Tag Archives: phone hacking

Jack of Kent: Putting phone hacking into legal context

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Following the recently renewed phone hacking allegations aimed at the News of the World, lawyer and writer David Allen Green has a useful post on his Jack of Kent blog putting the issues into legal context, outlining the laws which apply to the unauthorised interception of voice messages.

He advises that this includes Section 48 of the Wireless Telegraphy Act 2006 where a person commits an offence if they make unauthorised use of “wireless telegraphy apparatus” with intent to obtain information, and Sections 1 and 2 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 which rules that it is a criminal offence and a tort to unlawfully interfere with any communication during transmission.

Green provides detailed references to each relevant law and also provides links to guidance by the Crown Prosecution Service.

See his full post here…

‘The silence is almost eerie’: press holds back on phone hacking scandal

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Allegations of phone hacking at the News of the World resurfaced this week following an investigation by the New York Times which looked at past allegations as well as a new case being legally pursued by a third party. This has led to calls today for a judicial review from industry bodies and politicians.

But coverage of the event by the rest of the media has come under criticism by numerous publications and bloggers.

Caroline Crampton at the New Statesman reflected on the issue the day after the story broke, when she claims the Guardian was the only national newspaper to have reported on the NYTimes article at the time.

The Times, the Telegraph, the Independent, the Daily Mail, the Sun and the Mirror all failed to cover the story at all. Considering that the investigation uncovers a widespread culture of phone-hacking at a major Sunday paper, with one source saying “Everyone knew. The office cat knew”, I would have thought that Fleet Street would have more to say about the low tactics employed by one of its number.

But the silence on the Coulson story from the rest is almost eerie. Papers are usually desperate to expose each other’s failures. Why are they holding back?

Online media watchdog Tabloid Watch makes the same points, while editor of the Liberal Conspiracy blog Sunny Hundal wrote on the Guardian website that while he expected News International publications to avoid the topic, he was disappointed by a lack of coverage on BBC radio early on.

It comes as little surprise News International subsidiaries and other tabloids have avoided it. But the BBC’s radio silence also speaks volumes: not just about their deference to the new administration, but of unwillingness to investigate their peers. It needed the New York Times to blow the story wide open again.

(…) The conscience of our country is determined more by Rupert Murdoch’s private interests than is healthy, already. These controversies say less about rightwing bloggers (whose smears are used as a proxy) and more about the collusion that takes place among the media establishment.

However the BBC has since followed up on the Time’s report, including an interview on Radio 4’s Today programme with Lord John Prescott this morning discussing his own concerns of being targeted by phone hackers while BBC Surrey’s Nick Wallis yesterday discussed the report, admitting that the BBC had only touched on the issue “from time to time” but said he would be writing to every Conservative MP in Surrey and asking them if they are happy that David Cameron kept former NOTW editor Andy Coulson as his PR man.

The article by the New York Times is due to be published in its Sunday magazine this weekend.

Guardian commends Chris Huhne for speaking out over NOTW phone hacking

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Readers of the Guardian website may have noticed its coverage of cabinet minister Chris Huhne’s affair was rather quieter than that of its rivals over the weekend. Its report on Sunday said:

Some commentators questioned whether Huhne was targeted because he had previously spoken out against the News of the World, one of the papers to print snatched photographs of him and his mistress. Last year, Huhne wrote a comment piece for the Guardian demanding an inquiry into the News of the World phone-hacking scandal,saying: “It strikes at the heart of the privacy any individual can expect in a civilised society.”

Today, in its editorial the Guardian praises Huhne for speaking out against phone hacking at News of the World (following the newspaper’s own scoop) last year.

He has made some powerful enemies by being an MP unafraid to speak frankly and directly about notorious abuses of power. For the past year he has spoken out against the phone-hacking that occurred at the News of the World under Andy Coulson’s editorship and Rupert Murdoch‘s ownership. There have been few MPs so vociferous in condemning the possible collusion by our intelligence services in the torture of Britons abroad. Who knows who has put Mr Huhne under surveillance? Or what circumstances led Mr Murdoch’s snoopers to be in the right place at the right time? Yet an independent, forthright politician is cut down, as others before him. Public life ought to be able to accommodate such people as Mr Huhne, who brings to politics a deep interest in economics, social policy and the environment. But who, watching his example, would want to follow?

For further discussion of media coverage and privacy issues see Charlie Beckett’s blog: Twitter, India Knight and Chris Huhne: the end of discretion?

PCC defends phone hacking report: ‘We can’t do things that the police can do’

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The Press Complaints Commission yesterday denied it had mishandled its report into phone hacking, even though the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport select committee found the body’s findings “simplistic and surprising”.

Speaking to journalists at the launch of its annual review for 2009, its director Stephen Abell, and chair, Baroness Peta Buscombe defended the report that was condemned by the Guardian and the Media Standards Trust.

Where the self-regulation body had failed, Stephen Abell said, was in explaining its function and what its powers could achieve.

But he said it had done what it set out to do: to investigate whether it had been misled in 2007 and whether incidents of phone hacking were ongoing.

“We have to be extraordinarily careful,” said Buscombe, “not to do anything that would interfere with other investigative powers, i.e. the police … we’re very careful not to tread on other toes.”

The Guardian’s allegations in July 2009, however, concerned activity in 2006/7, a point Journalism.co.uk put to the PCC’s chair, Peta Buscombe and director, Stephen Abell.

“It was reported, there were claims that it was ongoing,” said Abell, with which Buscombe agreed.

“It was also a suggestion that it was ongoing at the time, it was certainly reported that way and we made clear in 2009 that’s what we were interested in,” he said.

The inquiry launched in 2009 was responding to “notions” made to the PCC that it was ongoing, said Abell.

“I have been very clear that on my watch if it was happening, if there was a whiff of it we would be onto it straight away but we would have to be exceedingly careful,” argued Buscombe.

“We can’t do things that the police can do, if we were to do that we would have to be regulated by the state, which I think is a very bad path for the press to go in,” she said.

But did the PCC consider it had been misled, considering the subsequent court settlements – with Gordon Taylor – for example?

“Were we materially misled in the context of what we were trying to do in 2007? It wasn’t the function of the PCC to duplicate the police investigation in 2007,” said Abell.

“What we did in 2007, was look prospectively not retrospectively,” he said.

Would the PCC act upon any new allegations, such as more recent ones made by the Guardian? If there was “material evidence,” said Stephen Abell. It was important not to go off “speculation,” added Buscombe.

Independent: PCC would act on ‘a whiff’ of new phone hacking

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“In the advertising world I never felt this beating up of the regulator that I have felt here,” chairwoman of the Press Complaints Commission and former chief executive of the Advertising Association Peta Buscombe tells the Independent.

In the interview, Buscombe explains the PCC’s role in the inquiries into allegations of phone hacking at News of the World, for which the commission was criticised by Guardian reporter Nick Davies and the Media Standards Trust:

“One of the lessons is that we have to be crystal clear in the way we explain our remit. There was an expectation that we would be able to do more than we felt able to do at the time,” she says. “I can tell you now that if we got a whiff that it was happening again, we would act, there’s no question about this.”

Buscombe also says she’d like Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, to return to the code committee, from which he resigned in November.

Full interview at this link…

Media Guardian: Fresh phone hacking investigation into John Terry affair stories

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More from Nick Davies in the investigative journalist’s ongoing exposés of phone hacking by the British press: the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has launched a new, official inquiry into suspected interception of voicemail messages linked to tabloid reporting of Vanessa Perroncel and her alleged affair with England and Chelsea footballer John Terry.

The evidence focuses on the phone records of Vanessa Perroncel and of one of her close friends, Antonia Graham. Perroncel was accused by tabloids of having an affair with Terry.

One allegation involves the interception of a live telephone call between the two women, a more serious offence than listening to phone messages.

Published in February, the findings of a Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee inquiry into press standards, privacy and libel said the News of the World and other newspapers turned a blind eye to illegal phone hacking and ‘blagging’ (the practice of obtaining information through deception), contradicting a Press Complaints Commission report published in November.

According to Davies’ new report, Perroncel’s lawyers have also formally warned seven national newspapers that she is planning to sue them for privacy breaches.

Full story at this link…

Independent.co.uk: Solicitor general to look into phone hacking concerns

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MP Tom Watson has speculated that his question in the House of Commons last Thursday, like many other phone hacking concerns, will receive scant attention by the press.

Linking to an Independent on Sunday report, he tweeted: “yet another phone hacking story that won’t be reported anywhere else”.

And Google News shows us Watson is right so far – only the IoS appears to have picked up the solicitor general’s response to his question about the investigation of the News of the World phone hacking case.

[From Hansard: PDF at this link]

Mr. Tom Watson (West Bromwich, East) (Lab): Will my hon. and learned Friend satisfy herself that the Crown Prosecution Service has not successfully prosecuted cases on the basis of police files that were compiled using evidence illegally obtained by News of the World phone hacking?

The Solicitor-General: Yes – I am not sure that any connection has been made, but I am very well aware of the issue, and it is an issue well raised.

Further to that, the Independent on Sunday reports:

Whitehall sources said that there would not, at this stage, be a full-blown investigation into any concerns, but that the issue would be examined. A more detailed investigation would take place if substantial evidence was put forward, sources said.

According to the paper: “a spokesman for the Met said it would not be commenting on the parliamentary exchange. A News International spokesman declined to comment.”

MediaGuardian: Clifford drops phone hacking case following £1m deal

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News International is to pay out around £1 million in legal costs and personal payments in the latest phone hacking case, the Guardian reports. Publicist Max Clifford will now drop his legal action concerning the alleged interception of his voicemail.

The settlement means that there will now be no disclosure of court-ordered evidence which threatened to expose the involvement of the newspaper’s journalists in a range of illegal information-gathering by private investigators.

Full story at this link…

Alan Rusbridger: ‘Weak press self-regulation threatens decent journalism’

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“Once again weakness by the regulator has led to people calling for tougher sanctions against journalism,” Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger argued at today’s press self-regulation debate in the House of Lords.

The failings of the Press Complaints Commission explained the Culture, Media and Sport select committee’s call for a renamed self-regulatory body with the power to make financial sanctions, he said.

The panel gathered at Westminster for the Media Standards Trust event (at which no member of the Press Complaints Commission was present, despite being invited) were united on one point: that increasing the PCC’s powers of penalisation was not necessarily the right way forward.

Geoffrey Robertson QC was adamant on this point: redress of grievances should be done through the courts with juries, not via the PCC; Bob Satchwell, chairman of the Society of Editors, was firmly against any governmental direction of press regulation: it should come from the public and the industry, he said.

Robertson, who has previously called for all newspaper editors to step down from the body, said the PCC was a “confidence trick that now fails to inspire confidence”.

Private Eye’s Ian Hislop was the “most trusted editor in Britain “by not having anything to do with the PCC” Robertson said, adding that most its inquiries were “utter jokes”.

Bob Satchwell, loyal defender of the mainstream press and the PCC, said that suspension of publication (one of the recommendations made by the CMS committee last week) had “absolutely no place in democracy”. “In the end the real arbiters should be the readers,” he said.

The PCC had changed a “cavalier” and “arrogant” press of yore, Satchwell said. The level of control should be up to the public and the readers, he added – not organisations like the Media Standards Trust, or the government.

Rusbridger, who laid out the phone hacking saga as a case study of PCC failure (over which he resigned from the editors’ code committee) said the body needed to either admit it couldn’t conduct proper inquiries, or undergo serious reform.

“It may be that it’s flying the wrong flag [and might be ] better to rebrand itself as a media complaints and conciliation service and forget about regulation.”

Over phone hacking and the new evidence presented by the Guardian in July 2009, the PCC had “showed a complete lack of appetite to get to the bottom of what had happened,” he said.

It inquiries into phone hacking, had been inadequate, Rusbridger said. The PCC had explained privately “that they didn’t have the resources to do proper investigations and it wasn’t within their remit. [It said] they were not set up or financed to do proper investigations”.

“To which the answer is is fine, but then don’t pretend to do investigations which are then used to exonerate people or organisations. By doing so you bring self-regulation into disrepute.”

Rusbridger argued several points in particular:

  • He claimed that either former NOTW editor Andy Coulson or News International executives were lying, in light of the Guardian’s allegations that four “criminal” private investigators had been hired by the News of the World in the past. It was either the case that Andy Coulson, currently director of communications for the Conservative party, was lying and knew about the activities of these private investigators, “criminally obtaining information which led directly to News of the World stories”; or, Rusbridger said, individuals within News International “knew about them and paid them [private investigators] … but protected the editor from knowing what was going on, in which case News International executives have been lying”. Those seemed to him, he claimed, the only two explanations for recent revelations.

CMS Report: News International claims party-politics make report on phone hacking worthless

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The Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee’s report into press standards, privacy and libel has some pretty damning things to say about journalism and management at News International, following allegations of phone hacking at the News of the World.

[Read the full report at this link]

The committee opened an investigation into phone hacking following a series of stories by the Guardian last summer, said that News International senior staff called to the committee had suffered “collective amnesia” and were unwilling to provide detailed information about activities at the paper up to 2007.

So how has News International responded?

On the Sun’s website today coverage of the report goes by the headline: “Report on press ‘hijacked’ by Labour MPs” and says:

Labour MPs wanted to smear Tory communications boss Andy Coulson, an ex-News of the World editor. But the report found “no evidence” he knew phone hacking was taking place.

The report uncovered no new evidence of phone hacking at NOTW, says the Sun. But the committee did draw new conclusions by looking into existing evidence:

It is likely that the number of victims of illegal phone-hacking by Glenn Mulcaire
will never be known. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that there were a significant
number of people whose voice messages were intercepted, most of whom would appear
to have been of little interest to the Royal correspondent of the News of the World. This
adds weight to suspicions that it was not just Clive Goodman who knew about these
activities.

Tom Newton Dunn’s story made it onto page 2 of the print edition and op-ed on page 8 (next to a feature on ‘How to tell if you’re being lied to’) weighed in with the headline “No honour”:

Today is another dark day for parliament (…) members wasted seven months – nearly half their time – on unfounded claims made by the Guardian newspaper against News International (…) Parliamentary select committees are important but only work if MPs  on them behave with fairness and honour. Some on this committee have not. Its report is accordingly worthless.

The Sun’s leader piece makes particular reference to Tom Watson MP’s position on the panel. As Watson himself notes in a Comment is Free piece on the CMS report today, he recently won a libel action against the Sun. No mention of this in the Sun’s piece – perhaps the political tensions are more personal…

The Sun’s story toes the same line as the official statement from News International in response to the report [in full below], which suggested that certain members of the cross-party committee had pursued a party-political agenda.

They have worked in collusion with The Guardian, consistently leaking details of the Committee’s intentions and deliberations to that newspaper.

Elsewhere, sister title The Times reports on the committee’s recommendations offering up two stories on page 15 of the print edition.