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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."
In all the articles I've read on this, it's never explained why they did it. It's obvious that when they hack phones belonging to celebrities they're looking for scandal dirt. What did they expect to dig up on a little dead girl?
"I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."
It's a long article, but is really worth a read. It talks about Ailes and his plans for what would be Fox News. It uses primary sources, and goes into some depth about an interesting bit of history. Murdoch may not have come up with the idea, but he sure has done well with the execution.
This is a particularly disgusting example of a very common practice within UK tabloid newspapers. I wish we could single out the News of the World but in fact the tabloids in general have all been up to it.
The interesting thing here is that Rebekah Brooks, who currently heads up News International in the UK, was editor of the News of the World when the phone was hacked and she is on record as saying she knew about phone hacking from back then. It is pretty likely (despite her protestations) that she knew what was going on - editors do - and it will be interesting to see how News Corp react to this with respect to her. She is one of Rupert Murdoch's favourites and all along they have been protecting her but we'll see what happens now.
Ruthless fucking cunts all the way down.
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. . . .
Is that really necessary? I know there's a serious anti-Fox News crowd here, but it's quite a stretch to include the entire organization when even the tabloid itself probably frowned on what one individual did.
"I have to tell you that I am sickened that these events are alleged to have happened," Brooks said in a memo to staff. "If the allegations are proved to be true then I can promise the strongest possible action will be taken as this company will not tolerate such disgraceful behavior."
Translation: "Awesome! We're getting AWESOME publicity out of this!!!!! Our circulation is through the roof! Whoever did this is going to get a HUGE bonus!"
On another note: If an individual did this to a News Corp machine, does anyone think there would be a bit more than outrage? Like guys with badges and guns kicking down the door of the alleged perpetrator and having his name all over the news and the News?
Of course that doesn't happen to big, rich, and powerful corporations; especially one that has the capability of smearing a politician into resigning - if he happens to go after said corp.
Just pointing that out.
Before the typical string of "OMG FAUX NEWS" posts pop up (somehow always modded Insightful?), let's lay down some basic fundamentals of the story:
A News Corp subsidiary that happens to be a tabloid (which as we all know don't count as real journalism) hired a private investigator to complete his own investigation on the murder of a girl. The private investigator, acting as a lone agent, "hacked in" (Is it hacking when you guess the passcode? 1-2-3-4?) to her voicemail and used a message on it to add to his investigation.
Rupert Murdoch didn't personally hold anybody at gunpoint demanding a passcode. News Corp didn't send Nazi Zombies after her family demanding information. But I can already tell from the headline that some people will just go there right off the bat.
I'm all for charging the PI with obstruction of justice, but unless News Corp explicitly told him what to do, their involvement in this is tangential at best.
The way to deal effectively with this is to take out the advertisers. A boycott is in progress and is getting results.
* News Of The World advertisers list - includes handy Excel spreadsheet, suitable for mailmerging
* Addresses and phone numbers of advertisers
So far, Ford have withdrawn their advertising from NOTW, and Mumsnet have removed their advertising from Sky. The latter will hurt, as that's advertisers considering all of News International too toxic to deal with.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
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.
How about just throwing some of those assclowns in jail? Let the pressure come from their new cellmate, Tyrone, who likes cuddling and moonlight walks around the exercise yard.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I don't know where to begin.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
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?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jun/30/news-corporation-powerful-media
This cancerous organisation has just made a deal with the government it is deep in the pockets of, to extend its media monopoly in the UK - this scandal is unlikely to reverse that decision, given how personally close News International is to the Conservative Party:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uk_general_election_2010#Endorsements
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
David Cameron wilfully employed the person who had to know and was involved in phone hacking. And new allegations released tonight suggest that person who Cameron employed (Andy Coulson) was involved in paying police officers for information (that is illegal).
So please don't paint this at St David saves the day - David Cameron is involved in this scandal whether he likes it or not - and he cannot take the regal "above it all" line.
For all of the right-wing clowns here who are saying that it is unfair to brand Fox News and the other "fine" Murdoch properties with the tar coming from this story, I have one response: If you buy properties that lie down with dogs and don't clean them up, you shouldn't be surprised when the fleas hop onto you. God knows Rupert's had time to change this paper's editorial policies if he didn't approve of them - he's owned it since 1969.
That is all.
To me, it's that Fox News U.K. actually attempted to gather primary source material, as despicable as their tactics were.
Fox News U.S.A. doesn't need to hack into anybody's mail, they can just make shit up.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/04/david-cameron-dinner-rebekah-brooks-mystery
We are a perfectly corrupt society.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
This might be the straw that's very likely going to break the camel's back, but it's been a long running story now. Back in 2005 they were rumbled for hacking into voicemail of aides to the royal family, a good article from a US source, the NYT, here. The tl;dr version of that article is a minor uproar ensues but Newscorp contains it and is more or less successful claiming it as a one-off, rouge scenario, offering up the resignation of Andy Coulson, the editor, though he claims not to have known anything about it of course.
Now Andy Coulson makes the mistake of getting a job - head of communications, think Toby Ziegler in the West Wing - in the Conservatives, who get into government. This, combined with statements made by the private investigator who's decided he's not going down alone, adds enough fuel to get the fire burning again. The Guardian and Channel 4 get digging and out comes a documentary. A handful of celebrities are sniffing around it now, lo and behold Hugh Grant throws gas on the fire by bugging the bugger. All is forgiven Hugh, well played.
Accusations just keep mounting up and the picture is forming pretty solidly of a newsroom where such things were par for the course. An oft-repeated point directed at Coulson I'll paraphrase as "either he knew and he broke the law, or he didn't and he's grossly negligent" (not sure who started that, I think Ian Hislop). Coulson is given the boot.
The shit is flying pretty thick now and it just keeps coming. But it's all the royals, celebs and politicians. There is a sense that whilst it's overstepping the mark considerably, these are all public people and fair game. Milly Dowler, on the other hand, was a child and a tragedy. This is a recent turn in events and very quickly major advertisers have started to step away. I'll applaud Ford for being the first of the big advertisers to drop them, though I'm quite surprised it took so long. I suspect more shuffled away quietly.
News is now coming in that the police investigating the phone hacking have contacted the parents of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, the girls killed by the Soham Murderer. This was one of the biggest stories and national tragedies I can remember.
The News of the World really must not be allowed to survive this, it is a stunning failure of ethics, governance and plain decency on a huge scale with substantial evidence. If they can't be brought down for this, they clearly cannot be taken down for anything. Yet it's even proving difficult to remove the editor.
It's like Ross Perot and George W got together and decided to have an aphorism contest...
round them all up and give them all the harshest penalty under law
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
under the new draconian anti-hacking laws, some of which have been classified as 'terrorism', perhaps NewsCorp could be declared a terrorist organization.
im referring to the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, some of which paragraphs now qualify under 'terrorism' and RICO law.
maybe the UK has something similar - they used terror law to go after Iceland when the banks busted.
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.
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.
other organizations.
the head of a media company will often be involved in piddly little bullshit , like how the CEO of NBC was involved in the Conan O'Brien thing.
Bill Keller of the NYTimes was directly involved in the Wikileaks debates.
because, uhm, a couple hundred thousand people died in that one.
did anyone 'hack' and 'phones' about that 'tragedy'?
I guess this is for Americans who think Fox News is the pinnacle of Murdoch's evil, or anyone under about 25! There's another Murdoch property, The Sun. Its circulation is still next-to-nothing in Liverpool 22 years after they published an infamous front page (THE TRUTH) lilbelling Liverpool Football Club fans. They blamed them for the Hillsborough football stadium crush, accusing fans of attacking the emergency services, urinating on dead bodies etc. For 22 years there's barely a newsagent in the city that will stock the paper, and it's the UK's biggest selling daily. News Of The World is (basically) the Sunday edition, and they are the first to call for lynch mobs whenever covering crimes against children
This is enormous news in the UK except of course in The Sun and the Times, both Murdoch papers. It's happening at a time when Murdoch wants to buy complete control of Sky, a deal which needs approval from the state. Our Prime Minister David Cameron pulls Christmas Crackers with the News of the World's former editor, who's at the centre of this scandal. And the NoTW's editor after her, Andy Coulson - Cameron appointed him as his party's communications director in 2007 - but he had to resign in January when it became clear he knew all about the illegal phone hacking. This man was in government until this surfaces.
So it's just the pinnacle of the bizarre relationship between the Murdoch press, our main political parties, and apparent public opinion. If advertisers and readers boycott the paper, which seems quite likely in the short term, you could only call it "a good start".
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
allegedly targeted too. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/06/families-7-7-targets-phone-hacking
one love, one spaceship earth.
Something that bothers me about this that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere is that "hacking" in to anyone's voicemail is far too easy to do.
Every voicemail system I have had has used a 4 digit pin to protect it. Many times it comes pre-set with the last four digits of the phone number as the pin or something simple and obvious like 0000 or 1234. As far as I know there is no company that implements throttling or lockout when too many wrong combinations are tried, meaning that using an automated dialer you could try every possible combination in around 10 hours even if you could only try one attempt every 30 seconds.
I don't know what else is required to "hack" into someone's voicemail but I'm tempted to think that if a private investigator could do it, the phone companies are not trying hard enough.
Punishing the people who have committed this crime is appropriate, but it is not sufficient to prevent the crime from being committed again.
Sig matters not. Judge me by my sig, do you?
We have done this for VIP clients, and involves rerouting the calls to a better system.
However, we've gone one better, which is why journalists really hate us now - we keep forensic quality logs..
Take off Murdoch, you have been rumbled! Surely now the guilty News International employees must be named and shamed so that the vigilante justice that the News of the World so approves of can be done.
They may also have hacked phone calls of the realtives of theo killed in the 7/7 terrorist bomb explosion in London.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/8619373/News-of-the-World-bereaved-relatives-of-77-victims-had-phones-hacked.html
I think you've filled in all the details, and you've completed a business plan that actually works. Bravo Sir!
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Why isn't Mastercard and Visa REFUSING to accept "subscriptions" to this paper? Why hasn't THEIR Paypal account been frozen?
See how it's one set of rules for common people and another set of rules for Big Business?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
... they are the first to call for lynch mobs whenever covering crimes against childre
including the notorious time that they got a crowd sufficiently fired up to attack the office of a paediatrician....
Does this corporation employ similar newsgathering methods in its other markets? Australia? USA?
Korma: Good
if you read through enough court cases involving the first amendment, for example the recent Thomas Drake case (google FAS.org thomas drake case files), you will find out what happens when we let the first amendment 'slide' a little against people we dislike or disagree with.
precedents used against terrorists (who i do not approve of) and oliver north (who i strongly disagree with) in first amendment cases were later applied to thomas drake.
tahts why you have to protect it no matter who is on the other end of the prosecution. because eventually the government will use any precedent to further restrict that freedom of speech.
uhmm dude you just said you want someone to die for hacking into a phone. thats not really considered by most people to be an appropriate punishment for the level of crime allegedly committed