Over the next year, the hacking scandal expanding to a corruption and bribery scandal at the News of the World's sister paper, the best selling Sun. Over 50 people have now been arrested. An internal News Corp inquiry, the MSC - set up under pressure from the FBI, SEC and DOJ - has now handed over thousands of emails suggesting bribery of public officials. The scandal expanded to include allegations of TV piracy at News Corp's pay-TV encryption services in Australia, the UK, Italy and the US.

But more than anything, for the UK, the Leveson Inquiry has shone a light into the dark corners of the political media class, and revealed such extensive back door lobbying between the Murdochs and the last five prime ministers, that it was almost like discovering a state within a state. And of course, with Rebekah Brooks, Andy Coulson and James Murdoch meeting virtually every day with David Cameron, George Osborne and Jeremy Hunt, the convergence over the last few years has been almost seamless. As a senior News International journalist expressed it to me:

The Court of Cameron and the Court of Murdoch have become almost totally enmeshed.

This last year has been an amazing journey for our country, and for me personally, as I became inextricably caught up in the coverage of the affair. My book, which explores those 14 days in July which ended a media dynasty - and the 50 years leading up to it - is in the final stages and due for publication at the end of the month.

Below I might share some of the book, particularly the reality of the Milly Dowler story, but mainly this diary is to share YOUR memories, to hear your thoughts about this momentous year

This is from an unedited, unproofed section of Chapter One; The Fall of the House of Murdoch

Accessing mobile voicemail messages without permission has been illegal in the UK since the Computer Misuse Act 1990, which carries a two-year prison sentence as a maximum penalty and has no ‘public interest’ defence. However, throughout the early nineties when mobile phones became ubiquitous, several newspaper scoops were derived from some kind of interception and recording of analogue phone signals. The two most famous are a six-minute bedtime ‘Tampon’ conversation between Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles on a mobile phone (recorded December 18 1989 and published by the Sunday Mirror and the Sunday People in 1993) and the Squidgygate tape of a private conversation between Princess Diana and a close friend (published by the Sun in 1992).

In 2000 the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) made intercepting a message while ‘in the course of transmission’ illegal. Around this time mobile telephony shifted from analogue to digital and intercepting encrypted signals required expensive technology, generally only available to the security services. However, a back door was left open: voicemails could be accessed remotely through a pin number. Much like the default admin passwords left on computers in the eighties, these pins were often left unchanged from their defaults. One of the first to discover this loophole was Steve Nott who alerted various newspapers to the security breach. As he claimed under oath to the Leveson Inquiry, the newspapers decided to use the security breach for ‘their own purposes’ rather than publish the story. Even phone users who changed their pin codes were still vulnerable to simple password attacks, with data such as dates of birth culled from other sources. If that failed, a bit of social engineering could solve the problem; dedicated investigators could ring the mobile phone service provider, either pretending to be the customer or an employee, and get the pin code set to default.

On the evening of 21 March 2002 after their thirteen-year-old daughter Milly failed to return from school, Bob and Sally Dowler rang the police. Within twenty-four hours a nationwide search for Milly was launched, and soon videos and photos of the missing teenager were broadcast on prime-time television. The News of the World which, under the editorship of Rebekah Brooks and her deputy editor Andy Coulson, had built a reputation for covering child murders, began a furious campaign.

Three weeks after Milly’s disappearance, in the first edition of NoW on Sunday April 14th, a major story by-lined by Robert Kellaway, has some interesting details.

To any casual reader the details of the messages, not only their content, timing and more importantly the tone of the callers, indicate that these have been listened to by the journalist. It’s not even concealed. There’s no suggestion of a police source. The News of the World, arrogating command of the investigation and trying to sell up a scoop, seems to know more about Milly than the police.

We now know that Milly was already dead, murdered by Levi Bellfield and dumped in Hampshire woodland where her body would not be found for two years.

We also know now that senior editors of the News of the World were at that time ‘110 per cent’ convinced they knew where Milly was on the basis of hacking her voicemail. One of these was a message from a ‘recruitment caller’ offering a job and (according to the Wall Street Journal) the Sunday paper had sent out eight reporters and photographers to stake out an ink-cartridge factory in Epson for three days. When Milly failed to turn up, and investigations proved that Milly wasn’t even on the factory’s books, the News of the World – stumped for any story – came up with a new scandal: that some hoax caller had rung the factory impersonating a recruitment agency.

Later editions of the News of the World changed the original story, removing some of the more incriminating detail, adding some minimal fact checking. The recruitment company wasn’t a hoax caller, they’d just come up with the wrong number for a client seeking work. But still the tabloid persisted in churning the non-story into a lurid smear: someone mentally disturbed had now called the recruitment agent impersonating Milly.

The hunt for missing Milly Dowler took a shocking twist last night when it emerged a deranged woman has been posing as the missing youngster.

Police believe the sick hoaxer called into a recruitment agency pretending to be Milly.

Staff at the Midlands bureau failed to recognise the name as that of the missing girl and took the woman on their books.

It is thought the hoaxer even gave the agency Milly's real mobile phone number. Police believe she may have got it by gaining the trust of people who knew the schoolgirl.

The agency used the number to contact Milly, real name Amanda, when a job vacancy arose and left a message on her voicemail AFTER the 13-year-old vanished at 4pm on March 21.

It was on March 27, six days after Milly went missing in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey that the employment agency appears to have phoned her mobile.

News is a rough draft of history and a breaking story is like a series of jotted notes, but this scribbled nonsense covers old errors with new: the paper had missed the simple explanation of a wrong number call. A police investigation of this would have quickly discounted the red herring. But the News of the World wanted its sensational exclusive and didn’t want to divulge its illegal source, so clumsily tried to cover its tracks. It would continue to pepper its pages with useless speculation for the next two weeks. When their persistent interference with a missing person investigation failed, and they were eventually ignored by Surrey Police, the newspaper sought retribution by suggesting in print the investigating officers were incompetent.

In the past, tabloid newspapers have been accused of acting like judge and jury during criminal trials, but here we have them acting like the leading investigators during a major murder inquiry (the concatenation of errors, followed by bluster and threats toward the police are forensically documented by Tim Ireland on his Bloggerheads site). Most disturbingly, the paper used its access to illegal information to encourage Milly’s parents that she was still alive and even pressure them into delivering an exclusive interview.

For those who have eyes to see, it’s clear that even ten years ago the Sunday tabloid considered itself better than the police and above the law, which of course they were in more ways than one. It also must have been blindingly obvious to any journalist, police officer or senior News International management at the time that Milly’s voicemail had been hacked by News of the World.

snip about 20 pages of the non-reporting of this story over 9 years

How a family’s grief over their missing daughter could become the stuff of ‘entertainment’ is the subject of the next chapter, but forgetting the near obscene outcome, depraved motives, or illegal means of the News of The World’s hacking, the inescapable fact is that journalists will always intrude and that the reality for any individual involved in a big story will nearly always be a form of misrepresentation and intrusion – at least on a personal emotional level.

There has always been, and always will be, an element of callousness in journalistic investigation. To paraphrase one the first great British press barons, Lord Northcliffe, news is public information which usually someone wants to keep private. Depending on the story, this may involve deceiving witnesses or targets, or indeed threatening them with non-accuracy if they don’t disclose. Such were the tactics of Woodward and Bernstein, and any legitimate journalist covering a big important story will tell you this. Most journalists protect their sources for reasons of trust, loyalty and continued information, but ultimately you’re just a piece in a jigsaw – a ‘source’ – and if you’re more than that, then the journalism is compromised. The individual has to be subordinate to politics in this instance. In the words of Peter Mandelson, ‘You can be friendly with journalists, but journalists are never your friends.’ If a story is in the public interest then the private relationship is always secondary.

The clear difference between the News of the World and the investigative discoveries of the Washington Post in the seventies, the Guardian in the nineties, or indeed the Daily Telegraph when it revealed the scandal of MPs’ expenses, is precisely this justification of a wider public interest: the bigger political picture is the exposure of unseen corruption and – eventually – an assurance of more accuracy and transparency in public life.

Just looking at the three different versions of the News of the World’s coverage of Milly Dowler on 14 April 2002, you can see very little public interest in terms of informing the public, or indeed helping the police. Instead there are several degrees of obfuscation and obstruction. Not only did News of the World journalists (ineptly) try to conceal the hacking of Milly’s phone, they consistently lied to witnesses about their identities. Having got the initial story of a runaway wrong, they first blamed the recruitment agency and then whoever called the recruitment agency as a ‘sick hoax’. This is not ground-breaking journalism. This is clumsy and bullying covering of tracks.

The same habits of intrusion, deception and bullying counter accusation would characterise the attitude of many News International journalists for the next decade. Right up to the Leveson Inquiry in 2012, News of the World’s former senior reporter Neville Thurlbeck suggested – until refuted by a Surrey Constabulary investigation – that the Surrey police had given his paper access to the Dowler messages.

Two senior officers in charge of the original missing person probe at the time – one of whom is now the deputy chief constable of Surrey Police – were placed under investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) in June 2012 for allegedly failing to explore the News of the World’s blatant phone hacking.

In this instance of phone hacking the contrast with Watergate journalism couldn’t be clearer. During Watergate the Nixon administration blocked Woodward and Bernstein wherever they went. Faced with a wall of silence from those in power, the two American journalists had to occasionally dissemble and divert to secure a bigger story in the public interest. But behind the walls of fortress Wapping, the News of the World journalists pulled rank and power, dissembling and diverting in order to conceal the bigger story from the public interest.
 

The book is partly about the decline of the press, the hollowing out of the main stream media, and of course gives big thanks to my fellow Kossacks and Murdochgate investigators who have helped to end the media dynasty. As an example of the great collaboration I've had - especially from illustrious illustrator ericlewis, edifying editor and fact-checker Bluestateredhead - here's a version of Ceebs database on 'Leveson Forgetfulness' which forms appendix One of the book.

Just so you know, the median amnesia of politicians and senior News International execs in module 3 of the Leveson Inquiry was around 4 per cent

For the victims of the press in module 1, the median amnesia was 0.3 per cent

7:51 AM PT: Great. Got the dummy of the book cover - in full tabloid style

Rebekah Brooks was due to answer bail this week for her previous (prearranged) arrest for phone hacking and suborning police officers. This time the raid was much more brutal. It's speculation at the moment, but the fact her husband, the race horse owner Charlie Brooks, was arrested too, suggests it might have something to do with this strange incident of the binned laptop last July, on the night of the Lulzsec hack of The Sun. But apparently one has to be careful speculating here, because of British Contempt of Court Act 1981. I draw no inferences and will remove any quotations. But I wonder if linking to the many easily accessible reports about this is also a breach. Seeking more advice. In the meantime, paras 35-36 of this legal submission from the phone hacking victims who have settled are also very interesting in terms of a potential coverup.

This is very significant, not just because of the gravity of the charges, but because it now puts the hackgate scandal right into the highest circles of power. Charlie Brooks is one of David Cameron's oldest and closest friends, and their riding trips together on an old police horse leant out from the Met, source of the Horsegate hilarity - one of the funniest ever newspaper live threads on the subject at the Telegraph website.

By cruel irony, Charlie Brooks' horseracing column, celebrating the opening of the Cheltenham races, was published this morning. The title and subhead is some somewhat unfortunate.

 

Cheltenham Festival 2012: this meeting is a war of attrition on many fronts The happiest moment of my year is about three hours before the first race at Cheltenham on Tuesday;

 

Rebekah Brooks was until July, Chief Executive of News International. Also arrested is Mark Hanna, head of security at News International. Both were answerable to News International's Chairman, James Murdoch.

 

The Dynasty Falling

 

---

 

But by far the biggest news would be the arrest of James Murdoch. Over the weekend I heard that a senior Fleet Street editor thought this was on the cards. There is also the intriguing fact that one of the six arrested this morning was 39 year old man in Hampshire. Several people online noticed James was 39. My valiant co-reporter Ceebs managed to track down several James Murdochs in Hampshire. According to Reuters:

 

 

One of the descriptions of those arrested - police declined to name them - also fitted the description of James Murdoch, but two sources said he was currently in the United States.

 

News Corp declined to comment on the arrests.

 

But even if he's not arrested yet, as the Chair of News International, he is now powerfully in the frame.

This is not only a personal catastrophe for James, but for the Rupert himself. The whole strategy of News Corp (James still sits on the board there and at BSkyB) was to sacrifice anyone (proteges like Brooks, old retainers like Les Hinton who had served Murdoch for 50 years) to protect the family. But though he wasn't chair of News International when Mulcaire's hacking was at its height, he was during the huge cover up at News International, which implied attempts to delete huge swathes of email evidence, not to mention legal threats, and even surveillance and intimidation of lawyers, police officers and members of Parliament.

James is a victim here of his legacy. By all accounts, he was a more enlightened chairman at BSkyB than his father, and - though inevitably arrogant and entitled - still a better manager. The truth is, he would probably never be in this position, for good and ill, without the family name.

Live by inheritance. Die by inheritance. In every gift there is a curse.

The hackgate scandal has, like the Dreyfus scandal in France 100 years ago, shone a torch beam into the collusions and corruptions of British society, as an overweening media monopoly inserted itself in public life, and suborned the Met police, cowed journalists, and crept its way into the heart of government. The arrest of senior News International, apart from symbolising the Fall of the House of Murdoch, finally proves that some people aren't beyond the law, and encourages everyone who has been intimidated and silenced by Murdoch's money and influence can now speak out, without fearing press intimidation and police collusion.

Whether crimes have been committed or not, is for a judge and jury to answer once charges have been brought. But some very powerful people are now subjected to the full scrutiny of the law. For this alone, it's a great moment for British society, and I hope gives Americans who object to the perverting nexus of money, media power and politics, to hope for more justice there.

 

6:51 AM PT: LibDemFop has more details in an excellent diary on the rec list

http://www.dailykos.com/...

8:07 AM PT: The Labour Shadow Minister for Culture and Media has now asked the Leveson inquiry to investigate the full relationship between Rebekah and Charlie Brooks, and the Prime Minister David Cameron

It is important that the police are continuing to pursue the investigation into phone hacking.

Rebekah and Charlie Brooks are, on the prime minister's own account, close friends of his.

The Leveson Inquiry – when looking into the relations between the press and politicians – will need to investigate the full extent of the relations between the prime minister and senior News International executives at the time when hacking was rife and at the time his government was considering News Corp's bid for BSkyB.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/...

12:24 PM PT: Great compliment from the great Heather Brooke

Can't wait to read this MT @peterjukes: After today's arrests, my book (pub in July) Fall of the House of Murdoch unbound.co.uk/books/the-fall…

— Heather Brooke (@newsbrooke) March 13, 2012

1:02 PM PT: I appear here briefly on a Channel 4 package around 1.40, but check out the video of Charlie Brooks that follows

http://bcove.me/...

 

Original posted on Daily Kos

I think there's a connection... (40+ / 0-)

between the slow rejection in the UK of the tabloid style of reasoning (basically trollery and personal insult) and the sudden turning on Rush L.

The British Tabloids and the American Shock Jocks basically thrived on the backlash against the civil liberties victories of the 60s: legislation against racial discrimination, homophobia, the rise of women in the work place and reproductive rights. For 40 years they thrived on right wing white male resentment. They had nothing to offer but trollery because they sought to to interfere with communication about race, gender and sexuality, but without an alternative agenda or real ideology, except that of opposition, reduction ad absurdum (looney left fictions about banning nursery rhymes etc) and the shock value of mockery.

This was never anything but a reactionary tribute to all the victories of the 60s. The candidacy of Sarah Palin was the ne plus ultra of this political style. Rebarbative, provocative, posited on antagonism alone, it never could offer much more than a macho guffaw and muttering of unfocused dissent.

Forty years on, the people who find this stuff amusing are diminishing. Shock Jocks have run out of positions. They can only flame out or die down.

The other connection is the rise of social media and blogs like DKos. They can organise dissent. Avaaz and 38degrees focused on the advertisers during the News of the World scandal, and when the public summoned enough outrage through twitter and email, the advertisers withdrew from the paper. That's what killed News of the World.

Thanks to new media, we really aren't passive consumers anymore, but can communicate directly with those to attempt to appease us. I guess this is what has happened to Limbaugh.

Well, great minds and all that, but there's much more on this in a great new article by Media Matters: The Self-Destruction Of Limbaugh, Murdoch and Beck

What's fascinating about their startling falls from grace is that each one represented a clear case of self-destruction. Limbaugh hand Murdoch and Beck weren't cut down by their political foes or by partisan dirty tricks. They were cut down by their own moral and ethical failings.

Meaning, Limbaugh's opponents didn't make him call Sandra Fluke a slut and a prostitute, and liberal didn't force him to spend days smearing the women in the most humiliating ways possible, painting her as a greedy nymphomaniac whose parents ought to be deeply ashamed. Nobody egged him on into doing that. In fact, after the initial "slut" and "prostitute" insults, liberals demanded Limbaugh stop using that kind of ugly language. If anything, Limbaugh's foes tried to save him from himself. (By contrast, many of his partisan fans immediately cheered his Fluke attacks.)

The same is true with Beck and Murdoch. Who on the left would have even dreamt up a plot to somehow to get Beck call the president a racist, or to later ramble for weeks about how pro-democracy demonstrators in Egypt represented a spear tip to a looming American left-backed Caliphate uprising in the Middle East. Who even thinks like that, other than Beck?

As for Murdoch, he's cultivated a culture of corruption that's so firmly entrenched that one of his newspaper executives allegedly tried to secure a vote in parliament from a conservative politician in exchange for offering favorable coverage in a Murdoch newspaper. Again, who does that? Who works for a newspaper and doubles as a vote whip for a political party?

All of this behavior is reprehensible and of course falls completely outside the purview of journalism, as even loosely defined to include cable and AM talk shows. For the conservative media, there are no checks in place anymore. Instead, all the introspection has been eliminated and replaced by robotic, partisan defense regardless of the circumstances.

The only part where I disagree is that - while all three are guilty of hubris and over-reach - that was alwaystrue in their careers. As I've discovered while writing my book (see my sig) Murdoch has been involved in the dark arts of intelligencing and intrigue since the 60s - his father since World War I. I bet Beck has always spouted gibberish. And Limbaugh has said offensive things ever since I was unfortunate enough to hear of his existence.

What has changed to my mind is the interactive nature of new media: the fact we can all publish on blogs, can drill down through data, and redistribute information peer to peer. This is making the shock jocks and tabloid merchants look old, slow moving and dinosaur like. Their lies can be countered. Our outrage can finally be heard. It's no longer a monologue of the mainstream media, but a dialogue across many platforms.

(On that score, my diary earlier today about A Chancellor, a Dominatrix, Cocaine and a Spoiler is getting quite a bit of traction on the #Leveson strand. Expect to hear more).

Read the original diary and comments on Daily Kos

 

6:36 AM PT: You'll probably find better analysis of this breaking news in the comments rather than my constant updates

6:38 AM PT: Just had to share this tweet from Owen Jones

James Murdoch gone. If this was Lord of the Rings, that's Saruman down. Still Sauron to go

6:44 AM PT: And another keeper

Don't panic everyone. In a few short weeks he'll be relaunched as James Murdoch on Sunday.

7:07 AM PT: And another

James Murdoch has now been lent to Rebekah Brooks, having reached the end of his working life.

A reference to the police horse the Met loaned to Rebekah, which was returned in poor condition.

7:29 AM PT: Off to appear on Sky News about this - UK viewers wish me luck

9:27 AM PT: About to appear on CNN international, and apparently will be interviewed for Wolf Blitzer's situation room too 

2:20 PM PT: CNN international interview

http://edition.cnn.com/...

2:39 PM PT: Since the Guardian, with help from the NYT, has been the main force exposing this, let me share their brilliant new video

2:49 PM PT: And this is what the leading commentator for the Conservative Daily Telegraph is now saying

Until now, it is only the lesser people who have carried the can for the culture of criminality that flourished inside News International, with the buck stopping with editors such as Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks. The time has come to look higher up – and I am not thinking of hapless James Murdoch, who belatedly resigned as the chairman of News International yesterday afternoon.

Rupert Murdoch, the company’s founder, insists that he never had any knowledge of wrongdoing, and no doubt that is true. But he was the man at the top. He took a very keen interest in the way his British newspapers were run (a newspaperman to his fingertips, last weekend he could be seen hard at work in the newsroom as the Sun on Sunday was launched) and it was he, and nobody else, who set the culture.

We learn more about this culture practically every day. It was a culture of bullying and intimidation, where facts were distorted and lies told. It was a culture which merged the boundaries between police, media and the political class. Though brilliant in many ways, it also did a great deal to debase and even to destroy our public life. Now Rupert Murdoch, an American citizen of Australian heritage, is promoting the break-up of Britain through an alliance with Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish National Party (they met yesterday).

Murdoch’s culture, we now know for a fact, included the criminal culture at the News of the World. We have also heard the corruption allegations from Sue Akers concerning the Sun. Of course nothing has been proved, but if even half of what she says turns out to be true, then it is time to ask whether Rupert Murdoch is a fit and proper person to run not just a newspaper, but any British public company.

As I've discovered through writing my book, Rupert set the culture. In the US he did this with the Summer of Sam scandal of 'celebrity killer' in his New York Post in the 1970s. Hackgate is the logical extension of his modus operandi.

3:40 PM PT: One last comment about the Daniel Morgan Murder, and the relationship between the former prime suspect and our prime minister

the Marunchak business takes us deep down into a bloody gutter.

Rees, having been investigated several times for Daniel Morgan's murder, the last one scuppered by NoW intervention, was rehired by Coulson after prison

The same Coulson who was media supremo at No 10, with security clearance to read the most sensitive secrets of state

It beggars belief. The corruption rose from the gutter to the heights of the political establishment.

 

Originally posted on Daily Kos

 

6:02 AM PT: BBC Reporter Jeremy Bowen has just tweeted this:

Marie Colvin emailed me on Mon from #Homs. said her report previous day in Sunday Times 'was one of those we got in to journalism for'

Here's the link to that heart rending report from the ruins of Homs

http://twitdoc.com/...

6:10 AM PT: And here's Remi Ochlik's Prize Winning Photo from Ras Lanouf in Libya last year

http://www.worldpressphoto.org/...

6:32 AM PT: It now appears that Colvin was deliberately targeted by the Syrian military because of the emotive nature of her reports from Homs

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/...

Jean-Pierre Perin, a journalist for the Paris-based Liberation newspaper who was with Colvin in Homs last week, claimed they had been told that the Syrian Army was "deliberately" going to shell their centre. Mr Perin said: "A few days ago we were advised to leave the city urgently and we were told: 'If they (the Syrian Army) find you they will kill you'. "I then left the city with the journalist from the Sunday Times but then she wanted to go back when she saw that the major offensive had not yet taken place." Mr Perin, who headed to Beirut from Homs, said the Syrians were "fully aware" that the press centre was broadcasting direct evidence of crimes against humanity, including the murdering of women and children. "The Syrian Army issued orders to 'kill any journalist that set foot on Syrian soil'." It was in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, that Mr Perin received news of the intercepted Syrian Army radio traffic. The Syrians knew that if they destroyed the press centre, then there would be "no more information coming out of Homs", said Mr Perin.

Originally posted on Daily Kos

 

 

5:38 AM PT: Also, for those interested, today's admissions extend beyond phone hacking

alan rusbridger @arusbridger Close

John Prescott's emails "unlawfully accessed" as well as phone hacked #Leveson #hackgate

 

That's the editor of the Guardian by the way, talking about the former Deputy Prime Minister having his computer hacked. Operation Tuleta is looking at allegations senior police and counter terrorism officers, as well as other serving ministers, were hacked by NI.

It's like a corporate version of East Germany's STASI.

6:01 AM PT: In the comments below Kossacks have asked me about the legal history of these cases, and I've given a brief sketch of background in this comment here. But more importantly as Brian Cathcart of the Hacked Off campaign writes, we should honour the victims - celebrity or otherwise - who took the grave risk of taking on News International.

 

A whole industry of deception, in other words, has crumbled thanks to the people compensated today and thanks to their predecessors who settled earlier, notably Sienna Miller.

And pathetic though News International’s legal defence has been lately, suing was never easy for the claimants. Think of the risks they exposed themselves to.

Back in 2010 when many of these cases began life, every politician knew that the Sun and the News of the World could wreck their reputations, and that these papers had more access to the Prime Minister (and his two predecessors) than any backbencher and most ministers. Suing probably looked like political suicide to most MPs.

Across television, cinema and sport, from Hollywood to India, New International owns or controls far more than any other company, so if you were an actress, a sportsman, a football agent or a PR person you risked much more than your time and money by suing — you risked your livelihood.

As for ordinary people whose phones had been hacked, you might think they had nothing to lose by suing, but think again: this is a company that employed private investigators on an industrial scale. Would you be happy to have every aspect of your private life secretly investigated, and if the slightest blemish was found — perhaps involving a vulnerable relative — to have that exposed in the press?

So it took courage for these people to sue, and collectively they made the difference between News International escaping scot free and what we have now: substantial police investigations, a couple of dozen arrests, and the historic and far-reaching Leveson Inquiry.

 

Originally posted to Brit on Thu Jan 19, 2012 at 12:23 PM GMT.

 

“To keep the matter in perspective, let me repeat what I said at the beginning of this essay: that in England the immediate enemies of truthfulness, and hence of freedom of thought, are the press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats”
George Orwell: The Prevention of Literature

We’ll never know what Orwell would have made of Rupert Murdoch, a press lord and film magnate, with the bureaucracy of News Corp virtually under his sole control. But over sixty years later, with the collapse of communism, and the near hegemony of market economics, new private bureaucracies have arisen: corporations which in an age of transglobal capital and borderless exchange, could be argued have become almost as powerful as many nation states. The debate about free speech, as evidenced so far by the Leveson Inquiry, has not updated itself to reflect this reality.

In crucial ways, I would argue that – throughout the Hackgate Scandal – we’ve seen vivid evidence of corporate censorship. From the mass deletion of emails, legal pay-outs with attendant non-disclosure orders, redundancies with confidentiality clauses, to professional harassment of lawyers and politicians, there have been clear examples forceful non-disclosure, even if it is in the guise of ‘reputational management’ rather than provable cover-up. But censorship and self-censorship are only the most egregious examples of the chilling of free speech.

As Orwell points out, the suppression of dissenting voices doesn’t have to be negative: it can achieved through the promotion of the favourable point of view, the acquiescent op-ed, the politically correct line. Though it’s not bribery, the blandishment of large fees on favoured politicians or public figures for their ghost-written Opinion pieces both co-opts them and the readership. Suppressio veri: Suggestio falsi. All it takes to promote falsehood is to prevent the truth.  

SNIP -

One of the key revelations of the Hackgate scandal is a massive malfunction in the company’s core activity. The pages ahead will describe an ethos – right from Murdoch’s early days in Australia – in which crucial bits of information are withheld from the public for commercial or political leverage. In effect, Murdoch turned news into a currency that could be traded, sometimes with the public, sometimes with other players under the counter. Rather like Enron, the notorious US company which went from provision of energy to trading in energy futures, one can look at News Corps various gambles over the years – from the cross promoting of Sky in The Sun to the promotion of favoured politicians and public figures – as a trading in news futures: i.e. betting on outcomes rather than current events. And just as this kind of derivative trading is liable to consume the original activity (as Enron did by deliberately provoking power cuts in California to manipulate energy prices) I would argue that through both Hackgate and its reaction to it, News Corp has gone from being a news organisation to an anti-news organisation and failed its primary purpose.

As sites throughout the internet go dark tomorrow, we should all remember what is at stake - and how the threats of censorship and suppression of free speech don't only come from the state

UPDATE: Looking again through the legal judgement in 2009 - and comparing with Harding's confession to Leveson yesterday - it's quite clear The Times misled the High Court. Paragraph three of Lord Justice Eady's judgement makes it clear:

3. It was asserted in the Claimant's skeleton for the hearing of 28 May that his identity had been disclosed to The Times in breach of confidence. By the time the matter came before me, on the other hand, Mr Tomlinson was prepared to proceed on the basis that the evidence relied upon from Mr Patrick Foster, the relevant journalist, was correct; that is to say, that he had been able to arrive at the identification by a process of deduction and detective work, mainly using information available on the Internet.

But it wasn't detective work and deduction. The journalist hacked the blogger's account.

Lincoln once wrote:

The London 'Times' is one of the greatest powers in the world - in fact, I don't know anything which has much more power - except perhaps the Mississippi

And now we know that Murdoch's outlet, once known as the world's prime newspaper of record, not only closed down a fantastic blog by using illegal means to out the blogger, but knowingly deceived the High Court.

Nightjack's anonymity cannot be returned to him. Once out of the bottle, it was gone for good. Lost too where all those great reports from the front line of policing. The internet lost a strong voice, forever. But The Times goes rolling on.

I'm amazed this isn't getting more traction in the UK. In the US it should be more evidence for the ongoing DOJ, FCPA and RICO investigations.

Wed Jan 18, 2012 at  7:21 AM PT: David Allen Green has delivered the killer account of the saga on the News Statesman blog moments ago

http://www.newstatesman.com/...

The killer quote

If the Times did throw its financial and legal might behind a story which they knew to be based on computer hacking and did not inform the court -- or found out later, and still told no one about it -- then that, in my view, would be a scandal perhaps comparable to the tabloids' abuse of phone hacking.

 

Here's the problem. Fascism and Islamic fundamentalism have little if anything in common. Fascism is - by definition - a form of extreme nationalism which shades, in its Nazi version, into radical theories of racial superiority and competition. For all their many evils, extremist Islamic jihadist movements are by definition not nationalistic. That's their point. They are often para-state movements directed against national states, and aim for a transnational unification of the ummah, the global population of believers. As for the racial component, one of reasons Islam spread so quickly across the globe from 500-1500 was that it had virtually no ethnic component. One only has to look at the internationalistic nature of Al Qaeda in its heyday to see that ethnic purity was hardly a key qualification. So what does this matter? The term might confuse two distinct historical movements, but only a pedant would care about that. So what if it displayed some historical amnesia? Islamofascism evoked the forces of repression and terror we've faced for the last two decades. Above all the phrase was catchy. What's wrong with that? That's my point. It was too catchy. And you can trace some of the most startling foreign policy blunders and domestic problems through the spread of this glaring misunderstanding. 1. In international affairs, the term created a false link between the genuinely fascist elements of Ba'athist or Nasserite nationalism with their fundamentalist opponents such as the Muslim Brotherhood or Al Qaeda. It gave credence to the now provably false propaganda that Saddam Hussein was an ally of Bin Laden. We know how well that ended... 2. On a domestic level, it united an eclectic mixture of anti clerics, atheists, old new lefties, conservatives, racists and neo-cons could all unite against the Islamic threat as if they were a popular front replay of the 1930s. But the minority Muslim populations across Europe have nothing in common with the populistic mass movements led by Franco, Mussolini or Hitler. Indeed, the spectre of Islamofascism gave cover to genuinely fascistic movements such as the EDL and the Islamophobia which spurred Anders Breivik's murderous spree. 3. It encouraged the schoolboy debasement of the term Fascism to the point that even a so-called intellectual such as Jonah Goldberg to coin the term 'Liberal Fascists' - and risks invoking a wider version of Godwin's Law which states, anyone who ends up referring to the Nazis in an unrelated debate is close to losing the argument 4. And of course, it is a crime by association for 1.1 billion believers in the various forms of Islam, encouraging the belief that Muslim states (from Turkey or Indonesia) have a deep ideological drive to commit a second holocaust In 2006, the late lamented Tony Judt wrote a brilliant essay for the New York Review of Books, called 'Bush's Useful Idiots' about how so many liberal intellectuals had enabled the catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003. Many of those who supported the invasion have, with the wisdom of hindsight, accepted how they were misled by the false intelligence over the connections between Bin Laden and Saddam - between Islamism and Fascism. They have regretted the disastrous consequences of applying the rhetoric of World War II to the War on Terror. For some reason, Christopher Hitchens never regretted this false association. But to pay tribute to his spirit of polemic and provocation, it's worth pointing out that his legacy was far from perfect, and that - though no thinker is responsible for the trajectory of his or her ideas - it's the duty of others to point out stupid ideas can cost lives.