Phw...no
That's probably because it is...
NotW accused of hacking Milly Dowler's voicemail
Pressure on the News of the World over phone-hacking allegations intensified still further on Tuesday after allegations surfaced that journalists at the paper intercepted the voicemail messages of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler. Hacks working for the NoTW allegedly deleted voicemail messages sent to Dowler at the time she …
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Tuesday 5th July 2011 17:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
Are you
confusing pediatrician for pedophile like the good people of Portsmouth Hants did a few years ago? or was it some subtle comment that whizzed over my head?
Paediatrics is the branch of medicine that deals with the medical care of infants, children, and adolescents. A medical practitioner who specializes in this area is known as a paediatrician.
As a medical diagnosis, pedophilia (or paedophilia) is defined as a psychiatric disorder in adults or late adolescents (persons age 16 or older) typically characterized by a primary or exclusive sexual interest in prepubescent children
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Tuesday 5th July 2011 12:09 GMT andy gibson
A fine won't work
When you have a nation of morons willing to pay it for the company by buying their papers.
The only way to hit the company where it hurts is to ban them from publishing - a sliding scale from a week onwards, depending on the crime or lies they've published. And if they use page 1 to tell a lie, they should use the same page and font for the apology, not tucked away at the corner of page 20.
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Tuesday 5th July 2011 13:02 GMT John G Imrie
An apology
I've always thought that the apology should fill the exact location in the paper as the original story.
The other thing that is irritating me is that the Met originally went with the News of the Screws original line of a rogue reporter when they knew that the Milly Dowler case was being compromised by the same papers reporters.
Can I also suggest that all fellow commentards go out and buy a copy of to days Grouniad. I'd really like to see it beat the NotW's circulation figures for today.
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Tuesday 5th July 2011 14:09 GMT D@v3
I would agree
With all of your post, I am sick of seeing corrections or retractions, in a tiny little box on page 15.
The one thing i do disagree with is...
"Can I also suggest that all fellow commentards go out and buy a copy of to days Grouniad. I'd really like to see it beat the NotW's circulation figures for today."
and i only disagree from a matter of accuracy, as today is a tuesday, and the NoTW is a Sunday 'paper'.
and come to think of it, the Guardian, is not available on Sunday's. So buying one, in place of the other, is not possible.
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Tuesday 5th July 2011 12:59 GMT cdilla
Tory sleaze
Tory leader smooching with sleazy media bitch. That's nothing new.
And will anyone do any time at all over this? Hands up anyone who has the slightest faith that the British Government or the British legal system or the British police will see to it that there is a satisfactory outcome to this... thought not.
The political leaders bleat about how the image of British journalism is being tarnished! How the hell can a turd be tarnished?
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Tuesday 5th July 2011 15:31 GMT CaptainHook
Public Replusion
Brooks has friends in high places and so far the phone hacking scandal keeps sliding off her teflon shoulders but this is far too public and I doubt her contacts in Government or the Police are going to want to help her if there is the slightest possibility of that help becoming public.
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Tuesday 5th July 2011 22:08 GMT Adam Foxton
There's a difference
This time, they're not just phone hacking. They interfered and set back by at least days the investigation into the disappearance of a young girl.
They deleted evidence (whether relevant or otherwise to the actual case, it was still evidence even if it was just "no, no-one called her by now") in relation to this case
And jumping slightly into speculation, if they hadn't knocked back the investigation and if they hadn't deleted evidence they might just have caught the fucker who did it earlier. Not an unreasonable bit of conjecture, eh?
Well if they HAD caught the guy sooner he wouldn't have been able to kill two more girls in the following years. So, potentially, they caused the death of two more kids.
Now if THAT can't get the other (competing) papers to get the masses in a rage then nothing will. The News Of The World needs to fall for this, the people involved sacked with prejudice and then jailed.
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Tuesday 5th July 2011 15:50 GMT Steve Evans
Re: whatever happened to globalisation?
I'm sure it works in many countries.
All you need it:
1) A way of accessing a network's voicemail system in retrieval mode from another phone. In the NoTW story they just rang the mobile when they knew it would divert to voicemail (either off, or busy with another call, which they had just made). However most carriers also have a direct number you can call from any phone to retrieve messages, so you need to know the carrier for that... Or just ring all of them.
2) The phone number of the person you wish to snoop on - only required if you are dialling the voicemail directly and not letting it bounce in on a divert from the target phone.
3) A few guesses at the 4 digit pin which is usually default. Try 0000, 1234, 1111 and 8888.
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Tuesday 5th July 2011 23:03 GMT Britt Johnston
thanks for the explanation
I was convinced that it took inside connections to do something like this, especially as hacking MPs should be safeguarded against by technical staff in Westminster. But as I understand you, it is more likely that these politicians were also unaware how easy it is to open other people's voicemail.
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Tuesday 5th July 2011 12:59 GMT Anonymous Coward
Surely...
Brooks has to go, she was in control at NoTW at the time, if she didn't know about what was happening she was incompetend, otherwise she hampered the police investigation.
She won't go though, if Murdoch had any desire to get rid of her over wrong-doings, he would have made her resign when at the Sun she was running an anti-domestic violence campaign and got arrested for beating up her then husband.
This should stop the News Corp purchase of BsykB, as they are clearly not "fit and proper persons" to be running such a company. Do we still have that rule, though?
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Wednesday 6th July 2011 10:55 GMT Ken Hagan
Re: Surely
"Brooks has to go, she was in control at NoTW at the time"
IANAL, but as I understand it the owners of a company are entitled to employ trained monkeys in managerial positions if they want to. *Clearly* Brooks' only defence is that she hadn't a clue where her paper was getting its stories from and was therefore a waste of space in the editor's chair, but that's Rupert's problem.
The *directors* of a company, however, are legally responsible for the actions taken by that company. If the company is found to be in breach of the law, it is the directors who end up in court. That *is* our (the public's) business.
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Tuesday 5th July 2011 12:59 GMT NightFox
There's Hope
All to often something like this happens and everyone's disgusted and calling for boycotts, but a few months later it's all forgotten about and sales continue unaffected. However, you look what happened with The Sun in Liverpool following the Hillsborough tragedy (irrespective of your views on the offending story) and you do realise that if there's enough public will and sentiment (stirred up from time to time to keep to momentum), then the tabloids can be made to pay the price.
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Tuesday 5th July 2011 14:54 GMT NightFox
You What?
Wow, way to jump to a conclusion!
The thing with phone numbers is that people tend to GIVE them to people they know to call them; God alone knows how many people have my number. It would be so easy for the media to directly approach one of these contacts or social engineer the number out of them, or maybe one of these contacts even approached the media with her number.
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Tuesday 5th July 2011 13:02 GMT Stratman
title
Serious jail time for the perps and a fine sufficiently large to put the NOTW out of business for good.
If there's the merest hint that one of Bellfield's other victims would be alive today if it were not for the disgraceful actions of the Murdoch rag, they should be done for being accessories to murder.
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Tuesday 5th July 2011 13:08 GMT Anonymous Coward
Unregister it?
As all newspapers have to be registered couldn't the NoTW simply be unregistered as a news paper in the UK. Engaging in criminal activity and basically perverting the course of justice would be good enough reasons I'd have thought and there is NO way this could have been going on without senior people knowing it was going on... plausible deniability doesn't really work here.
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Tuesday 5th July 2011 13:08 GMT Anonymous Coward
Those talking about default PINs
I don't think these were done by using the default PIN (the PIN used to collect your voicemail from a number other than your own) so changing it wouldn't have helped.
There is another way of doing it that I'm fairly certain was employed in this case and it's something that would take a deliberate action to implement rather than 'I just guessed the PIN' style of defence.
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Tuesday 5th July 2011 13:08 GMT hokum
Brooks was innocent
Honest guv. See, she wrote a letter explaining: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/05/milly-dowler-phone-hacking-rebekah-brooks-email
"I hope that you all realise it is inconceivable that I knew or worse, sanctioned these appalling allegations. I am proud of the many successful newspaper campaigns at the Sun and the News of the World under my editorship. In particular, the 10-year fight for Sarah's Law is especially personal to me. The battle for better protection of children from paedophiles and better rights for the families and the victims of these crimes defined my editorships"
See? It's totally inconceviable that the editor of the paper knew how her staff were getting their stories, or why they were paying thousands of pounds to people outside the organisation. It's also totally inconceviable that she could have campaigned for laws to protect children (definitely not a way to sell more papers, by the way) while also allowing her reporters to interfere with a police investigation into the murder of a child.
That would be like someone who campaigns against domestic violence getting arrested for beating up their spouse!
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Tuesday 5th July 2011 13:26 GMT SplitBrain
Wouldn't it be funny....
If a collective of anonymous people decided to actually do something useful, and divert their attention away from Sony and onto a corrupt, theiving, worthless and feckless excuse for journalists.
We need a batsign thing but with a big V for Vendetta sign on it instead to shine into the night sky......
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Tuesday 5th July 2011 14:54 GMT Anonymous Coward
I'm just asking....
Do we know they actually deleted the messages?
My service (T-Mobile) only keeps messages for 3 days, before they kindly delete them. :-0
Not sure how long unread messages are kept, but once they listened to them (disgusting shamefull thing to do) the messages would be auto deleted 72 hours later.
Still thinking about canning Sky.....
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Tuesday 5th July 2011 15:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
[untitled, 2nd attempt]
"I can't think of any legitimate source of this information."
Rebebah Brooks/Wade has already admitted on the record that her NotW staff routinely paid Met officers for back door information.
"who and why was involved in the police closing down this inquiry so many times under the previous government."
Good question. I blame John Prescott. Or maybe not.
"which policeman responsible for one of the original enquiries now earns a fair shilling from news orp?"
I suspect you know, and I'm sure many others do too, but I assume we're currently not allowed to mention it here any more even though it has previously been permitted [1] - the previous version of this post, including Eddie Shoestring's name [2], was neither accepted nor rejected but "Last updated" (wtf?). Anyway, once you know the name, you can look up his history, including his book on terrorism and the police. His history is "interesting".
Flame, because the folks responsible for letting this happen need to burn in hell for as long as poss. As do the folks at the other papers, who knew it was going on, and didn't see a problem with letting it carry on.
[1] e.g. http://forums.theregister.co.uk/post/867300
[2] Name changed for the protection of the guilty.
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Tuesday 5th July 2011 15:41 GMT Steve Evans
Grrr!
I'm sure we'll be hearing the "I knew nothing about it" line from all the managers... Well even if that is true then it means you were not managing your staff were you. You didn't tell them what was acceptable and what was not. Therefore you are a bad manager. Sack.
Oh, and please stop giving the NoTW stories the "hacking" label it so doesn't deserve. This is no more hacking than my granny's drive to Sainsbury's is the British Grand Prix. They gained access to a voicemail account by a default password. They didn't even brute force it, just tried the defaults 0000, 1234, 8888. It would be harder to break into a chocolate money box which had the key beside it.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
