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.

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.