Party Vibe

TBH what amazed me more (as someone with knowledge of telecoms surveillance techiques) is how amateurishly the hacking was done – especially disrupting messages in the mailbox and making it obvious this had been carried out.

I don’t agree with the hacking of crime victims one bit, but to be fair now its been found out justice is being done – people are being arrested and brought to judgement. After all other newspapers have managed to get their info without breaking the law and still have accurate crime reporting.

I would not however want a situation like we have in certain European countries where the reporting of bad news such as crime and also the indiscretions of celebrities are covered up due to privacy laws. The right to report bad news and to expose the indiscretions of the powerful is one of the fundamental rights of a free press and a free country.

@extraslim 443053 wrote:

They weren’t even bothered about hiding it. That worry s me in regards to why the old bill didn’t seem to care.

Metpol wouldn’t have known about the extent of it until there was enough reports made and enough evidence found – they can’t be expected to be acting as free security guards to private telecoms companies and end users (who are both jointly responsible for their comms security).

Also in a relatively free and politically correct country like Britain for the Police service to be investigating journalists requires a lot of justification – all that said it looks like metpol are doing a good job bringing people to justice, its good to see supposedly “untouchable” middle class journos being made to see the inside of a Police station as a suspect without at the same time damaging the British tradition of a free Press….

it is only very recently in the UK that collusion between the Police and journalists (or even between journalists and criminals) has been discouraged. Before that it was rife, particularly from the 1960s to the 2000s.

That said its worth remembering that perhaps a lot of our anger against this particular case is because its a populist right-wing newspaper many of us dislike – and most of us on here have broadly progressive political views, and its the targets who were selected wrongly. I will be honest – have no problem with the use of surveillance in the context of organisations I agree with or even to get ahead in my own career (within legal and ethical frameworks though, but its a useful skill for my job as a senior IT manager!)

Left wing newspapers don’t normally go to this sort of extent to get their info (or they are smarter not to get caught?) but many of them won’t turn down info also gleaned by surveillance methods or hacking. Wikileaks, which was supposedly secret USA military information disclosed by insiders and leaked to a variety of liberal news outlets is one example for instance, others occur within the extreme left wing groups particularly animal rights which infiltrate the companies of suspected animal abusers and leak out corporate info and even home address details of staff. There was also the leaking of the entire membership list of the BNP a while back and lots of other stuff printed in leftie papers like the Guardian comes from public servants betraying their organisations confidentiality rules and leaking out stuff as “whistleblowers”.

At work I use surveillance techniques myself to ensure the right things are done – albeit within a more robust ethical framework than News International, or even many activist groups!

But years before that, I used to constantly have a radio scanner to listen to the Police so I was one step ahead of them when being involved in such things as drugs and raves, which was an illegal thing to do (you cannot do this any more in the UK, they have digital transmissions). And I used to listen to peoples personal phone calls on certain kinds of (now obsolete) mobile phones and cordless phones – just for the fun or it and because I could.

People will always try to get whatever info they can get on someone else, often unless legal and/or technical barriers stop them – such as enforced privacy laws, ethical policies or strong passwords/encryption. This is what I always warn people about at work when they use the telephone or internet – nothing is private if people are determined enough to get it.