This is it. I’m going to cancel my Sky subscription. I can’t stomach giving any more money to News Corp.
Cameron, confronted with this, said that it was “appalling” and also, more interestingly, that the police must investigate without fear or favour.
It’s the sort of thing he has to say, given his close links with NI and Murdoch, but it might be the first hint that there won’t be any support for Brooks et al.
Well, your face looks like a big pile of poop.
finally david cameron is outraged! i’m confused because he wants to get to the bottom of it now. but andy coulson was involved, and cameron’s already defended him and said he’s been tried for the same crime twice. surely he can’t want him tried for a third time. so he must want it all investigating but not andy coulson. that poor dear has been through enough.
No. They bribe phone company staff and get the passwords.
Not here in America. Nobody reads crap like that.
We put it on TV, where it belongs.
Oh yeah, well your mum
Are you sure about that? Because that’s not what I heard and what jjimm said above. Also, that assumes that someone in the phone company can look up your password. I can’t imagine it’s that simple; my limited experience with computer security is that the IT staff can reset your password, but they can’t see what it’s currently set to.
OK, I’ve been reading more articles about the phone hacking. Apparently the journalists sometimes just used default passwords (1111, say, or 4444) to access people’s voicemail boxes and sometimes convinced phone company workers to reveal the passwords (perhaps by pretending to be the owner of the phone). Either way, that seems extraordinary; that prominent public figures either used default passwords, or that the phone company employees gave up the passwords for such prominent people. Although I remember a case in the US when someone published Paris Hilton’s voicemail messages. She was known for carrying around her dog, and its name was well-known, so they were able to get the password by answering the security question (What is your pet’s name?).
The worst part of all this is it has pretty much been an open secret for years. Nick Davies has been talking about the “Dark Arts” (as fleet street call it) it to anyone who will listen for a long time. Phone Hacking is just one part of it. They are also fairly adept at getting into government run databases (such as vehicle registration, and the police national computer), and have people working for them who write viruses specifically to target their victims computers and harvest emails. It isn’t limited to News International either. It is common practice.
Rebekah Brooks claims she knew nothing about it while she was editor, and in my opinion, that makes her sound like a fucking liar. If someone like me (who doesn’t work on fleet street) can find out about it by reading a book, or watching Newswipe (who covered in in Ep 6 series 1, over 2 years ago), then she must have been completely fucking inept at her job to not know.
Even worse is how complicit politicians seem to be in all this. A few MPs have finally managed to get enough backbone to suggest that she should resign. It is a criminal offence. If she was complicit, she should be going to prison, not losing her job. The PM’s press secretary used to be Andy Coulson, who has also been previously implicated, which leads you to wonder how much of the information Cameron received about his opponents before the last election came from dubious methods.
Lets not forget that their was a previous Met enquiry into all this a few months ago, but the verdict was “move along, nothing to see here”, even though there appears to have been buckets of evidence lying around. Political pressure anyone?
I was under the impression that NotW actually published information from hacked voicemail accounts during Brooks tenure as editor. Is this incorrect? If it is not incorrect, she’s trapped herself in a lie - if the buck stops with the editor, then surely she has to take responsibility for what is actually published in the paper, which means she knew about and approved the tactic, if not in the specific Dowler case, then in the wider sense.
Heads should roll on this. As many as can be filed towards the guillotine, as far as I am concerned. Advertisers are reported to be considering pulling their ads from the NotW, according to The Guardian - nPower and Halifax being the two I’ve just seen reported. If this happens, then one assumes Uncle Rupert will have to pull the plug on several of the higher ups to appease the ad market. Just hope he fires the right people and not some patsy.
Nick Davies talks about the “Dark Arts” of journalism, first broadcast over 2 years ago on Newswipe.
If you were a fleet street editor, do you think you would laugh this off, or would you make a few enquiries to make sure you weren’t implicated? Either they are liars, or utterly inept as journalists.
Brooks admitted to bribing police for information in front of a Parliamentary select committee, she’s since been promoted to CEO. She’s also a constituent and personal friend of the PM. Coulson, who was Brooks’ underling, went on the be the PM’s personal PR man after his involvement in phone-hacking. Andy Hayman is involved too, he was the policeman in charge of the operation which killed Speedy de Menezes, before going on to a lucrative career spewing terrorist garbage in the NI press. He also had an MP bugged, which is forbidden.
So don’t hold your breath waiting for the vengeful hand of justice.
No, she claims to have been incredibly incompetent and to have had no idea what her employees were doing or where this information was coming from. She did publicly admit to bribing police officers, in front of a committee of MPs, but they were kind enough to over look that.
Yes, can’t have them working there any more. Promotions all round!
I am aware of her claims, laughable as they may be. I was asking whether it is true that she has trapped herself in a lie.
It seems Coulson was editor when they published a story referring to voicemails within the print - though I can’t reference the exact article, there are are a few people referring to it in the blogs currently. Of course, the chances of him being sent down are as remote as those of Brooks.
Private Eye are already claiming that Brooks exit strategy is to get pregnant, go off on maternity leave and be replaced whilst away, so that NI can claim she wasn’t sacked.
I wonder just how much we’re going to be able to do about this in the UK. The politicians are too scared of NI to really go after them and we’re already giving Murdoch more power with the BSkyB takeover being sanctioned, so the writing is on the wall for this to be a whitewash - with perhaps the token sacrificial lamb being offered up. I guess the only thing that will work is if people boycott NotW (but I bet most won’t put two and two together and boycott The Sun too).
Brooks talking about bribing police:
Sometime circa 2000, you used to be able to access your voicemail by dialling from a landline. There was a particular phone number for each mobile network provider, and you keyed in your mobile number then the voicemail code.
Most voicemail codes were factory default, such as 1234 or 0000. If you wanted to hack in, you simply dialled the network’s voicemail number from any landline phone, tapped in the mobile number then the voicemail code.
I know this because my friends did it to one another for the lulz; you could pick on anyone as long as you knew their mobile number and network, and if they hadn’t changed the access code. Most people never changed the access code because it wasn’t well known that you could access voicemail from any landline.
I wasn’t remotely surprised that the tabloid pricks started doing it. I don’t allow The Sun or News of the World in my house now, but I did use to read them when I was younger because they were very simple to read, and I remember their coverage of the Milly Dowler case, and the Soham murders - apparently the parents of the murdered girls in Soham have now been approached by police to discuss the possibility of phone hacking.
It’s a new low, but as I said, not surprising.
They have also hacked into the phones of the parents of the two girls murdered by Ian Huntley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soham_murders I keep thinking they can’t get any lower surely? Then, of course, they do.
Oh and it seems Ford have also pulled advertising. I’d love this to be the end of the that shit rag the NoW and Brooks career too, but I doubt much will happen sadly.
So, in that respect, it’s almost just like the US! Who knew our two countries had so much in common?
The thing that’s actually making me laugh is that of all the shit that Murdoch’s organisations have pulled over the years, this isn’t even in the top 10 of things to be outraged about.
Blatant electoral manipulation, warmongering, cynical promotion of class divide…these raise no public outrage at all. A fairly sleazy investigative journalism trick, and everyone’s baying for blood.
And yet lower still: families of the victims of the 7/7 bombings.
Not-so-paranoid prediction: the McCann family and their friends will also be found to have been targetted.
Paranoid prediction: Mulcaire will be found hanging in his cell. “Couldn’t take the shame,” they’ll say.