500 a time to ping celeb's phones on their behalf...

All those little interventions leave logs. Probably multiple copies in different locations.

[8bitagent]

I swear, you can mention 30 highly suspicious whistleblower deaths to people, and people will chalk it all up to coincidence.

As if this shit only happens in films or "over there in Russia"...yeah right

[Harvey]

Good question.

http://www.crossrhythms.co.uk/articles/life/News_Of_The_World_NewsLite_Culture_And_Breakdown_Of_Trust/43937/p1/

Make no mistake about it; the News of the World saga carries implications for much more than the world of journalistic practice and culture.

The entire sorry episode started with fresh allegations about phone hacking and payments to police officers. It ended late last week with the announcement that News of the World would publish its final edition last Sunday.

The story flags a number of questions that have already received wide coverage in the media, domestically and abroad.

Have politicians enjoyed too cosy a relationship with leading news organisations? Have police personnel routinely received payments for information given to journalists? Did British police effectively sweep earlier allegations about phone hacking under the carpet, rather than running a thorough investigation?

There are, however, two important aspects to this story that have received little or no comment in the mainstream press and media.

The first involves the culture surrounding journalism in the UK and its standards of practice for news gathering.

Specifically, are the practices associated with gathering celebrity gossip - what I call, newslite - becoming part of the mainstream news culture?

Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator hired by News of the World, apparently had 4,000 names and personal phone numbers in his records, which were seized by police. These included the ex-directory phone details for politicians, sports administrators and celebrities.

The obvious question is how he managed to lay his hands on this sensitive, private information.

Perhaps less obvious is the question of whether an endemic culture of illegal data-trading is emerging within mainstream news houses generally. Are individuals within telecom companies regularly colluding with journalists to provide sensitive, personal information?

In the world of marketing, the practice of data-mining already allows advertising companies to build up lifestyle logs for potential consumers. It uses information drawn from maps of personal mobile phone usage and material people have entered into social networking sites.

In some instances, deep packet encryption software is also used on a commercial level to extract keywords from bulk email traffic. This data is fed to marketers who use it to draw up profiles for potential ad-targets.

Some employers and education facilities are now using data-mining techniques to help them identify their most suitable job or course applicants.

All of this is often done without the knowledge or consent of consumers whose data is being used. In law, this type of practice is something of a grey area as privacy regulation struggles to keep pace with rapid changes in potentially invasive technologies.

[8bitagent]

How many Russian journalists and government whistleblowers have been killed for speaking out on FSB staged "Chechen" terror, assassinations, corruption, vote rigging, mafia, etc? 2, 300?

[Harvey]

Vey were all comrades, come, let's drink wodka...

[pepsified thinker]

More on the fake Murdoch dead story by LulzSec

http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/18/lulzse ... ath-story/

Looks like hacker group LulzSec is back in action, this time redirecting the homepage of the Murdoch-owned The Sun (http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/) to a fake story about Murdoch’s death from a drug overdose located on the Murdoch-Owned London Times URL http://www.new-times.co.uk/sun. After the amount of requests caused a 404 failure on the Times site, the group then redirected The Sun’s homepage to the @LuzSec Twitter account. (The original page is archived at http://freze.it/pX)

From what I can see the fake story was meant to mirror an actual The Sun story about the latest development in the messy Murdoch/New Corp/News of the World scandal, “Ex News of the World journalist found dead.” After about 10 minutes of being up (and I swear the real Sun homepage was redirecting) the fake story was pulled from the UK Times site. I’m including the full text of the story below:

Media moguls body discovered

Rupert Murdoch, the controversial media mogul, has reportedly been found dead in his garden, police announce.
Murdoch, aged 80, has said to have ingested a large quantity of palladium before stumbling into his famous topiary garden late last night, passing out in the early hours of the morning.

“We found the chemicals sitting beside a kitchen table, recently cooked,” one officer states. “From what we can gather, Murdoch melted and consumed large quantities of it before exiting into his garden.”

Authorities would not comment on whether this was a planned suicide, though the general consensus among locals and unnamed sources is that this is the case.

One detective elaborates. “Officers on the scene report a broken glass, a box of vintage wine, and what seems to be a family album strewn across the floor, containing images from days gone by; some containing handpainted portraits of Murdoch in his early days, donning a top hat and monocle.”

Another officer reveals that Murdoch was found slumped over a particularly large garden hedge fashioned into a galloping horse. “His favourite”, a butler, Davidson, reports.

Butler Davidson has since been taken into custody for additional questioning.

LulzSec confirmed its responsibility for the hack with a couple of tweets promising more attacks, “We have owned Sun/News of the World – that story is simply phase 1 – expect the lulz to flow in coming days,,”"The Sun’s homepage now redirects to the Murdoch death story on the recently-owned New Times website. Can you spell success, gentlemen?” and “TheSun.co.uk now redirects to our twitter feed. Hello, everyone that wanted to visit The Sun! How is your day? Good? Good!”

The group also threatened that The Sun hacking went further than surface level, and tweeted out the emails and passwords of what are presumably Sun employees from the @LulzSec account, writing “We are showing you a very small surface; the real damage is currently giving the admins heart attacks. .” Gizmodo is reporting that one of the employee passwords tweeted out by the Twitter account “Anonymousabu” belongs to the recently-arrested News International chief Rebekah Brooks.

TechCrunch Europe is also reporting that LulzSec also circumvented a News International attempt to post a statement about The Sun attack. That site isn’t loading at all for me.

Just when you though this News Corp story couldn’t get any worse, it did (Just add LulzSec!). But still, punishing the unscrupulous hacking of a murdered girl’s phone (among other things) with more hacking might not be the most coherent way to get your message across.

Update: The group is now claiming to have taken down News International’s DNS servers, bringing all 1,024 News International sites down.

I'm a sucker for these fake stories and was quite taken in myself, so thought this might save others from undue confusion.

Interesting about the various NI sites being down at this point.

[edited to add distinction between my 2¢ vs. the news story to which I was linking]

[Harvey]

quite taken in myself

I had a conversation with a friend the other day and argued that the more these fucks rely on technology, the closer the day that some 10 year old tech savant will show 'em justice. The moment I said it, being dumb as they come, I realised it was a pure undiluted meme. I'm a weathervane as far as these things go.

This is post modern conspiracy, at it's finest. Beats the shit out of X-box.

[Plutonia]

LulzSec has Rebecca Brooks emails. Here's the interesting bit:

LulzSec Hackers Deface The Sun Newspaper To Declare Rupert Murdoch Dead, Claim Stolen Emails
Jul. 18 2011

....

Worse may be ahead for the The Sun than mere graffiti: A hacker who goes by the handle Sabu claims that the hacker groups had also accessed The Sun‘s and defunct sister paper News Of The World’s emails, and may release them in coming days. “Sun/News of the world OWNED,” he writes. “We’re sitting on their emails. Press release tomorrow.”

Sabu and other Anonymous-related twitter feeds followed by twittering email addresses and passwords for Rebekah Brooks and Bill Akass, an editor who has held positions at The Sun and News of the World, and Danny Rogers, currently online editor at The Sun.

“We have owned Sun/News of the World,” added a tweet from LulzSec, the hacker group that went on a hacking spree targeting the CIA, Sony and PBS earlier this year only to supposedly disband last month. “That story is simply phase 1 – expect the lulz to flow in coming days.”

Update, 7pm Monday: The hackers also claimed to have hacked the website of News International, altering a statement in response to the breach. As of 7pm Monday, however, the site was down.

Update #2, 7:35pm Monday: They’ve also taken down the website of the News Corp.-owned Times of London.

Update #3, 8:10pm Monday: Now all websites for News International, the British arm of News Corp, are down.

In another message, Sabu seemed to dedicate the attack to Sean Hoare, a former entertainment reporter for the News of the World who acted as a whistleblower in the paper’s hacking scandal and was found dead Monday without explanation. “RIP Sean Hoare, a pioneer of #hackgateSean Hoare, a pioneer of #hackgate,” Sabu wrote.

A cartoon included on the parody of The Sun‘s homepage included references to accessing the site through a “buggy Web app” that ran software and hardware, ironically, from Oracle-owned Sun Microsystems. ...

http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2 ... en-emails/

Press release expected tomorrow.


PS: Ahab, your captcha skillz are indeed 133t

[Nordic]