Slashdot Mirror
News Corp. Subsidiary Under Fire For Hacking Dead Girl's Voicemail
Hugh Pickens writes "Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. came under pressure from UK Prime Minister David Cameron to respond to 'really appalling' allegations that its News of the World tabloid hacked into the voicemail of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler. The tabloid printed a story based on a voicemail left on Dowler's mobile phone on April 14, 2002, when she had been missing from her home in Surrey, southwest of London, for more than three weeks. According to a Guardian newspaper report, a private detective working for the tabloid gained access to Milly Dowler's phone messages after she was abducted in March 2002 and the detective, Glenn Mulcaire, is alleged to have deleted voicemail messages on Dowler's phone, giving her parents 'false hope' she might still be alive and thereby complicating the police investigation. According to one source, when her friends and family discovered that her voicemail had been cleared, they concluded that this must have been done by Dowler herself and, therefore, that she must still be alive."
Ruthless fucking cunts all the way down.
She's also David Cameron's neighbour and horse riding buddy, and the replacement for Andy Coulson, who resigned over the phone hacking scandal then bagged a job as Cameron's communications advisor before finally stepping down from that role too. Cameron - let it not be forgotten - stood by Coulson the whole time.
The real question shouldn't be if News Corp is a fit owner of BSkyB, but if Cameron's government is fit to preside over any aspect of Murdoch's takeover bid.
"We live in a global world" - Harvey Pitt, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
Are News International paying you for this?
The allegations are of full collusion between NotW and the PI - specifically that although the PI may have gained access to the voicemail, it was News International journalists who deleted messages from it (i.e. tampering with evidence in a murder investigation). Trying to blame some rogue investigator is utter bullshit.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
The summary says the investigator deleted the voicemail messages. In the news report I saw, the allegation is that the NotW journalists deleted the messages.
(alleged) chain of events is:
1. NotW hires investigator to gain access to voicemail
2. NotW listens to voicemail to get soundbites from loved ones for their shitty, amoral rag.
3. Once voicemail is full, they delete stored messages so they can get more juicy copy from distraught friends and relatives of a murdered 13-year old girl
4. They then interview parents of said girl, the mother speaking about the hope that her daughter is still alive based on the deleted voicemails.
Do not try to excuse this. The people doing this are pitiless psychopaths.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Aww, come on! Do you really believe that? NOTW are also accused of a whole string of similar hacks on royalty and celebrity phones. One such incident they can explain away, but all of them? Especially because they have a well-deserved reputation for other dirty tricks.
And no, Rupert Murdoch didn't personally hack those phones. Osama Bin Laden also didn't personally fly one of those airplanes. Still, OBL was considered a mass murderer. Rupert Murdoch is no mass murderer, but he IS a ruthless psychopath.
Just because you remove yourself from the equation with money -- just like a mafia don does when he hires a hitman -- doesn't mean you get a pass when they correctly interpret your winks and nods, even if you escape the legal ramifications on technical grounds. As Nick Fel and pmc point out, the participation of people within NotW seems to have been already proven in a court of law.
In a larger perspective, this perfectly supports the theory that News Corp doesn't give a shit about news, but it pretends to for money. Take the American side of his empire, for instance. Roger Ailes founded Fox to push his political agenda, and Murdoch bankrolled it because he thought it would make money. That's not a conspiracy. That's just a common sense understanding of known facts. The idea that a Nixon aide and a capitalist would lie and cheat and hire people of questionable character to achieve their objectives shouldn't surprise anyone at all.
From the story I understood that the journalist or PI deleted the voicemails addressed to her leading everyone to believe she was still alive and had access to her phone. Although I don't know the specifics of the voicemail system, I think they fact that they accessed them and played them may be enough for tampering. Most systems records that fact that the voicemail has been played. Even if they did not delete them, the indication that the voicemail had been played would have been enough to completely change the investigation from the viewpoint of the police. The teenager in question may have been considered a runaway who had access to her voicemail and/or phone instead of an kidnapping or murder victim who didn't have access to her voicemail and would have changed how the police responded.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
the modern organization has everything timed, measured, and decided on down to when you take a shit.
the 'one bad apple defense' has been repeatedly proven to be
1. a classic tactic of modern organizations to insulate themselves from responsibility
2. very often based on utter lies
It was used by the government to act like Abu Grahib was an accident, when it was the direct result of a wide spread policy to approve of and promote 'harsh interrogation' and get rid of the culture that respected Geneva and LOAC
It was used by the government to act like My Lai was an isolated event. In reality, the Army itself collected and documented several other incidents that were similar to My Lai, and hid them in a box on a shelf for decades until they were discovered by journalists and researchers.
It is used by bank CEOs to try to act like they had no idea what their CDO trading desks were doing. Utter nonsense. They had people screaming at them about what was happening - those people got fired because they were hurting short-term profits and presented political risks to the executives.
and on and on and on
the 'one bad apple' theory has been proven time and time again to be utter lies in the modern corporate organization.
Slashdot isn't Wikipedia; do your own fucking research for easily-verifiable information. Rebutting with "citation needed" while making no attempt yourself only says that you're gigantic douche.
Also interesting is that the senior policeman in charge of the original investigation (Andy Hayman) found only a 'handful' of victims, and was asked by parliament to reinvestigate the case. He replied *the same day* that after reinvestigation that no evidence of more victims was found.
We now know that the Met police in fact had evidence of a large number of victims.
Hayman left the force and - by mere coincidence - got a job as a columnist at the Times: another News Corp paper.
Still, not to worry: he was replaced as the investigator in the case by John Yates, who also appeared to misled parliament by claiming that there were only 8 - 12 victims when must have had evidence of many more.
By mere coincidence, senior Met officers dined 13 times with News Corp executives during the short period of the original investigation. Yates himself dined with the News of the World's editor Colin Myler during the 2009 investigation when Myler should almost certainly have been considered a suspect.
Rebekah Wade admitted to a Commons Select Committee that her paper had paid police for information in the past. The Met police refused to investigate this clear admission of a crime.
its worth pointing out that the police in Britain are tangled up in this mess - they were paid off handsomely by the 'journalists' involved and it is fairly clear they were very much embroiled in this business.
also, our prime minister is a personal friend of the newspaper editor that was responsible for a lot of the hacking, including the incidents where the murdered girl had messages deleted from her phone and false hope given to her family.
david cameron also hired Andy Coulson (under criminal investigation for his part in phone hacking) as communications director.
this scandal goes all the way to the top and anyone who thinks that the truth will fully emerge must be deluded - it's actually pretty hard to believe the depths to which Britain has sunk.
the british media have always been fairly unpleasant and disreputable but the facts of this case are quite incredible - you could hardly make them up.
It should be remembered that the reason the phone hacking was so prevalent was because The Public likes to read the salacious stories the technique can grub up, like rummaging through the bins, and what The Public wants The Public gets ... NotW were only providing what their readers wanted!
THIS. The trail leads right back to the readers of the newspaper. People treat the NotW as a laugh, a bit of a giggle, but this is the consequence. I hope the readership acknowleges this and a mass boycott of the NI papers results. The best punishment of all has to be Rupert Murdoch's bottom line.