News International phone hacking

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Suprised there's not a thread on this yet, pretty much every UK paper is leading with the story today.

News International has been acced of hacking into voicemails on phones. They've been changed with it before a while ago, accessing the voicemails of aides to Prices William and Harry. I'm pretty sure some scapegoat got jailed for that.

Anyway, it's now been revelaed that they may have done the same thing to a kidnapped & murdered schoolgirl, Milly Dowler.

On top of that, the families of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman have also been contacted by the police regarding the phone hacking.

The day then got, if anything, even worse when it turned out that familes of the July 7th terrorist attacks in London may have been targeted too.

A slew of companies have already pulled their advertising from the paper at the centre of all this, the News of the World. Heads had better roll for this one.

 

If cops can only listen into your phone conversations with a search warrant, privates listening in are committing criminal offences and ought to be prosecuted and punished.

Lock the creeps up. Fine the newspaper so that it hurts. Period. Make it a stern warning to the yellow press.

 

The journal is peddling to a market; can't they just shove the readers of a cliff? /borderline-serious

 

I take it News International is one of those trash tabloids, like National Enquirer?

Anyway, if it's true, it's despicable. There's low, and then there's low, and then there's this.

Edit: Is it News Internatioanl, or News of the World?

 

News International is a holding company with it's fingers in many pies, as I understand it. It's run by that despicable human being Rupert Murdoch and run various newspapers and news outlets. That's what I understand, anyway.

 

I read Murdoch has closed down the NotW. Good riddance!

Murdoch being Murdoch suggests that the decision to fold the NotW had nothing to do with journalistic ethics. There are more important things than this rag for Murdoch, and Murdoch being Murdoch that would be profits. My hunch tells me it probably has something to do with reducing vulnerabilities in the context of taking over Sky.

 

I think there's alot missing to this story, Its not that easy to gain access to private information. Im not suggesting that the papers chiefs didnt authorise this activity, but I doubt that the papers staff had the knowledge and training to access phone records and crack into accounts - I want to know who they employed to do the work for them.

 

I feel for the innocent workers who are going to lose their jobs over something like this. I don't know the publication in question, but I'm always saddened when a media source goes away.

 

What's the purpose of getting the voicemails of crime victims - just some sort of titillating tabloid feature?

 

exactly, it all seems pretty pointless. A friend of mine reads alot of news papers, and she said that nothing appears in the news of the world which doesnt appear in other tabloidsso, what exactly did they get out of this?

 

Whoa, ye've missed the most important part of the story. In the case of Milly Dowler they didn't just access her voicemail. When her mailbox got full they deleted messages so that more could be left and they could get more tidbits to print. Her family thought that Milly must have been alive to be deleting them and the likewise the police, who also follow up voicemails as perpetrators often leave messages in order to try and appear concerned. NEWS INTERNATIONAL KNOWINGLY AND DELIBERATELY INTERFERED WITH THE POLICE INVESTIGATION INTO A MISSING 13 YEAR OLD GIRL WHO WAS LATER FOUND TO HAVE BEEN RAPED AND MURDERED.

News of the World is part of the News International group of papers (which also includes the Sun and the Times) which in turn is part of Murdoch's media empire (Fox etc). The News of the World seems to have been the worst of the papers but other papers were also carrying out similar hacking. Closing the News of the World is a cynical attempt to isolate the problem when the entire group is a moral cesspit. Also the money in newspapers is in the advertising and they've all pulled out.

If you put a "5" between the network code and the rest of the phone number you can ring directly to the voicemail box from another phone. As nobody bothers changing the password it'll be "0000". Not the most exacting of tasks. The papers also make extensive use of private detectives in order to give them deniabilty. "I didn't know how they got the information" when it blatantly wasn't through legal means. The private detectives would also have lists of contacts with the police and so on to get confidential information illegally. There was also a case of a trojan virus being used to monitor somebody's email account.

For crime victims mainly titillation. For the 7/7 victims they got morsels which they then used in interviews with the deceased's family in order to guide the conversation into areas they knew would make good stories. For celebrities you can get information that you wouldn't otherwise. Hugh Grant has a fantastic article on this whole area (not just celebs) where he bugged a conversation with an ex journalist.

The best part is where the journalist talks of how every prime minister since Thatcher has had to kowtow to Murdoch and is subservient to the press. It's no wonder there's been no proper investigation before now. News International would also have large files on every politician and senior policeman ready to smear if they get uppity. Our UK members will remember Any Gray, the football commentator for Murdoch's Sky Sports. When he sued one of Murdoch's papers for hacking his voicemail an old videotape of him making sexist jokes to a colleague off air mysteriously surfaced and he was forced to quit.