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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."
Allegedly the investigator did it so that the voicemail wouldn't run out of space. As in they'd heard the ones on the phone, but wanted to ensure that they could hear new ones coming in.
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.
Because she was still missing at the time. They wanted the scoop. Bunch of sick fucks, deleting messages and giving the parents hope their kid is still alive (it's not the only time they've done this too).
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.
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
One reporter and the private investigator have already gone to prison for this: I think wrong-doing has been proved beyond a reasonable doubt by convictions in a criminal court.
In addition News International have setup up a ~£20million fund to pay compensation to those who they have admitted they hacked. I think wrong-doing have been proved beyond a reasonable doubt by a confession and an apology.
What is up for debate here is exactly how evil and corrupt they are - it has been proved that they are evil and corrupt already.
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?
1. The editor of the paper at the time is now NIs most senior person in the UK.
2. The voicemail messages were deleted by NotW journalists, NOT by the investigator who initially gained access to the voicemail.
Don't try and let NI off the hook for this (even if you are an astroturfer working for them).
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.
The News of the World Hacking Scandal is a big thing in the UK at the moment. It has now emerged that they hacked the phones of two other murdered girls, Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells, who were murdered by Ian Huntley; and the police are now looking at many other child murder cases.
Hacking websites of the rich and powerful for the sake of lulz or political protest is one thing - this is anon attacking big money. Being emplyed by the rich and powerful to hack the voicemail of innocent dead teenage girls is a different thing - this is big money attacking anon. The difference is obvious.
Korma: Good
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.
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.
The previous leaks didn't delete the source information after distributing it. These guys recorded the phone messages then deleted them, potentially interfering with a police investigation and causing the family to believe their daughter had deleted the messages so must have still been alive. See the difference?
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.
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.
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.
If you knew anything about this story, which has been running since 2006, you'd know that it isn't about the actions of one individual; it's about a culture of using illegal techniques to obtain access to private information that has been rife at the News of the World (NotW) for years.
Rebekah Brooks, editor of the NotW at the time Milly Dowler's voicemail was hacked, accidentally admitted to a House of Commons committee a few years ago that the paper bribed police officers for information, though she later claimed that she didn't know the details of specific instances. As knowing the specifics would have left her open to prosecution, we can form an opinion of the merits of her claims of ignorance of what those she employed and directly supervised were doing on a regular basis.
Two people, one a NotW editor and the other a private investigator employed by the NotW, have served prison sentences for hacking the voicemail messages of members of the royal household.
The voicemail messages of senior politicians, including the former Deputy Prime Minister, and of senior military officers have been hacked, and this has been admitted by News International.
So far, News International has paid out more than £2million in out-of-court settlements, and it is believed they may have to pay as much as £40million to deal with all the claims against them by individuals whose privacy has been invaded.
This isn't the actions of one individual: it is a corporate policy of deliberate illegality for the sake of profit.
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