Technology | 2009.07.15
News of the hacked | Henry Porter
If Murdoch\'s papers really believe in public interest they should disclose all details of illegal phone hacking
The major threat to privacy is assumed to come from the state. But Nick Davies\'s story in the Guardian today – about News Group\'s payments to settle cases that could reveal details of an operation to use information from intercepted text messages sent by many well known individuals – shows how privacy is equally threatened by determined commercial organisations.
News of the World (NoW) journalists used information obtained by hacking into the phone of Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers\' Association, and after reaching a settlement with Taylor suppressed hundreds of pages of evidence. In 2007, the NoW reporter Clive Goodman was found guilty under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, and sent to jail – but Davies\'s investigation shows that the practice was much more widespread than suspected. Phones belonging to MPs from all parties, including Tessa Jowell and John Prescott, were hacked using a private investigator named Glenn Mulcaire, also jailed in the 2007 trial.
As well as trying to suppress documentation, News Group initially denied keeping any records or notes of the messages. This turns out to be untrue: among messages transcribed were those to Sir Alex Ferguson and Alan Shearer. Significantly, Rupert Murdoch\'s company has denied interceptions of this scale to a parliamentary select committee and the Press Complaints Commission. This jeopardises any claim the company may make in the course of exposing well known figures. The company\'s credibility is now seriously called into question.
More disturbing is the possibility that because of the company\'s influence in British public life, the Metropolitan police could have stayed its hand when considering more widescale prosecutions. It is now incumbent on the police to explain publicly why the investigation was not brought to the sort of conclusion the public would expect for this level of alleged criminal activity.
One officer suggested that two or three thousand mobile phones had been hacked. If true, it would speak of a programme of interception with reporters from the NoW ordering from a menu supplied by the shady investigator. The public needs to know to what extent Murdoch\'s papers indulge in this illegal activity: it is legitimate matter of public interest, the very thing cited by the NoW as it pursues people such as Max Mosley, whom they bugged and filmed in a sado-masochistic sex session.
Mosley received £60,000 after the paper had fought and lost the case on a spurious public interest defence, which seems even harder to swallow now we know the extent of its spying programme. There is no doubt that executives understood how damaging the revelations about phone-tapping would be because they paid over seven times as much (£450,000) to Gordon Taylor.
The cover-up has failed. The Press Complaints Commission needs to reopen its investigation and call executives before it. The parliamentary committee will almost certainly want to know if it has been deceived, and to take evidence again. Nigella Lawson, Patsy Kensit, Jude Law, Anne Robinson and many others are owed an apology as well as an explanation. So are less well-known individuals who have attracted the NoW\'s interest.
Those members of the government who have supported the state\'s acquisition of so much personal data and have now been subjected to the NoW\'s hacking operation may think that privacy laws that guarantee the communications of innocent individuals from unscrupulous corporations, as well as the state, are long overdue.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]king-privacy-news-of-the-world
