News of the World Investigation Expanded to 9/11 Victims

DMandPenfold writes "Police are questioning whether a change in News International's email retention policy was part of an effort to conceal widespread phone hacking by the News of the World, a scandal which is threatening Rupert Murdoch's planned takeover of BSkyB. The trawl for emails and the questioning of changes in News International's email retention policy has important implications for IT security and corporate governance professionals, and is likely to see organizations examining their own policies and reminding their staff on acceptable usage and best practice for email."

Comments

for the wrong reasons

[Trepidity]

is likely to see organizations examining their own policies and reminding their staff on acceptable usage and best practice for email

It'd be pretty sad if the lesson people take from the News Corp fiasco is: man, their IT staff should've really been more on the ball about making sure no evidence of the crimes they committed was accidentally retained.

Re:for the wrong reasons

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

It'd be pretty sad if the lesson people take from the News Corp fiasco is: man, their IT staff should've really been more on the ball about making sure no evidence of the crimes they committed was accidentally retained.

It's been an open secret for well over a decade now that email retention policies are purely legal dodges. There is no other reason to automatically delete such massive stores of institutional memory except for the possible legal threat they may pose. It isn't like email storage requirements are a practical limitation - any company with terabytes of email is going to have an IT budget so large that those costs will be lost in the noise.

And, while I don't have a link at hand, I recall a case a couple years ago where the government was pursuing charges that a large corp's email retention practices were a deliberate form of destruction of evidence - despite all of the lawyerly sign-offs and standardised corporate practices verbiage. I wish I did have a link because I'd like to know how that case turned out.

Re:for the wrong reasons

[vlm]

It isn't like email storage requirements are a practical limitation

Talk like that is going to result in the lawyers requiring all emails to be hidef videos with 5.1 sound, no more plain text. Keep quiet lest a lawyer hear us, unless you look forward to supporting that kind of a monstrosity...

There's blood in the water....

[darien.train]

And a lot of it too. Everyone can smell it and the revelations are only in their infancy. I always thought Murdoch was a blight on the news industry and a poster child for the evils of media consolidation but this scandal shocks even me. This is mafia-level shit.

Re:There's blood in the water....

[Rogerborg]

Oh, pfft, Murdoch could eat an orphan live on Sky 1, and he'd still be feted and fawned over come the next general election. Keeping that harridan Rebekah Brooks on-board is a clear F-U to the peons (in which I include such non-entities as mere Prime Ministers).

Re:There's blood in the water....

[MightyMartian]

It's getting actually downright scary. Apparently there's evidence that a member of the Queen's security team was taking bribes for information on the doings and whereabouts of members of the Royal Family. Let's keep in mind here that the Queen is the head of state of the UK and fifteen other Commonwealth Realms, and this is a massive breach of security.

Imagine for a moment what would be happening right now to any newsroom that had managed to penetrate the Secret Service and was gaining information on the President's whereabouts, or that of his wife and children. The Secret Service would be tearing the newsroom to pieces, reporters and editors, Christ, even the bloody janitors and the guy that flips the water bottles, would be sweating it out under a bright light bulb in front of guys in suits and sunglasses.

Re:There's blood in the water....

[Hope Thelps]

Keeping that harridan Rebekah Brooks on-board is a clear F-U to the peons (in which I include such non-entities as mere Prime Ministers).

Maybe.

I'd pretty much assumed that she was just being kept ready as the scape goat of choice when things get really bad (and we don't know how much there is yet to come). "Oh, we don't want to lose Rebekah, we have complete confidence in Rebekah, no absolutely we won't fire Rebekah... well, okay, you win, Rebekah has been escorted out of the building - a big triumph for the will of the public. Massive embarassement for us but you beat us. Now let's move on."

Maybe I'm just naive.

Ok, ok.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Can we finish locking the News of the World staff in their headquarters and burning it to the ground, along with anybody found to have aided or abetted them(given that their contacts with the Met and right up to the PM are well known, this probably includes a few people in addition to their shady PIs...) and get on to an important matter:

Why are phones, particularly the VM box that is more or less an automatic part of today's cell phone, so damn vulnerable? The Telcoes seem to have no trouble tracking our activities in great detail if those activities are something for which we can be billed, and they also seem eminently willing to cooperate with law enforcement. Why, then, do I have absolutely no way of knowing when, and from where, my VM box was called into, and why would the VM box of a phone that is subject to police investigation be accessible from the outside at all?

I certainly wouldn't mind seeing a bunch of tabloid flacks roasted in their own slime; but if voicemail hacking and phone intercepts by random PIs are that easy, we have a problem that needs to be solved by better security, not just crushing malefactors after the fact...

Re:Ok, ok.

[Herkum01]

I know VM is not very secure, but what I don't understand is why everyone is not screaming about this being a hacking crime. If an individual does this they want to throw the book at them and lock them up for years.

Just because it is a newspaper out to make money does not entitle them to escape criminal charges. They should be out there pressing charges and fining Murdoch for this behavior.

Re:Ok, ok.

[bmo]

>The majority of the time, the user will have a stupidly weak password like 1234, 123456, 111111, etc. I do VoIP for a living and one of the platforms I support, Broadworks, can not block a user from having a password like 123456. 111111 is banned, but easy sequences can't be yet.

The next time you go to the ATM take a look at the number pad, where people put in their PINs.

You will see that numbers 1 through 5 have the most wear.

It's like this everywhere.

--
BMO

Re:Are they just the ones that got caught?

[clickclickdrone]

>The Daily Mail has been noticeably reluctant to comment on the subject, for example.
They just haven't found an angle yet to blame it on immigrants. Luckily, Murdoch has just arrived...

Press charges against Murdoch and Brooks

[G3ckoG33k]

Published: September 1, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/magazine/05hacking-t.html

IN NOVEMBER 2005, three senior aides to Britain’s royal family noticed odd things happening on their mobile phones. Messages they had never listened to were somehow appearing in their mailboxes as if heard and saved. Equally peculiar were stories that began appearing about Prince William in one of the country’s biggest tabloids, News of the World.

  As Scotland Yard tracked Goodman and Mulcaire, the two men hacked into Prince Harry’s mobile-phone messages. On April 9, 2006, Goodman produced a follow-up article in News of the World about the apparent distress of Prince Harry’s girlfriend over the matter. Headlined “Chelsy Tears Strip Off Harry!” the piece quoted, verbatim, a voice mail Prince Harry had received from his brother teasing him about his predicament.

The palace was in an uproar, especially when it suspected that the two men were also listening to the voice mail of Prince William, the second in line to the throne

The ones in charge, Rupert Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks, have known about this for years and approved of it. They are the ones who should be charged, not the pianists, i.e. the reporters. They did what they were told to do.

Read more at http://www.observer.com/2010/media/new-york-times-goes-after-murdoch-and-news-world-phone-hacking-scandal

"When The Times reporters asked one veteran News of the World reporter how many people in the offices knew about the hacks, the reporter said “Everyone knew The office cat knew."

and

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/12/world/europe/12hacking.html?_r=1&ref=world
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/11/world/europe/11britain.html?ref=world

The evidence is there, and everywhere, Murdoch and Brooks are scum.

Re:Press charges against Murdoch and Brooks

[Zelos]

What about the morons who kept buying the paper every Sunday to read those kind of idiotic stories?

Perhaps it's a case of getting the newspapers we deserve?

Re:When do the investigations here start?

[HangingChad]

See, I don't buy that. You may want it to be true because it excuses Fox. False equivalence lets one side keep moving the goal post. The other side does it, therefore it's okay if our guys do it.

Re:/. would be supporting it

[Nick Ives]

Wait a second, you're seriously arguing that it would have been better for the Kenyan people to not know about the corruption? That the fixing of an election and the ensuing violence was Wikileaks fault?

Wikileaks didn't kill those people, cabinet ministers in the Kenyan government planned and promoted the violence in order to crush the opposition! Sure, if the opposition hadn't found out about the corruption there would have been no reason to kill them. If you want to follow that logic though, we should just burn all newspapers and do whatever the people in power tell us to do.