Slashdot Mirror
Murdoch Voicemail Hacking Story 'Ain't Over Yet'
lee317 writes "Reuters is reporting that Rupert Murdoch's headache over the alleged phone hacking by his News Corp's reporters could be small compared to what is ahead. So far, around 20 public figures who believe their voicemail messages were intercepted by journalists at the popular News of the World tabloid are suing News International, the UK newspaper arm of News Corp. After a public apology from the newspaper aimed at 'put(ting) this problem into a box,' a UK judge eluded to the fact that civil cases against the firm could run into next year at least."
I think you've misread TFS. The journalists are not doing the suing. The suing is by "20 public figures". The journalists are the villains of this story, and are employees of Murdoch, who is the villain of pretty much every story.
Umm... try reading the story before commenting?
Journalists working for a paper owned by Rupert Murdoch intercepted the voicemail of (well, guessed passwords for) a lot of famous and/or important people.
After denying it for years and some other shenanigans, finally it's coming to court. News International just want it to go away. They've already said 'OK, we did it, but it was just a rogue journalist. Well, maybe two. Or a few. But not many.' Turns out it may have been quite a bit more widespread than that. Statements made to a ministerial inquiry mean the investigation is also spreading to look at journalists paying the Police for information.
It won't be going away any time soon...
The villains are those who buy Murdoch's products.
For example, if you have Sky TV subscription then you are part of the problem. Everything from NotW to Fox News is your fault.
Oh, wow. Indeed. But, either way, "intercepted," what exactly do they mean by that?
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
...those sneaky judges, so elusive.
Perhaps he "alluded" to the fact?
Intercepted: if you are caught being rich.
Wiretapping: if you are caught being poor.
An investigation into newsgathering practices at the News of the World has so far touched celebrities, government ministers, sports stars and British Prime Minister David Cameron, repeatedly making headline news in rival publications.
TFA leaves out the fact that the News of the World "journalists" also went after the voicemails of military and police officials as well.
I'm amazed that the British Government hasn't arrested more people, if for no other reason than there were serious national security concerns when they first found out about it.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Whether the problem is an election, a rival corporation, or a rival nation, chances are an army of hackers can go about solving it in sophisticated or simple ways.
I think we are in the cyberwarfare era. Corporations, governments, and private individuals will be able to hire hackers for doxing services, or other more controversial services.
This is the tip of the iceberg. Political rivals can be targeted by hackers. This includes activists, union members, or the priests and pastors at churches. Nobodies dox are safe, anyone can be owned and exposed.
Seems like a possibility. What then?
Eluded. Alluded. Potatoe. Potatoe. Let's call the whole thing off.
I think you've misread TFS.
Misread? This is Slashdot - he probably didn't read TFS at all and instead just misread the summary. :P
they have summaries now?
rewriting history since 2109
Perhaps he did, he just might not have had his morning coffee. =O
They hacked mobile phone voicemail. Was a pretty simple "hack" for most, some was social engineered afaik.
They broke the law. If it was a teenager their life would be ruined, Murdoch seems to think that apologising gets them out of it. Far from it, seeing as some were cabinet ministers.
The whole thing boils down to an endemic problem within (at least) News of the World, so far it hasn't been seen that the rest of News Corp conducts themselves in this way.
Completely wrong much? Not only do you get the facts backward, your conclusion is crazy. We do not need more "journalists" getting their "news" stories that way.
Rant.
How about listening devices planted in flowers sent to the bereaved? The UK's tabloid press have been out of control for years. This isn't about press freedom, or even freedom of speech or expression. It's about Murdoch's agenda, gutter journalism and selling salacious crap to any window-licker that'll buy it.
We can hope that his sorry newsprint empire will wither like his online presence behind its paywall. Sadly, that's not going to happen...not for as long as the unwashed want innuendo on the front page, reactionary crap on page two and hooters on page three. It may be tomorrow's fish and chips wrapper, but it has already peddled its sordid agenda by the time some fat-ass is chomping his way through the deep fried goodies it contains.
Tabloid journalists and their paymasters? I shit 'em.
End rant.
According to early reports there is evidence that News of the World was not the only UK paper doing this. Is there any effort to identify the others?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I'm pretty sure the word TFS was looking for was "alluded", not "eluded". The difference is pretty significant in context.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Intercepted - British English (eg http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1985/56 )
Wiretapping - American English
It isn't /the/ UK arm of News Corp, just one of many. The main arms are The Sun and The Times, going by their daily sales (for The Sun) and 'prestige' (The Times).
why the outrage at reporters doing something the government is doing all the time?
What else is new? I'm sure the percentage of hackers within a news corporation is bigger then the percentage of hackers in the world.
Social engineering is the main method.
But I am fairly certain, though I have no proof of this, just a hunch (hey thats what a reporter would say!) that methods like eavesdropping and payoffs are far more normal than people think.
- "If one man can create that much hate, you can only imagine how much love we as a togetherness can create."
So, when wikileaks does it, it's important to have this information out in the open. When The Evil, Evil People[tm] do the exact same thing, it's a horrible miscarriage of the expectation of privacy and needs to be loudly denounced.
Aren't we just biasing our views based on if the story portrays the "correct" people as the villains? It's amusing to see the really hateful attitudes and spittle-flecked invective.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
We also dont need to call these people journalists. If you've ever read NotW or it's daily equivalent The Sun you'd know better.
They hacked mobile phone voicemail. Was a pretty simple "hack" for most, some was social engineered afaik.
Perhaps even simpler than that...
I'm amazed the carriers haven't come in for any criticism. Voicemail accounts could be accessed from any phone by entering a PIN - and they were mostly preset to a default, such as '1111' or '1234'. In these cases, you just needed the phone number of the celebrity. Call the remote voicemail service, enter the PIN, and you'd be in.
I remember working for a cellphone reseller in 1997, and being surprised by this. The company leased handsets to the stars of certain soap operas, and the customer care peeps were listening to voicemails down the pub of an evening.
Information wants to be beer.
We also dont need to call these people journalists. If you've ever read NotW or it's daily equivalent The Sun you'd know better.
yupos , agreed they are the type of newspaper ,which when used for emergency toilet roll.....
.......more shit comes off the paper.
Yup, you really dont want to get Page3 bum.
...not eluded.
Go ahead, call me a 'meaning' Nazi
eludedpast participle, past tense of elude (Verb)
1. Evade or escape from (a danger, enemy, or pursuer), typically in a skillful or cunning way: "he managed to elude his pursuer".
2. (of an idea or fact) Fail to be grasped or remembered by (someone).
Interestingly this almost reverses the meaning.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
In the late nineties, a Cincinnati Enquirer reporter wrote a series of articles about Chiquita Banana. Parts of the series alleged immoral and illegal practices on the part of Chiquita. Eventually, it came to light that the reporter in question had gained access to the voice mail of Chiquita executive officers. The Enquirer retracted the entire series of articles, going so far as to pull them from Gannett's electronic database (the Enquirer was owned by Gannett at the time) leaving print copies as the only record. The reporter was convicted of several crimes, fired and the Enquirer paid several millions of dollars to Chiquita.
Now, if the allegations of immoral and illegal conduct were true, is that really a good ending to the story? An investigative reporter had his career effectively ended, a large corporation had their record whitewashed in an Orwellian fasion, and a newspaper effectively agred to longer investigate allegations of illegal deeds by one of the largest produce companies in the US.
It seems to me that if the allegations were true, society is better off by them becoming public. And even if they weren't true, a case could be made that making the evidence public to allow informed citizens to make up their own mind serves the public interest.
In such cases, an organization like WikiLeaks is a good thing over all. Sure, it's messy. Sure, there are gray areas. Sure, it's possible for them to overstep the bounds of what ought to be released. But those dangers pose less danger than the alternative, media silence on such issues.
The difference between the Chiquita/Enquirer SNAFU and the present News Corp. situation is largely over corporate vs. individual communications. (Although, to be fair, some of the government communications intercepted by News Corp. would fall under the corporate rubric rather than the individual rubric.) There is also another possible distinction, tabloid journalism vs. "serious" journalism. But I don't think that there is any real way to limit one without limiting the other.
So, in the end, I think it's not a cut and dried situation. On the balance, I think investigative reporting and organizations lie WikiLeaks serve the public good. But insofar as they do target individuals in their private capacity rather than in a corporate role, they do pose a danger to basic civil rights.
When I worked for Orange, many moons ago, remote voicemail access was disabled by default. It could only be used after the customer set up their own PIN.
If this was and is the case with other networks then this "hacking" is down to social engineering. That or famous people using their publicly-known birthdays as their PINs.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Mod parent "insightful" because he has a good if unpleasant point.
But there is a big difference in security threat between releasing copies of 6 month old written memos, and listening in on the telephone conversations of the PM in real time.
-- QED
I am curious as to what was actually done. All of the news articles on this story only say that phones were "hacked". This is Slashdot. Does anyone know what exactly the reporters did to the phones and/or voicemail accounts, and how difficult or easy it is to do?
(no sig)
There have already been convictions for this. Please don't use that awful cowardly word (which is no protection anyway) when it isn't needed.
Unfortunately, WIkileaks doesn't "intercept" anything. Wikileaks is only a venue for others to supply sensitive information. WIkileaks then makes such information available without revealing the source.
So unless the summary is completely wrong, Wikileaks is nothing like what is being described.
It is always elitist dogma bullshit framed as patriotic-religious public interest dogma. Fox is just one of many....
Without the Internet and WWW news resources, no one in any country gets the truth today. Broadcast and publishing news is all about hype, snipe, pop, frame, spin, faux experts, pseudo pundits....
The more the citizens of any country listen to broadcast and publishing news the greater the stupidity or illiteracy. Yes, I have just insulted the general public of every nation, but the truth never hurts the stupidity or illiteracy, because they never hear the truth.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
They have "minders" trained by KRM. It's already looking like an Eastern government, in which the civil servants of the original ruler have the real power under his sons, until everyone has forgotten the original - like the Mikado (which I believe means "Palace gate")
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
You must be a Brit. The correct term here in the states is Freedom Listening.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I'm not sure I really feel the same amount of anger about this. Invading the privacy of public figures can sometimes occur for the public good. I can think of lots of situations where depending on the information uncovered, we would be praising these people as heroes.
I'd just like to avoid feeling like a hypocrite.
Seems to me that this culture of amorality stems directly from Murdoch himself. I would dearly love to see that man convicted of crimes against humanity. The reporters surely are the small fry and now the scape goats. On whose orders did they conduct the hacking of the voicemail?
http://www.acetonestudio.com
so this is just like what that teen did to Palin, right....
that teen who was sentenced to a long time in JAIL!!! Depending on the countries of the reporters and the public officials, this could easily be "espionage" which is against US and UK laws and carries BIG trouble... maybe they can put them on the same boat with the Brit who hacked the DOD... it's that serious.
Hence the scare quotes.
when parents set a bad example for the kids.
But dad, you wiretapped my phone, why can't I wiretap yours? What makes you better than me?
Kids. Always asking difficult questions.