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."
if you go into a courtroom defending Bradley Manning or Wikileaks against Espionage Act charges, you are going to want as much pro-first-amendment precedent as you can get. and you also want as much pro-hacking precedent as you can get.
that means that you want a bunch of cases on the books where hackers and journalists did not go to jail for doing their job, and whistleblowers did not get punished.
is murdock a scumbag? hey, thats irrelevant. if murdock and/or his organization get massively punished for this, then the courts will use that precedent to justify sending people like Wikileaks to jail for even longer.
Fun fact: out of Obama's several espionage act prosecutions, several also involve the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Manning has many, many charges against him that are from the CFAA.
If you want to uphold 'anti-hacking laws' to go after Murdock, then you are only weakening your defense of Manning.