Prince Harry wins phone hacking case against British tabloid
npr.org
npr.org
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/news-world-phone-hacki...
>In the latest revelations, people linked to missing Madeleine McCann and murdered schoolgirl Danielle Jones are said to have had their mobile messages broken into by the Sunday tabloid’s journalists.
>Police have also contacted families of victims of the July 7 bombings to warn them their phones may have been accessed in the days following the 2005 terrorist attacks.
...
>The News of the World has been accused of hacking on an “industrial scale”.
>Notebooks seized from former employee Glenn Mulcaire – the private investigator at the centre of the scandal who was jailed in 2007 – revealed 11,000 pages of documents and several thousand names of targets.
>Police are now examining every high-profile case involving the murder and abduction of children since 2001.
The UK legal system damage calculation actually requires some justification of the damages sustained by the claimant.
To stop the business I would expect a minimum payout of the entire revenue (not profit) of every published article and paper, payable to in its entirety to each individual victim.
Instead none of the criminals are in jail, and the financial penalty was negligible compared to the income that came about from the crime.
This wasn't just Prince Harry or celebrities who were victims of phone hacking, it was ordinary people who weren't prepared for such an industrial violation of privacy and sheer decency from multiple newspapers. And it went on for decades[1]. In one case the mother of a dead teenager thought her daughter was alive because her phone's voicemail was being accessed. It turns out that The News of the World was doing it, it was such a widespread thing. And I'll never forgive the Conservatives for gutting the Leveson Inquiry[2] which went neck-deep in exploring how much of a mess the industry was.
---
The sad thing about the court finding that Piers Morgan knew of the phone hacking is that it'll do nothing to him. The man is mired in decades of scandal and certain connections he made allowed him to bounce back every time. That, and the tabloid industry has an incentive not to act against their own lest all their dirty secrets get out there.
I could talk about Morgan all day, but I'm still in awe at how we let him recover his career after 2004. He put British soldiers at risk when he published faked photos of British soldiers torturing Iraqis, and when they were found as fake, he outright refused to apologise for it and got fired. That ought to be a career-ending move, but having connections with Murdoch lets you get away with anything.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_of_news_media_phone_h...
Maybe it depends on which sea you mean, but in my primary school, decades ago, British 'press' was held up as an example of what happens when a nation doesn't take newspapers seriously.
Also podcasted as 'Page 94' and the editor Ian Hislop is a longtime panelist on highly (have I got news for you), can be seen on youtube.
*Mr Hislop's description of Boris Johnson coming out of make-up and deliberately messing up his hair is very telling.
I vaguely recall it being possible at one point for an attacker to get into someone's voice mail by spoofing the target's caller ID and calling their carrier's voice mail access number. Was it something trivial to pull off like that? (Not to trivialize how violating that would be.)
Another was some networks had a voicemail number you could dial into from abroad and then enter the phone number and pin of the voicemail box you wanted to access. Before this scandal nobody has ever changed that pin, or known about it, in the entire history of british telephony.
You could also call something like 07700007123 and then it would ask you to type your phone number and remote access PIN. Almost nobody knew that you could do that, and so almost nobody changed their remote access PIN from the default 1111 or 1234 or 0000.
One 150-year-old newspaper, News of the World, shut down in 2011 when it came out that they'd hacked the voicemail of a murder victim and, prior to that, several British military personnel who were killed in action. It wasn't publicized as to whether this was done via spoofing or via access to law enforcement tools.
because they listened to the voicemail the family of the victim thought the victim may have been alive.
no jail time means none of the people doing this will stop.
no meaningful financial penalties mean no businesses will stop, and no jail time for executives that approved it means they'll remain ok with it.
Fast forward to today, it seems journalists are increasingly engaged in activism.
I'm also not sure anyone really expects high journalistic standards from tabloids. This kind of junk 'reporting' has been in Britain since the 1700s.
(Along with a few others. I don't know why the half-broadsheet format seems especially popular with such disreputably tactics. But regardless, this is absolutely nothing new for the Daily Mirror and its ilk.)