Douglas Caddy

Miliband 'went to News International parties' The Independent By Sam Lister Saturday, 30 July 2011 Labour leader Ed Miliband attended a string of News International parties and held talks with former chief executive Rebekah Brooks, records released today showed. Mr Miliband also had a series of meetings with the editors of the News of the World and the Sun, Labour confirmed. The party leader met Mrs Brooks, who was forced to quit two weeks ago over the phone hacking scandal, on September 15 for a "general discussion". Sun editor Dominic Mohan was also at the London meeting but held separate discussions with Mr Miliband in February as well as at Labour's party conference last autumn. Mr Miliband attended the News International annual summer reception in 2010 and this year as well as the organisation's party at the Labour conference. Two days before it emerged the mobile phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler was hacked by a private investigator working for the News of the World, shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander attended a social event in the Cotswolds with Mrs Brooks and Mr Hinton as well as Richard Wallace from the Daily Mirror. The party was hosted by Rupert Murdoch's daughter Elisabeth and her husband Matthew Freud in Burford on Saturday, July 2. Mr Alexander also met the couple in London at a "social" event on December 20, the document reveals. Shadow Northern Ireland secretary Shaun Woodward met Mrs Brooks on Boxing Day. It emerged earlier this month that Prime Minister David Cameron, who succeed Mr Woodward as MP for Witney after he quit the Tories and defected to Labour, also had a social engagement with Mrs Brooks on December 26. Mr Woodward also met up with Mrs Brooks in France on June 11 this year and visited Mr Hinton on October 9 in the United States of America. Tessa Jowell, shadow Olympics minister, also attended the party although she declared the date as July 3. The bash, held at Burford Priory, reportedly started on Saturday evening and continued until noon the next day. Ms Jowell also met the couple at social events in London and Oxfordshire on December 1, Christmas Eve and Boxing Day. Ed Miliband had previously released a list of the meetings he had held since taking the top job last September but today's records date back to May and cover all the party's senior politicians. They show Mr Miliband has attended more than 50 meetings or receptions with proprietors, editors and senior media executives, including senior figures from the BBC, ITV, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Telegraph, The Independent, The Observer, The Times and The Guardian. It follows the release by Government of all ministerial contacts with senior media executives. That showed Chancellor George Osborne had met executives of News Corporation companies on 16 occasions since the coalition Government took power. It also emerged that News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch was the first senior media figure to meet Jeremy Hunt after he was appointed Culture Secretary in May last year - though this was before Mr Hunt was given responsibility for deciding on the failed BSkyB bid. PA

FBI’s News Corp. 9/11 Probe Moves Forward By Patricia Hurtado, David Glovin and Greg Farrell - Jul 29, 2011 Bloomberg The FBI is in the initial stage of a probe of News Corp. (NWSA) as investigators evaluate whether U.S. charges can be brought over claims employees hacked into a rival’s website and sought access to phone records of victims of the 9/11 attacks, a person familiar with the matter said. The Federal Bureau of Investigation will let Scotland Yard take the lead on a parallel investigation already under way in Britain, said two law-enforcement officials familiar with the matter. The bureau isn’t planning to mount an aggressive investigation into allegations that News Corp.’s payments to U.K. police officers a decade ago violated a U.S. overseas bribery law, said the officials, who didn’t want to be identified because they aren’t allowed to discuss the U.S. Justice Department’s investigation. “If the conduct largely relates to payments made to the U.K. police, it is quite probable that the U.S. would defer to the strong enforcement regime in the U.K.,” said Angela Burgess, a partner at the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP in New York. “If there are U.S. victims or a greater U.S. nexus, a broader U.S. investigation is more likely.” In the U.S., Manhattan federal prosecutors have joined the inquiry into allegations that News Corp.’s American marketing arm hacked a password-protected website at Floorgraphics Inc., an attorney for Floorgraphics said. FBI Questions William Isaacson, a lawyer at Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP who represented Floorgraphics at a 2009 civil trial against News America Marketing In-Store Services, said two Manhattan prosecutors participated in his July 18 interview by the FBI. In its lawsuit, Floorgraphics, now based in Hamilton, New Jersey, claimed News America employees hacked into its website in 2003 and 2004. “They wanted to know what the case was about,” Isaacson said in a telephone interview. One of the prosecutors identified by Isaacson works in the office’s public-corruption unit, while the other works in the complex-fraud unit, according to a personnel directory in the federal courthouse in Manhattan. Allegations of phone hacking at the now-closed News of the World newspaper in the U.K. have led to the arrest of at least 10 people, including Rebekah Brooks, a former chief executive officer of News Corp.’s News International unit, and ex-News of the World editor Andy Coulson, who was Prime Minister David Cameron’s press chief until January. Scandal Fallout The furor led to News Corp.’s dropping a takeover bid for British Sky Broadcasting Group Plc and prompted Cameron to start an inquiry. The FBI is pursuing a claim that News Corp. reporters unsuccessfully tried to get a former New York police officer to obtain phone records of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center in Manhattan. U.S. investigators are attempting to identify any victims, evaluating whether there is enough evidence to bring any federal charges and if the alleged crimes in the U.S. took place too far in the past to be prosecuted, said the person familiar with the probe related to the Sept. 11 attacks, who declined to be identified because the matter isn’t public. The probe into the illegal phone records access is in the most preliminary stage, the person said. News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch told U.K. lawmakers last week that he has “seen no evidence of these allegations.” News Corp.’s New York Post told employees to retain files related to any attempts at unauthorized access to third-party data, or illegal payments to government officials in an effort to obtain information, according to a memorandum reproduced on The Poynter Institute’s Romenesko Web site. Federal Probe Teri Everett, a spokeswoman for News Corp., didn’t immediately return a call seeking comment on the memorandum or the federal probe of the company. Ellen Davis, a spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in Manhattan, declined to comment on a U.S. investigation. Alisa Finelli, a Justice Department spokeswoman, also declined to comment. Bharara’s office regularly investigates allegations of white-collar crime that cut across state and international borders. Suzanne Halpin, a spokeswoman for Wilton, Connecticut-based News America, declined to immediately comment on the participation of Manhattan prosecutors in the Floorgraphics probe. Isaacson said he fielded questions from two Manhattan assistant U.S. attorneys and an FBI agent in what appeared to be a preliminary inquiry. His phone interview with the prosecutors and FBI agent came on the same day that press reports appeared about the Floorgraphics lawsuit, he said. Floorgraphics Lawsuit In its lawsuit, which was tried in federal court in Trenton, New Jersey, Floorgraphics accused News America Marketing of stealing business by hacking into its secure website 11 times from October 2003 to January 2004 and through other means. At the time, Floorgraphics sold floor advertising in grocery stores. At the trial, a News America Marketing lawyer acknowledged that his client’s computers were used to access Floorgraphics’ site. Six days into the trial, News America Marketing entered into what its lawyer called a “series of business arrangements” with Floorgraphics, part of which involved a $29.5 million payment and an agreement to buy Floorgraphics’ assets, according to court records. Floorgraphics agreed to dismiss the case. “This site was available to hundreds, if not thousands, of Floorgraphics retailers, representatives of consumer packaged goods companies and Floorgraphics employees,” Halpin, the News America Marketing spokeswoman, said in a statement last week. ‘Employee Movement’ “There is considerable employee movement within this industry, and we believe it was someone with an authorized password” who was using a News America Marketing computer, she said. “News America Marketing condemns such conduct, which is in violation of the standards of our company.” This month, U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg for New Jersey called for U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate the possibility that payments to U.K. police could be considered a violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which forbids U.S. companies from paying bribes to officials of foreign governments. On July 15, Holder confirmed the existence of an “ongoing investigation.” ‘A Stretch’ Some lawyers question whether the law, used primarily to punish bribes to obtain business, would apply to paying police officers for information. “The FCPA is not a global statute governing all corrupt activity in the world,” said Steven Peikin, a former federal prosecutor now at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP. “It would seem to me that if you’re paying off a police official to obtain information, that would be a stretch,” he said. “It’s not the heartland of conduct that the FCPA was intended to reach.” The Floorgraphics civil case is Floorgraphics v. News America Marketing In-Store Services Inc, 04-cv-03500, U.S. District Court, District of New Jersey (Trenton). To contact the reporters on this story: Patricia Hurtado in New York at pathurtado@bloomberg.net; David Glovin in New York at dglovin@bloomberg.net; Greg Farrell in New York at gregfarrell@bloomberg.net . To contact the editor responsible for this story: Michael Hytha at mhytha@bloomberg.net .

Shake up at News of the World Sean Hoare quits Sunday People to join Singh By Jessica Hodgson Media Guardian, Tuesday 5 June 2001 12.54 BST http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2001/jun/05/thepeople.newsoftheworld News of the World editor Rebekah Wade has ordered a shake-up of the newsroom. Phil Taylor, the news editor who made a rare picture byline appearance in last week's paper with an exclusive story about TV star Michael Barrymore, has become associate editor. He will have a new role as the paper's Mr Fix It - essentially in charge of the paper's buy-ups and special investigations. It is believed he clinched the deal after rivals tried to poach him. Neville Thurlbeck, the investigations news editor, has been promoted to news editor while veteran Greg Miskiw, responsible for the "Sophie Tapes" and "For Sarah" campaign, also gets a promotion to become assistant editor of news and investigations. Showbiz columnist Rav Singh has been promoted to assistant editor - it is believed he has upped his salary to £100,000-plus after the Express tried to poach him. Mr Singh, who used to work at the Sun's Bizarre desk, is expanding his team after poaching Sean Hoare, the showbusiness editor of the Sunday People.

July 29, 2011, 5:13 pm New York Post Employees Told to ‘Preserve’ Documents The New York Times By JEREMY W. PETERS Employees of The New York Post, Rupert Murdoch’s irreverent and hard-charging city tabloid, were told Friday to keep any documents they may have that pertain to the kind of illegal activity that has led to numerous arrests and a widening investigation at the News Corporation’s British newspapers. The paper’s editor, Col Allan, told employees in an e-mail late Friday afternoon that the instructions were being made out of an abundance of caution, not because any illegal acts had been uncovered. Lawyers for News Corporation asked that employees be told they should preserve any such documents or files because of the investigations in London, he said. “As we watched the news in the U.K. over the last few weeks, we knew that as a News Corporation tabloid, we would be looked at more closely. So this is not unexpected,” he wrote. “I am sorry for any inconvenience caused by this directive. However, given what has taken place in London, it is necessary for us to take this step.” News Corporation officials would not comment on the matter. Though Mr. Allan and News Corporation lawyers were adamant that the directive did not indicate that anyone at The Post had broken the law, the move shows just how concerned the company is that it could face a wide-ranging investigation in the United States. The notice appears to be limited to The Post. Journalists at Mr. Murdoch’s other New York-based newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, did not receive similar instructions. The memo from Col Allan read: By now, you have received an email from News Corporation’s in-house legal counsel to preserve and maintain documents. All New York Post employees have been asked to do this in light of what has gone on in London at News of the World, and not because any recipient has done anything improper or unlawful. As we watched the news in the U.K. over the last few weeks, we knew that as a News Corporation tabloid, we would be looked at more closely. So this is not unexpected. I want to stress that your full and absolute cooperation is necessary and you are expected to comply with this direction from our legal department. At the same time, please know we understand and take very seriously your concerns over the protection of legitimate journalistic sources. While we have instituted this hold, we do intend to protect from disclosure all legitimate and lawful journalistic sources in accordance with the law. I am sorry for any inconvenience caused by this directive. However, given what has taken place in London, it is necessary for us to take this step. Let me say how grateful I am for the hard work and terrific reporting all of you do here each and every day. The New York Post has a proud history. We will also have a proud future. Thank you for your professionalism and full cooperation in this matter. The memo from News Corp. Legal read: Dear New York Post Colleagues, As you have undoubtedly seen, there have been press accounts of inquiries into whether employees or agents of News Corporation or its subsidiaries have (a) accessed telephone and/or other personal data of third-parties without authorization, and/or ( made unlawful payments to government officials in order to obtain information. As you also know, these stem from the actions at The News of the World in London, as well as unsourced, unsubstantiated reports in one London tabloid. Starting today, all employees must preserve and maintain all documents and information that are related in any way to the above mentioned issues. Please know we are sending this notice not because any recipient has done anything improper or unlawful. However, given what has taken place in London, we believe that taking this step will help to underscore how seriously we are taking this matter. Here is what is required of you: Any documents pertaining to unauthorized retrieval of phone or personal data, to payments for information to government officials, or that is related in any way to these issues, must be retained. Please note that the term “documents” should be construed in its broadest sense, including but not limited to: written material, graphs, charts, files, e-mail, text messages, instant messages, any content in social media, voicemail, tape recordings, microfiche, video and film, handwritten notes, draft documents, memoranda, calendars, card files, appointment books, and the like whether in hard copy or on computer databases, hard drives, desk tops, laptops, thumb drives, disks, backup tapes, or any other storage medium, and regardless of whether the document is located on a company-issued or personal device. It also includes all copies of the same document. The term “related in any way” should also be applied broadly. If you have any doubt whether a document should be preserved, you should err on the side of preserving it. You do not need to collect relevant documents. However, if relevant documents are destroyed or otherwise made unavailable, it may prevent the New York Post from protecting its interests and subject you and individual officers or employees of the New York Post to severe sanctions. Any destruction of such documents or information, inadvertent or otherwise, should be reported to the Legal Department. In sum, effective immediately, and until further notice, you and your staff must comply with the following directive: do not destroy, discard, alter or change any potentially relevant documents as defined above, even if such documents or materials would otherwise be routinely discarded or destroyed in the ordinary course of your business. Finally, we understand your concerns over the protection of legitimate journalistic sources. We intend to protect from disclosure all legitimate and lawful journalistic sources in accordance with the law. If you are unsure of the nature or extent of your responsibilities, or if you are aware of additional personnel to whom this memorandum should be sent, please contact Genie Gavenchak in News Corporation’s Legal Department.

July 29, 2011 2007 Letter Clearing Tabloid Is Under Scrutiny The New York Times By JO BECKER and DON VAN NATTA Jr. LONDON — When a Parliamentary committee first confronted The News of the World with charges of phone hacking in 2007, the paper’s owners produced a reassuring, one-paragraph letter from a prominent London law firm named Harbottle & Lewis. The firm had been hired to review the e-mail of the tabloid’s royal reporter, who had pleaded guilty to hacking the cellphone messages of royal household staff members. The letter said senior editors were not aware of the reporter’s “illegal actions,” which helped convince lawmakers that hacking was not endemic at the tabloid. That letter has taken on new significance since it emerged in recent weeks that those e-mails, while not pointing to wider knowledge of hacking, did contain indications of payoffs to the police by journalists in exchange for information. The circumstances behind the writing of that single paragraph are being examined as part of criminal and Parliamentary inquiries into whether the tabloid’s parent company, News International, the British subsidiary of the News Corporation, engineered a four-year cover-up of information suggesting criminal wrongdoing. In interviews, two people familiar with both the contents of the e-mails and the discussions between the executives and the law firm provided new details about the possible payoffs. The two people also indicated that both News International and the firm were aware of the information when the reassuring letter was written, yet defined their task as only addressing the hacking issue. In one e-mail, from 2003, the paper’s royal reporter, Clive Goodman, complained to the top editor, Andy Coulson, about a management push to cut back on cash payments to sources, saying he needed to pay his contacts in the Scotland Yard unit that protects the royal family. In another e-mail, Mr. Goodman said that he did not want to go into detail about cash payments because everyone involved could “go to prison for this,” according to the two people who described the e-mail’s contents. The two people also said that in the exchange of e-mails, Mr. Goodman requested permission from Mr. Coulson to pay £1,000 for a classified Green Book directory, which had been stolen by a police officer in the protection unit. The book contains the private phone numbers of the queen, the royal family and their closest friends and associates — a potentially useful tool for hacking. In the years since the letter was written, various revelations have confirmed that phone hacking was endemic at the tabloid. Evidence disclosed in the past several weeks of widespread payoffs to the police have given rise to a second, and potentially more potent, front in the scandal. Both Harbottle & Lewis and News International took notice of the e-mails to and from Mr. Goodman containing those initial indications of payoffs in 2007, according to the two people knowledgeable about the events. News International’s chief lawyer set them aside for a second look, and they were among the e-mails retained in the files of the law firm. Yet they were not turned over to the police until last month, and no hint of their existence made its way into the firm’s single-paragraph letter four years ago. The two people familiar with internal discussions between News International and the firm, who spoke on the condition of anonymity given the criminal investigations, said company executives urged Harbottle & Lewis to write a letter giving News International a clean bill of health in the strongest possible terms. The firm had been hired to defend the paper after Mr. Goodman sued, claiming his dismissal over phone hacking was unfair because it was widely known that others were doing it, too. The firm was asked to examine 2,500 e-mails involving Mr. Goodman to defend against his claim that superiors knew about his hacking. The correspondence between the company and the firm over framing the letter does not make reference to the e-mails on police payments, a source familiar with the exchanges said, but it does reflect “huge anxiety” about the wording. The final version of the letter, dated May 29, 2007, sent by the firm’s managing partner to Jon Chapman, who was head of the legal department for News International, read: “I can confirm that we did not find anything in those e-mails which appeared to us to be reasonable evidence that Clive Goodman’s illegal actions were known about and supported by both or either of Andy Coulson, the editor, and Neil Wallis, the deputy editor, and/or that Ian Edmondson, the news editor, and others were carrying out similar procedures.” The company rejected earlier drafts by Harbottle & Lewis that were not as broad, according to the two people with access to the correspondence. One of them said that lawyers on both sides seemed to struggle to find language that said the review had found no evidence of wrongdoing. “They wanted to bury those e-mails, and they wanted Harbottle & Lewis to give them a letter to indicate there was nothing incriminating in the file,” said one of the people who reviewed the exchanges. “They knew exactly what they were doing.” But a former News International official familiar with the matter said that Mr. Chapman was expected to testify to a Parliamentary committee that the discussion over the letter had nothing to do with the e-mails suggesting police payoffs and only with finding a way for the firm to say it had looked into Mr. Goodman’s allegations about hacking and had found no evidence. The former official noted that neither Mr. Chapman nor the firm’s lawyer who reviewed the e-mails are criminal attorneys. Mr. Chapman is expected to testify that while he noticed the e-mails in question, he did not realize that paying the police was a criminal offense, the former official said. He is expected to testify that Mr. Goodman’s e-mail mentioning prison seemed to him to be in jest. Like Mr. Chapman, Harbottle & Lewis has been asked to give its account to a select committee of Parliament, and it has said it will cooperate as long as the police say its participation will not harm the criminal investigation. News International recently released the firm from its client confidentiality obligations so it can talk to the authorities. While it is unclear what the firm’s opinion on the e-mails was in 2007, client confidentiality would have prevented it from unilaterally reporting them to authorities. Mr. Goodman, who was rearrested this month on suspicion of paying police officers for information, did not return a call requesting comment. Lawyers for Mr. Coulson, who was arrested this month on suspicion of conspiring to hack phones and bribe the police for information, have said that they have told him not to answer questions in the midst of a criminal investigation. News International discovered the e-mails indicating police payoffs as it was responding to lawsuits filed by phone hacking victims and inquiries from the police. As the company assembled its defense team, a law firm it hired retained Lord Ken Macdonald to advise the News Corporation board on whether the e-mails were evidence of a crime and needed to be turned over to the police. Mr. Macdonald had overseen the office that prosecuted Mr. Goodman in 2006. But back then, he had not seen the trove of e-mails reviewed by Harbottle & Lewis, since they were never reported to the authorities. Once Mr. Macdonald saw the e-mails in May, it took him between “about three minutes, maybe five minutes” to conclude that it was “blindingly obvious” that they were evidence of criminal wrongdoing, he told a select committee of Parliament. Mr. Macdonald advised the News Corporation board to immediately turn the e-mails over to the police, a move that set off the current investigation into the payments made to the police by journalists at The News of the World. The company then trawled through other documents, including its cash authorization records, and found 130,000 pounds’ worth of payments to a group of officers over several years, according to officials with knowledge of the inquiry. Included within those records was documentation of a thousand-pound cash withdrawal around the date of Mr. Goodman’s e-mail concerning his purchase of the Green Book from a police officer, according to one person with knowledge of the investigation. Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting.

Martin Hickman: This marks an explosive development in the scandal The Independent Analysis Saturday, 30 July 2011 The expansion of Operation Tuleta from a "scoping exercise" to a full-blown investigation will open a new and explosive instalment in the phone-hacking scandal. For a start, detectives are likely to investigate more egregious news-gathering techniques than phone hacking: computer hacking, burglary and "blagging" personal data. Some of the targets of these techniques had more to lose than their privacy. While vile and disgusting, the alleged eavesdropping of Milly Dowler, war widows and Sara Payne did not endanger life and limb. The alleged targeting of ex-intelligence officers with knowledge of IRA informers could have. Tuleta may also draw other titles and newspaper groups into the scandal. It is likely to focus on the activities of Jonathan Rees, a private detective who worked for News International and the Mirror Group. While police investigated Mr Rees over the murder of his business partner Danny Morgan in 1987, they bugged his office and recorded his conversations with reporters. Mr Rees was acquitted of murder in March, but soon after fresh claims were made about his work for newspapers. Several of his reported victims such as Jack Straw and Peter Mandelson asked police if they had been targeted. That pressure may have persuaded Scotland Yard that the best way to end this scandal once and for all is to investigate all the "dark arts", not just phone hacking.

New police investigation will probe computer hacking The Independent By Matt Blake, Crime Correspondent Saturday, 30 July 2011 Scotland Yard is to expand its inquiries into illegal news-gathering techniques at News International by launching a full-scale investigation into computer hacking, The Independent understands. In the latest twist in the long-running phone-hacking scandal, the Metropolitan Police is assembling a new squad of detectives to look into claims that the News of the World stole secrets from the computer hard drives of public figures, journalists and intelligence officers. Since March, officers have been carrying out Operation Tuleta, a scoping exercise into the covert use of "Trojan horse" computer viruses – which allow hackers to take control of third-party computers – following allegations made in a BBC Panorama programme. Now, following complaints from public figures who believe they were targeted by the private investigator Jonathan Rees, who worked for the NOTW and other newspapers, the Met is to scale up its inquiries. So far only two full-scale investigations, Operation Weeting into alleged phone hacking by the NOTW private investigator Glen Mulcaire, and Operation Elveden into the NOTW's alleged bribery of police officers. Operation Tuleta is being staffed by detectives from the Specialist Crime Directorate. A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said: "Since January 2011 the MPS has received a number of allegations regarding breach of privacy which fall outside the remit of Operation Weeting, including computer hacking. Some aspects of this operation will move forward to a formal investigation. There will be a new team reporting DAC Sue Akers. The formation of that team is yet to take place." A Scotland Yard source told The Independent: "This started as an exercise to investigate the very serious allegations made by Panorama and enough evidence of criminality exists for there to be a successful prosecution. We understand that the hacking of computers by the NOTW covers a much wider period than the three months initially alleged by the BBC programme." The new investigation threatens to drag other newspaper groups into the scandal. In March, Panorama alleged that, in 2006, Alex Marunchak, then the editor of the Irish edition of the NOTW, hired a private investigator to hack into the computer of a former British Army intelligence officer, Ian Hurst. It was alleged that emails and documents from Mr Hurst's hard drive were hacked, along with correspondence between him and a number of people including IRA agents. Among those whose emails were allegedly stolen is Greg Harkin, a former journalist on The Independent. According to the BBC, the Sunday tabloid was trying to find out if Mr Hurst or Mr Harkin knew the whereabouts of Freddie Scappaticci, the man alleged to have been "Stakeknife", the British Army's most important undercover agent in the IRA. In 2003, newspapers were speculating about the identity of Stakeknife and several claimed he was Mr Scappaticci, who became the IRA's No 1 assassination target and was placed under a secret protection scheme. A year later, Mr Hurst and Mr Harkin wrote a book about Stakeknife with more information about his alleged identity and activities within the IRA. Because of concern about the safety of Mr Scappaticci – who has always denied being the spy – a High Court injunction prohibited the publication of details of his appearance and whereabouts. Any computer hacking by the NOTW could have broken the injunction and, potentially, endangered the safety of Mr Scappaticci and his British handlers. Mr Marunchak has denied any involvement in computer hacking. Under the terms of the Computer Misuse Act 1990, computer hacking is a more serious crime than phone hacking. "Unauthorised access with intent to commit or facilitate commission of further offences" can carry heavy fines and a jail sentence of up to five years. A spokesman for News International declined to comment. How it is done A "Trojan horse" is a virus that infiltrates a computer and allows the attacker to remove the entire contents of hard drives, steal passwords and read emails. It most commonly masquerades as valuable and useful software available for download on the internet or through an email link. The attacker often disguises it in an email pretending to be from someone the victim knows. Once the computer is infected, the attacker has complete control and can turn it on or off remotely from anywhere in the world. It will scour the owner's hard drive for any personal and financial information before sending it back to a thief's database.

Judge orders Nixon’s secret Watergate testimony unsealed By Reuters Friday, July 29th, 2011 -- 2:10 pm WASHINGTON (Reuters) - More than 36 years later, the secret grand jury testimony of President Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal was ordered released on Friday by a federal judge because of its significance in American history. U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth granted a request by historian Stanley Kutler, who has written several books about Nixon and Watergate, and others to unseal the testimony given on June 23 and 24 in 1975. Nixon was questioned about the political scandal during the 1970s that resulted from the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington. The scandal caused Nixon to leave office on August 9, 1974, the only resignation of aU.S. president. The scandal also resulted in the indictment, trial, conviction and imprisonment of a number of his top officials. Lamberth ruled in the 15-page opinion that the special circumstances, especially the undisputed historical interest in Nixon's testimony, far outweighed the need to keep the records secret. Grand jury proceedings typically remain secret. "Watergate significance in American history cannot be overstated," Lamberth wrote, adding that the scandal continues to attract both scholarly and public interest. "The disclosure of President Nixon's grand jury testimony would likely enhance the existing historical record, foster scholarly discussion and improve the public's understanding of a significant historical event," he said. The Obama administration's Justice Department had opposed releasing Nixon's testimony, citing the privacy interests of individuals named in the testimony, among other reasons. But Lamberth said those privacy interests were minimal. He said Nixon died 17 years ago, many other key figures likely to be mentioned were deceased and most of the surviving figures have written about Watergate, given interviews interviews or testified under oath about their involvement. Nixon's grand jury transcript will not be released immediately because the government will have the opportunity to appeal. A Justice Department spokesman said government lawyers were reviewing the ruling.

http://filestore.democraticaudit.com/file/de232c951e8286baa79af208ac250112-1311676243/oligarchy.pdf

David Cameron faces growing pressure over Andy Coulson hiring Labour leadership demands answers about Andy Coulson's access to national security documents inside No 10 By Robert Booth and Patrick Wintour guardian.co.uk, Friday 29 July 2011 19.57 BST David Cameron is facing growing pressure this weekend over his hiring of Andy Coulson after the Labour leadership demanded to know if the former News of the World editor ever saw documents inside Downing Street that should have been available only to staff with the highest level of security clearance. Ivan Lewis, the shadow culture secretary, is writing to the prime minister seeking answers. He will also ask if Cameron was consulted over the decision not to seek the highest level security clearance for Coulson and if Coulson attended any meetings of the national security council and/or the cabinet. No 10 has refused to answer the same questions posed by the Guardian this week after it emerged Coulson was not put forward for rigorous "developed vetting", a process involving detailed interrogation by trained investigators aimed at uncovering lies and anything that could make an official susceptible to blackmail. Throughout the phone-hacking scandal that has engulfed Coulson's former newspaper, the Metropolitan police and News Corporation, Cameron has stressed there have been no complaints that Coulson broke the rules while working as his director of communications. Coulson was granted 'security clearance' when he entered Downing Street in May 2010, which allowed him access to secret papers. This is one level below "developed vetting", which the Cabinet Office has said Craig Oliver, the current Downing Street spokesman, is currently undergoing alongside Coulson's former deputy, Gaby Bertin. The Guardian has told Downing Street it understands that on at least one occasion Coulson did attend a meeting of the national security council, which is sometimes attended by the chief of the defence staff and heads of the intelligence agencies. Downing Street has refused to say whether he did or not. It also declined to say whether Coulson attended meetings relating to Afghanistan, UK military, counter-terrorism, briefings on terror threats, and discussions with foreign leaders and generals where highly classified information may have been aired. Late Friday the prime minister's spokesman referred to previous statements which he said "detailed why the Permanent Secretary decided not to have Andy Coulson and others Develop Vetted in May 2010 - and underline that No10 and the Government have careful and rigorous procedures to ensure secret material is handled appropriately." On Wednesday the spokesman said he did not intend to go into further detailed questions. "To repeat, vetting is about access to paperwork, not meetings." That appeared to contradict the Cabinet Office's earlier explanation that Coulson did not require direct vetting as he did not attend cabinet, the cabinet's crisis committee – Cobra, – or national security council meetings. The Guardian told Downing Street it understood that, "officials and advisors without high-level security clearance are regularly excluded from discussions about highly sensitive issues, including intelligence. That would seem to suggest that the level to which an individual is vetted is highly relevant." Cameron's spokesman responded on Thursday afternoon: "Fundamentally you seem to refuse to accept that there were good reasons that had nothing to do with phone hacking why a number of special advisors, including Andy Coulson, were not Develop Vetted in May 2010 ... "There is no suggestion that Andy Coulson, or anyone else, had access to the most secret papers. Nor is it the case that decisions were taken about his vetting status because he had resigned from the News of the World [in the wake of the police investigation into phone hacking at the Sunday tabloid]." The Guardian replied on Thursday evening: "Our readers will be bemused, at best, by your refusal to address the issue of whether Andy Coulson attended any meetings at which highly classified information was discussed. More sceptical readers may conclude that you are reluctant to disclose information that could prove inconvenient in some way." The Guardian has asked Downing Street to focus on three key questions: did Coulson ever attend a meeting of the national security council?; did Coulson at any time have unsupervised access to information designated top secret or above?; and which ministers or officials were informed of the decision not to vet Coulson to the highest level? It invited Downing Street to address the questions directly, but the latest statement from No 10 did not do so

What now for Rupert Murdoch?What does the future hold for News Corp and the Murdochs? Rupert's biographer Michael Wolff and commentator Roy Greenslade discuss the damage done By guardian.co.uk, Friday 29 July 2011 21.15 BST Could the hacking scandal be the end of Rupert Murdoch and News Corp? Michael Wolff, author of The Man Who Owns the News, a biography of Murdoch, and media commentator Roy Greenslade talk about about the man, the media empire and what happens next. Emine Saner listens in. Roy Greenslade: As bad as things appear to be, Rupert Murdoch could be seen to be a tremendously beneficial owner of media in Britain. He's poured money into the Times and the Sunday Times, and kept them afloat when few other people would have done so. He launched satellite TV, increasing the range of channels available to everyone. This must surely be something to appreciate about the man. Michael Wolff: If you like the direction, reach and power of "big media", you can hardly find someone who has been more beneficial than Rupert Murdoch. The downside, however, is to use it to further his own interests, create a power base, an independent state of his own. Murdoch loves newspapers. But one of the reasons he has loved newspapers is they can be very powerful and they give him a power he can use. RG: Isn't it always the case that small media, if it's successful, is going to become big media? We would say in terms of business, if we believed in capitalism, that branching out is a natural consequence. So Murdoch, as a newspaper owner, gains power, and we know there's this amazing reciprocal relationship that goes on. He uses his political power to further his business interests, and he uses his business interests to further his political power. The point is, is there any proof that his use of political power has had any effect on the democracies of Australia, Britain, the United States? Especially the US, where it seems he has very little political clout. MW: Let's take the present presidential election cycle, in which you have a list of candidates in the Republican party. [You look] at these people and think, "how did they get here? These are the strangest group of national candidates ever assembled, how did this happen?" The answer, most obviously, is because of Fox News. It has two million viewers who want to be entertained by politics, who need exaggerated figures to entertain them. You can only be a viable Republican if you speak to the Fox audience. They demand exaggerated figures, therefore we have conservatives who are unelectable in America. RG: Is that not a failing of politics? Is it politicians who are being lured – and this would be true in Britain – into the idea that this man has more power than he really has? MW: I absolutely believe that. Both here and in the US, at any point, politicians could say "no, you're not powerful, you just have the illusion of power and that's what everyone is falling for". But that's a bit of dialectic here – whether power is real or it's an illusion. I think this is a unique moment – you can call it an Emperor's New Clothes moment – of re-evaluation of what power means. RG: You've spent time with Murdoch, and over the years so did I. I've also met – and suffered under – other media moguls, most particularly the late, unlamented Robert Maxwell so I am able to contrast them as people. Murdoch is quite a nice guy when you meet him. He is quite gentle, he rarely raises his voice. I found him quite sociably liberal, though clearly a rightwinger. As a person, he is not without charm. He really likes journalists, he likes the gossip. MW: I think you can even go so far as to say the man has a fundamental amount of integrity. He is guided by a set of clear interests, principles and a worldview, and mostly he doesn't deviate from it. Having said that, fundamentally the problem is that Rupert Murdoch doesn't care about you. He doesn't care about anybody outside of his sphere. He is connected only to specific things – his family, which is good, you feel a warmth. He is a victim to these emotions as much as any father. And he cares about his company. But beyond that … RG: We balance between Rupert being a good thing for keeping newspapers going and yet at the same time, having accrued that power, has misused it. Is it not possible to conceive that this crisis would lead to a rebalancing, or are we really seeing – as I believe – the disembowelment and end of News Corp altogether? MW: Let's just deal with the newspapers. We are seeing the end of newspapers and this has given a weapon, within News Corp, to those who have been saying, "What do we have these papers for? We have all this capital tied up in low- or often no-growth businesses." They have the upper hand now. I think that's one of the reasons why the newspapers will go; also the newspapers are incredibly tainted and I don't see how the Murdochs can go on running a business in the UK any more. As for News Corp as a whole, the best-case position is to say, "if we get rid of the newspapers and we get rid of the Murdochs, we have a healthy company". I think it may be too late for that. Emine Saner: What happens to the rest of the family? Is this also the end of the Murdoch dynasty? RG: James has been found wanting in this whole affair. He wasn't around when it happened, but he was sent in to clean it up and he used a toothbrush. MW: I've spent time with James. He is intelligent, but he is the son of a rich man and that's his dominant characteristic – he is impulsive, entitled, arrogant, he listens to nobody. What that means, ultimately, is that he is incredibly immature. His father is too old; he is too young. RG: Do you think there is a real split in the family? MW: I'm just picking up on what I hear and obviously there is an enormous amount of friction. At some point it naturally becomes every man for himself. RG: The performance in front of the select committee was extraordinary. I kept thinking, is he acting? Is he pretending he's not hearing, that he's faltering and doddery in order to confuse the committee? MW: I've been telling people this for several years now. This man is 80, and he's an old 80. In all the time I spent with him, this is the behaviour that I saw. He can't hear. There are a whole range of cognitive references he can't deal with – dates, names, mid-term memories, abstractions. He can deal with things right in front of him. That's why he's very good on the phone with newspaper editors. ES: Where does he go from here? RG: He retires to a nice Los Angeles ranch, I guess, Ronald Reagan-style. MW: One of the better sources I have, with access to News Corp, said the fear inside the company is that Rupert will not see 82 as a free man

Phone-hacking inquiry: unanswered questions The PCC is not a 'regulator' and has no effective ability to investigate or to apply meaningful sanctions Editorial guardian.co.uk, Friday 29 July 2011 21.27 BST Another week, another resignation. Today it was the turn of Lady Buscombe, the chair of the Press Complaints Commission, to step down from her role overseeing self-regulation of newspapers. This departure had an air of inevitability about it. The November 2009 PCC report into phone hacking was a risible document which was almost wilfully blind in its inability to see the significance of publicly available evidence or to ask searching questions of the appropriate people. Earlier this month the PCC withdrew that report, belatedly accepting the obvious: that it had gullibly accepted the News International "one rotten apple" explanation of behaviour at the News of the World. But by then the damage had been done. It was apparent then – and has become even more so since – that the PCC is not a "regulator" in any accepted sense of the word. It has no effective ability to investigate or to apply meaningful sanctions. The 2009 report was, as we warned at the time, "dangerous to the press" because it would call into question the credibility of self-regulation itself. Thus it has proved. The PCC is now advertising for a new chair to step into Lady Buscombe's shoes. Since it is unlikely that the PCC will survive the inevitable scrutiny of Lord Leveson's forthcoming inquiry this is, on the face of it, not the most attractive job in the world. But the PCC does serve a useful role as a mediator and its code of practice remains a good set of practical and ethical guidelines. So it is right that the PCC continues its work while the industry, and others, decide on the regulatory framework which will replace the PCC. At the end of a week in which Lord Leveson put more flesh on the bones of how he intends to proceed this autumn, there remain some very troubling questions about how Andy Coulson came to be appointed to his role at No 10; what sort of vetting was involved; and what access he had to sensitive information, given his relatively low security clearance. People in line for highly sensitive jobs are vetted to find out anything compromising which could make them vulnerable to blackmail or other forms of undesirable influence. Given the criminal cases and press coverage relating to Coulson's period as editor of the NoW, David Cameron's determination to bring him to Downing Street looks extremely puzzling. Why was he not put through the sort of routine vetting procedures to which his predecessors and successor were subjected? Which ministers or officials approved the decision to give him only a cursory security check? Given his lack of clearance, what information did he have access to and which sensitive meetings did he attend? We now know that News International had evidence in 2007 that Coulson had knowledge of illegal payments to police officers. Did that report have the potential to make him vulnerable to external pressure? These are important questions – and we hope that Lord Leveson will see it as his duty to ask them, for otherwise this will remain an unexamined aspect of this affair. The prime minister has, with some justification, boasted of his commitment to transparency over his relationship with powerful media figures. But on this issue he is curiously coy. More worrying is the refusal of public servants to come clean about the questions – including Sir Gus O'Donnell, the cabinet secretary, Jeremy Heywood, the Downing Street permanent secretary, and Craig Oliver, the current head of communications. The series of questions posed by the Guardian to Downing Street this week are relatively straightforward and could, in the spirit of openness, be answered perfectly simply. It is not the role of public officials to deflect, or block, awkward questions or to protect politicians from embarrassment. Nor should these same officials attempt to limit the terms of reference under which Lord Leveson could, and should, consider these issues at the heart of government

MP's bid to recall Murdoch rebuffed The Independent By Theo Usherwood Friday, 29 July 2011 Labour MP Tom Watson said his attempt to recall Rupert Murdoch and his son James to give more evidence to the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee over phone-hacking has been voted down. Mr Watson revealed the rebuff by his colleagues at a news conference after the committee met today to discuss its next steps in its investigation of the scandal. Further written evidence has to provided by August 11. The committee will then decide which witnesses to recall. MPs will write to law firm Harbottle & Lewis to see whether it can provide further evidence about the extent of the phone-hacking scandal now that News International has relaxed the confidentiality clauses in its contract. Chairman of the committee John Whittingdale said: "We have considered this morning the evidence we received last week from Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks and subsequent statements by certain individuals have raised questions about some of the evidence we have received. "As a result of that, we are going to write to ask for further details from various areas where evidence is disputed. "We are writing to Colin Myler, Tom Crone and Jon Chapman. We are also writing to James Murdoch to follow up on a number of questions which he promised us further information on last week." Mr Whittingdale said it was highly likely James Murdoch would be recalled to give evidence to the committee but he wanted to receive written evidence first. "I think the chances are that we will reissue to take oral evidence but before doing so I want to get the answers to the detailed questions that we have," Mr Whittingdale told a news conference in Westminster. He said the letters to Crone, Myler, and Chapman asked them to detail exactly what they dispute about the evidence provided to the committee by the Murdochs and Rebekah Brooks. He said Crone and Myler's claims to the committee two years ago that an email headed "For Neville", a reference to the News of the World's chief reporter Neville Thurlbeck, was not of any significance now was "directly contradictory" to the statements they gave last week. "There is no question that Tom Crone and Colin Myler appeared before the committee to give oral evidence and told us they had discovered no evidence that anyone else beyond Clive Goodman had been involved," he said. "We are now told, we understand from a statement issued to the media, that they had drawn James Murdoch's attention to the significance of the 'For Neville' email. It appeared that when they appeared before us that they didn't think it was significant but they now suggest it is." Mr Watson said Myler and Crone had been "tricky witnesses" in the original inquiry but the committee was now looking into the cover-up of the phone-hacking scandal. He said: "What we have got is a flat contradiction between James Murdoch's evidence by two very senior executives (Myler and Crone) in the company." Mr Whittingdale added: "Obviously we want to see the responses that they send to the letters that we are writing, but Tom Crone and Colin Myler and Jon Chapman have all said that they dispute the evidence given to this committee by James Murdoch. "We want to hear exactly how they dispute that. I suspect it very likely that we will want to hear oral evidence. If they do come back with statements that are quite plainly different from those given by James Murdoch, we will want to hear James Murdoch's response to that. "The chances are that this may well involve oral evidence from him as well." He said it would have made no difference whether the Murdochs or Brooks had given evidence to the committee on oath. The select committee was looking into whether it had been misled but was not concerned with an entire investigation into phone-hacking, he added. Earlier, a friend of the mother of the murdered schoolgirl Sarah Payne said she was "absolutely devastated" after being told she may have been targeted by a private investigator who hacked phones on behalf of the News of the World. Sara Payne, who worked closely with the Sunday paper to campaign for tougher child protection laws, previously said she had not been told she was a victim of phone hacking. But her friend Shy Keenan revealed that Scotland Yard this week told her that her contact details were found in notes compiled by private detective Glenn Mulcaire, who was jailed over phone hacking in January 2007. Former News of the World editor Ms Brooks, who became close friends with Ms Payne during the paper's campaign, said the latest allegations were "abhorrent". It is believed that the evidence found in Mulcaire's files relates to a phone given to Ms Payne by the News of the World so she could contact her supporters, the Guardian reported. Ms Brooks said in a statement: "For the benefit of the campaign for Sarah's Law, the News of the World have provided Sara with a mobile telephone for the last 11 years. It was not a personal gift. "The idea that anyone on the newspaper knew that Sara or the campaign team were targeted by Mr Mulcaire is unthinkable. The idea of her being targeted is beyond my comprehension." A source close to News of the World staff said it was understood that Ms Payne's phone did not have voicemail until 18 months ago. Ms Payne wrote a column for the final issue of the News of the World on July 10 after it was closed amid growing political and commercial pressure over the phone hacking scandal. Describing the paper as "an old friend", she said it became a driving force behind her campaign for a "Sarah's law" to give parents the right to find out if people with access to their children are sex offenders. News International, which owns the tabloid, which was forced to close in the wake of the scandal, said it was taking the matter very seriously, was deeply concerned and would cooperate fully with any potential criminal inquiries. The latest revelation, which comes following allegations the paper illegally accessed the voicemails of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, 7/7 victims' relatives and grieving military families, will ratchet up the pressure on the publishing company and its embattled head James Murdoch. Mr Murdoch has faced growing scrutiny about his governance in the wake of the scandal, but yesterday reports suggested he been unanimously backed by the board of BSkyB to remain in his role as chairman. The broadcaster, which is partly-owned by News Corp, News International's parent company, is expected to formally announce its show of support today following lengthy discussions between directors yesterday. The board meeting was the first since News Corp abandoned a takeover bid for BSkyB because of the hacking furore.

Glenn Mulcaire: I acted only on News of the World's orders Private investigator at centre of phone-hacking scandal says he was 'effectively employed' by the paper from 2002 to 2007 By Lisa O'Carroll guardian.co.uk, Friday 29 July 2011 16.10 BST Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator at the centre of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, has said that he only ever acted on instructions from his employers. The day after revelations that Sara Payne's phone may have been targeted by Mulcaire, who worked for the News of the World for several years before being jailed for intercepting voicemail messages in early 2007, the statement issued by his solicitors firmly pushed the spotlight back on his former News International employers. Mulcaire said he was "effectively employed" by the News of the World from 2002 until 2007 "to carry out his role as a private investigator". "As he accepted when he pleaded guilty in 2007 to charges of phone interception he admits that his role did include phone hacking. As an employee he acted on the instructions of others," said the statement. "There were also occasions when he understood his instructions were from those who genuinely wished to assist in solving crimes. Any suggestion that he acted in such matters unilaterally is untrue. In the light of the ongoing police investigation, he cannot say any more." His solicitors added that he "already expressed his sincere regret to those who have been hurt and affected by his activities and he repeats that apology most sincerely". It is the second statement made by Mulcaire since the most serious News of the World phone-hacking allegations began to emerge in early July. He issued a public apology the day after the Guardian revealed that murdered teenager Milly Dowler's phone had been hacked and voice messages had been deleted. "I want to apologise to anybody who was hurt or upset by what I have done," he said on 5 July, adding that he had worked at the NoW under "constant demand for results".

Gordon Taylor urged to come clean about £725,000 payout The Independent By Ian Burrell, Media Editor Friday, 29 July 2011 Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association, must break his silence over phone-hacking and explain why he was paid £725,000 in damages for being targeted by the News of the World, MPs said last night. Tom Watson, the Labour MP who has done much to uncover the scandal, said Mr Taylor must appear before the judge-led inquiry into phone hacking and demanded that the News of the World publisher News International (NI) releases the football chief from a confidentiality agreement which has prevented him from discussing the matter. The circumstances of the payment have been the source of intense dispute following claims before MPs by James Murdoch last week that the settlement was in based on advice from "outside counsel" on the scale of damages likely to be awarded against the company if it took the case to court. Two former senior NI executives – Colin Myler, the former editor of the News of the World, and Tom Crone, the paper's legal manager – have challenged Mr Murdoch's evidence and said he was "mistaken" in what he told the committee, arguing that he had been shown an email containing a transcript of a hacked message. It has since been claimed that Mr Taylor was originally offered a fraction of the final settlement –about £60,000 – but the figure rose as the company was made aware of evidence obtained by his lawyers. Mr Watson, who briefly raised the matter of Mr Taylor's confidentiality requirement with Mr Murdoch during a Commons select committee hearing last week, said the PFA chief executive must be allowed to speak freely before Lord Justice Leveson's inquiry. "I asked James Murdoch to release Gordon Taylor from his obligations to confidentiality and he ducked the question – the time is right for him to allow this matter to be cleared up. Just what is at the heart of the Gordon Taylor case that people don't want in the public domain?" His Labour colleague, Chris Bryant, said that following NI's decision to release its lawyers Harbottle & Lewis from client confidentiality requirements there was "no reason why News International couldn't release Gordon Taylor". He said the Leveson inquiry had the powers to subpoena Mr Taylor. "The whole Gordon Taylor pay-off is key because either James Murdoch or Colin Myler is telling the truth but either way it looks like a massive pay-off and we need to know what they were buying," he said. "It's difficult to see why Sienna Miller isn't worth £700,000 but Gordon Taylor is." Although Ms Miller was the subject of articles based on hacked messages that appeared in the NOTW, Taylor received a much larger settlement than the £100,000 paid to the actress, even though no article about him was published as a result of hacking. Mr Watson is concerned that the confidentiality clause which Mr Taylor agreed to prevented the wider football world, including PFA members, from learning earlier about the risk of hacking. There is growing evidence that the News of the World was engaged in a concerted effort to target the football world. David Beckham, Wayne Rooney, Gary Lineker and Ashley Cole are among the football figures concerned that they were hacked. Audiotape evidence disclosed by police to Mr Taylor's lawyers before his 2008 settlement included the disgraced private investigator Glenn Mulcaire briefing a journalist on how to hack voicemails and referring to a voicemail with "three messages from Tottenham". Mr Watson also intends to challenge a decision by the Serious Fraud Office not to investigate NI's payments to Mr Taylor and others over hacking as a potential breach of company law. He questions the SFO's assertion that the money involved is insufficiently large to justify an inquiry. He argues that the hidden legal payments made by NI to various parties, including Mulcaire, merit investigation as a potential improper use of shareholders' money. Mr Taylor did not return calls from The Independent.

Poster's note: David Cameron picked Lord Justice Leveson to orchestrate the cover-up using the tactic of delay. ------------------------- Leading article: There must be no delay The Independent Friday, 29 July 2011 The man who will judge the British media laid out his stall yesterday. Lord Justice Leveson noted acidly that his terms of reference "grew substantially" after the Prime Minister's initial statement announcing the establishment of a public inquiry. This was a reference to David Cameron's decision that Leveson should examine not only the ethics and regulation of the press, but also the BBC and social media. The upshot, according to Lord Justice Leveson, is that his report might not be delivered in 12 months as originally planned. His frustration is understandable, but Lord Justice Leveson should be in no doubt that another sprawling, Saville-style inquiry is precisely what is not required. The hacking story is still developing. The latest revelation is that Sara Payne, the grieving mother of a murder victim who became an anti-paedophile activist, might have also been hacked. Lord Justice Leveson will plainly have a difficult job to prevent his inquiry cutting across the police investigation. That could offer another reason for delay. But that too must be resisted. It is strongly in the public interest that the Leveson report is delivered as soon as possible, and its recommendations swiftly acted upon. Public faith in the press depends on it.

July 28, 2011, 4:46 pm Brooks Boasted of Paper’s Campaign in Murdered Girl’s Memory The New York Times By ROBERT MACKEY Photo: Stefan Rousseau/Press Association, via Associated PressRebekah Brooks, left, in 2002 with Sara Payne, the mother of an 8-year-old girl who was murdered by a pedophile in 2000. As my colleagues Sarah Lyall and Ravi Somaiya report, British police officials investigating the hacking of phones by News of the World journalists “have added to the list of probable victims a woman whose 8-year-old daughter was murdered by a repeat sex offender in 2000.” The woman, Sara Payne, is known in Britain for a successful campaign she led to change British law following the death of her daughter, Sarah. Under the terms of the Child Sex Offender Disclosure Scheme, parents are allowed to ask the police if a known sex offender lives nearby. After a trial period, the law was implemented across England and Wales last year. Mrs. Payne fought for the law, which became known as Sarah’s Law in memory of the murdered girl. Her killer lived within five miles of the Paynes and was on Britain’s sex offender registry, and Ms. Payne was convinced that her daughter’s death could have been prevented had she known his history. Rebekah Brooks, who was the editor of The News of the World at the time, threw her newspaper’s support behind the campaign; the tabloid even provided Mrs. Payne with a cellphone to help her with the campaign. According to Nick Davies and Amelia Hill of The Guardian, who first reported on Thursday that the London police told Mrs. Payne that she might have been targeted, “Friends of Payne have told the Guardian that she is ‘absolutely devastated and deeply disappointed’ at the disclosure.” In a tribute to The News of the World published in the newspaper’s final edition, Mrs. Payne wrote that she regarded the staff members as “very good and trusted friends.” She added: It is easy to forget in these dark times that The News of the World has often been a force for good and that has more than anything to do with the people that work on it. And it’s these people I have come to respect and it is for these people I write this piece. I do not pretend that they are perfect or always got it right but I can tell you on a personal level there have been many times when they have stayed close and stood beside me — not for the headline or public credit but just because it was the right thing to do. In response to the news that Mrs. Payne’s voice mail might have been hacked into by Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator who worked for The News of the World, Ms. Brooks said in a statement on Thursday: For the benefit of the campaign for Sarah’s Law, The News of the World has provided Sara with a mobile telephone for the last 11 years. It was not a personal gift. The idea that anyone on the newspaper knew that Sara or the campaign team were targeted by Mr. Mulcaire is unthinkable. The idea of her being targeted is beyond my comprehension. It is imperative for Sara and the other victims of crime that these allegations are investigated and those culpable brought to justice. Throughout the hacking scandal, Ms. Brooks — who recently resigned as the chief executive of News International, the British newspaper division of the News Corporation, owner of The News of the World — has denied ever knowing that illegally intercepted voice mail was used as a source of information by News of the World journalists. She has also repeatedly referred to her role in helping to publicize the Sarah’s Law campaign. Earlier this month, after The Guardian reported that the voice mail of a murdered 13-year-old girl had been hacked into and deleted in 2002 by reporters working for Ms. Brooks, she wrote in a letter to employees: I hope that you all realize 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 pedophiles and better rights for the families and the victims of these crimes defined my editorships. The News of the World campaign for Sarah’s Law began in 2000, the year Ms. Brooks became the tabloid’s editor and the paper set out to ”name and shame” sex offenders. As my colleague Ms. Lyall reported in 2001: The campaign led to lynch-mob attacks, firebombings and rioting in at least 11 communities, with vigilantes in some cases attacking people who looked like the men pictured or who had been incorrectly identified as past offenders. In one town, the home of a pediatrician was attacked when anti-pedophile campaigners got their spelling confused. Ms. Brooks brought up her support for the Sarah’s Law campaign four times last week, during her testimony to a parliamentary committee investigating phone hacking. Asked by one member of the panel about her newspaper’s use of private detectives, Ms. Brooks said, “In the main, my use of private investigators while I was editor of The News of the World was purely legitimate,” and used to determine the addresses and whereabouts of convicted pedophiles for Sarah’s Law.” Pressed by another questioner about her level of involvement with the reporting on the murdered 13-year-old, Milly Dowler, whose voice mail was accessed by her paper, Ms. Brooks said: The one thing that I would say is that under my editorship we had a series of terrible and tragic news stories, starting with Sarah Payne, Milly Dowler’s disappearance and subsequent murder. … The main focus of my editorship of The News of the World was convincing Parliament that there needed to be radical changes to the Sex Offenders Act 1997, which came to be known as Sarah’s Law. … So I suppose, if I had a particular extra involvement in any of those stories, then it would have been on the basis that I was trying to push and campaign for readers’ rights on the 10 pieces of legislation that we got through on Sarah’s Law. Asked by another member of Parliament how the public interest might have been served by breaking the law to obtain private phone numbers, Ms. Brooks said, “Many people disagreed with the campaign, but I felt that Sarah’s Law, and the woeful Sex Offenders Act 1997 that needed to be changed to protect the public, I felt was absolutely in the public interest.” Later in the hearing, when Ms. Brooks was asked by a fourth member of Parliament to describe her recollection of a meeting with senior London police officers, in which she was reportedly warned that her newspaper was interfering with a murder investigation, Ms. Brooks said that she remembered no such meeting. But, she added, “Because of the Sarah’s Law campaign, I had pretty regular meetings at Scotland Yard, mainly with the pedophile unit there.”

Found? The Last Bugs of the Nixon White House By Jeff Stein July 28, 2011 | www.wired.com http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/07/found-the-last-bugs-of-the-nixon-white-house/all/1 One morning in early March 1971, Army counterintelligence agent Dave Mann was going through the overnight files when his eyes landed on something unexpected: a report that a routine, nighttime sweep for bugs along the Pentagon’s power-packed E-Ring had found unexplained – and unencrypted — signals emanating from offices in the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Someone, it seemed, was eavesdropping on the top brass. Mann was no stranger to bugs. It was a busy time for eavesdroppers and bug-finders, starting with the constant Spy vs. Spy games with Russian spies. But the Nixon years, he and everyone else would soon discover, had extended such clandestine ops into new territory: bugging not just the Democrats, but people within its own ranks. Eventually, most of the Watergate-era eavesdropping schemes were revealed to the public, including the bombshell that Nixon was bugging himself. But the bugs Dave Mann discovered in the E-Ring in March 1971 — and another batch like it — have remained buried all these years. Until now. To understand how crazed this era really was, it helps to remember that the Nixon White House was obsessed with not just secrecy, but skullduggery. Only months into the new administration, in 1969, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was so freaked out by the back-alley dealings of Henry Kissinger that he put a spy in the White House to steal documents from his briefcase. Kissinger in turn was bugging his own staff and other officials, including one in the office of the Secretary of Defense. All this was two years before the so-called White House Plumbers, led by ex-CIA agent Howard Hunt, were busted in the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee, eventually opening a window into the Nixon funhouse. More than 50 people in the Nixon White House were working on dirty tricks to discredit political opponents, Bob Woodward’s infamous “Deep Throat,” himself a senior FBI official up to his armpits in illegal bugging operations, would whisper in one of their freaky late-night garage meetings. “Everyone’s life,” he warned the reporter, “is in danger.” But “the White House horrors,” as they became known, were still only wisps of suspicion outside Nixon’s circle when Mann made his discovery. The signals were eventually tracked to the offices of Gen. William Westmoreland, chief of staff of the United States Army. The guys on the Technical Surveillance Countermeasures team, or TSCM, wrote up a report. Mann, now 67 and semi-retired in Tennessee, was on duty the next morning with the Pentagon Counterintelligence Force, a unit compartmented from the TSCM and so secretive that it has managed to escape public notice until now. He and his PCF partner, Tom Lejeune (who would later be killed in Vietnam), undertook an investigation. “We went up to the office and entered one of the telephone closets, which line the halls of the various Pentagon corridors,” he tells Danger Room. “In the one across from Westy’s office, we found that we were able to recover audio from his office by the simple method of placing a handheld amplifier on … the wires going to the office suite.” “Tom noticed that there were two terminals which were slightly apart from the normal ones,” Mann continues, “and which had a pencil mark on each and the word ‘Westy’ written in pencil. That was where pure [unencrypted] audio emanating from the open carbon microphone inside the telephone handset was coming from. It was like having an open, high quality broadcast microphone in the office on all the time.” “Someone had figured out that they could obtain clear room audio without the risk of a clandestine listening device or other more obvious tampering to the telephone,” Mann adds. “It also told us that whoever did the job had to have access to the telephone and to the actual telephone closet.” They clipped headsets to the ‘Westy’ line to record a sample. “We both heard and recorded for posterity a diatribe by General Westmoreland royally chewing the ass of some unfortunate underling,” Mann recalls with a chuckle. They also found Westmoreland’s military assistant’s phone wired for sound, Mann remembers. And three more in the E-Ring: in the offices of the Army’s assistant chief of staff for logistics; an assistant secretary of the Army, Barry Peixoto; and another belonging to a general’s whose name he can’t remember. When Mann and Lejeune presented their findings, an investigation was launched, code-named GRAPPLE TRIP. Photo: These Chapstick tubes with hidden microphones were one of many bugs on display at the trial of the Watergate burglars. (National Archives) Mann suspected the bugging — if it was that — would have been done by either a member of the PCF TSCM crew itself or an employee of the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company. “Lots of fingers pointed towards the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company and a certain retired FBI agent who was their head of security liaison,” Mann adds by e-mail. “It was pretty well known that C&P Telco was J. Edgar [Hoover]’s go-to bunch.” True, that. The technique Mann described — activating carbon mics in the phones — was a common FBI bugging technique, two former agents confirmed on condition of anonymity, without commenting on Mann’s specific discovery. They called them “PL drops.” Only later, after the Watergate scandal exploded, did the world learn that the FBI was, in fact, bugging at least 17 people on behalf of Kissinger. They included Air Force Col. Robert Pursley, an aide to Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, four journalists, and 13 of Kissinger’s own aides or State Department officials. Ostensibly, the goal was to plug leaks of internal deliberations about the secret bombing of Cambodia and other subjects. According to a May 12, 1973 internal FBI memoranda (.pdf), the Kissinger bugs were “a super-sensitive matter and no record [was] to be maintained on these wiretaps.” To further help cover their tracks, “there would be no written record at the Chesapeake and Potomac Company concerning the above-noted wiretap requests.” Which shows, of course, that the FBI routinely did rely on C & P in and around Washington for “PL drops,” as Mann says. But it also suggests that the signals Mann and Lejeune found emanating from Westmoreland’s suite were not part of the Kissinger project. While digging into those mystery bugs, however, Danger Room found another. In 1969, not long after the one-time Vietnam commander was kicked upstairs as Army chief of staff, Westmoreland was overseeing a number of sensitive investigations into corruption in the Army. One probe was of heroin being smuggled back from Vietnam in caskets. Another centered on a “Little Mafia” of senior NCOs, that was skimming cash out of military service clubs in Vietnam. A third was targeting the Army’s former top cop, who was suspected of reselling weapons recovered by National Guard troops during the 1960s domestic riots. Westmoreland, according to Fred Westerman, a member of the Pentagon Counterintelligence Force in 1969, was “bent out of shape” by minute details of his investigations showing up in The Washington Post and The New York Times. Suspecting they were coming from inside his own offices, he demanded that the PCF dispatch a Technical Surveillance Countermeasures Team to check his phones for bugs. In an eerie preview of what Dave Mann and Tom Lejeune would find two years later, Westerman’s TSCM team detected audio signals being broadcast from a phone in Westmoreland’s suite. “I can’t say we found devices, but there was enough concern that it was shipped off for evaluation” to the 902d Military Intelligence Group, parent unit of the PCF, and then further up the chain to an inter-agency group,Westerman said. Because of strict compartmentalization of information between the two, he never did find out who the culprit was — if any. “Much ado about nothing,” says retired Army Lt. Col. Robert W. Loomis, the PCF’s operations officer in 1971. Now a psychologist in Pickens, S.C., Loomis said he remembered the GRAPPLE TRIP investigation well. “Nothing came out of it,” he said in a telephone interview. The audio broadcasts by the phones in Westmoreland’s suite, he said, were a result of “crossed wires in the telephone system.” The lines were “traced out” and “the final determination was that the signals never left the Pentagon.” The reason that the investigation was so hush-hush, he said, was that some of the lines went “directly to the White House,” which brought the Secret Service into the case. “As far as I recall, the signals that were found never went further than the E-Ring of the Pentagon,” Loomis said. “Well now, that’s a good story,” responds Dave Mann. “I am still of the opinion that someone was doing the listening.” In his long career in the counterintelligence world’s wilderness of mirrors, he says he often found bugs planted in intelligence facilities by other intelligence units. “There was a lot — and I mean a lot — of pressure to prove GRAPPLE TRIP to be a fluke or a miswired telephone,” he adds. “It seemed at the time to those of us at the investigator level that the [four apparent bugs found in the E Ring] were connected,” Mann continues. “Each of those offices were in some way connected to the bombing of Cambodia and other secret operations against the North Vietnamese.” Westmoreland was likely out of the loop on those ops. But as Army’s boss, sitting around the E-Ring table with the chiefs of the Navy and Air Force, he was still a member of one the world’s most powerful small clubs — and a White House rival. “The Nixon administration was undoubtedly the most untrusting of any in our history — and they often tapped government officials because they suspected they were being spied on. In the case of the JCS, at about this time, that happened to be the case….” says Mark Perry, author of “Four Stars,” a highly praised 1989 history of the Joint Chiefs. Dave Mann says the truth will probably never be known. Years after the original incident, he returned to duty at Pentagon Counterintelligence Force, still curious about it. He ordered up the GRAPPLE TRIP case file, which was “about a foot high and included the tapes we had made.” In the “last few pages of the files,” he says, he found the conclusion: “Persons unknown had accidentally modified the telephone instrument.” “At the end of the day,” he adds, “we will never know for certain who was responsible, and if there was intent or not.”

BSkyB could come to regret its backing of James MurdochNews Sara Payne may have had her phone hacked casts yet more doubt on James Murdoch's reputation for good governance By Jane Martinson guardian.co.uk, Thursday 28 July 2011 20.26 BST Can you snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? We should ask James Murdoch, for each time the head of News International overcomes one hurdle, he finds himself dragged deeper into the morass that is the phone-hacking scandal. Fresh from winning unanimous support to continue as chairman of BSkyB, the head of the company that owned the News of the World emerged to find that the scandal engulfing his business had reached a new low, with claims that Sara Payne, the mother of a murdered schoolgirl, may also have been a hacking target. Payne had been huge supporter of the now defunct newspaper, helping a campaign that former editor Rebekah Brooks considered one of her greatest successes and writing a farewell column just a few weeks ago that spoke of her "good and trusted friends" there. She is now said to be devastated. If nothing else, this grim tale suggests that support can change with the facts, a message that surely can't have escaped James Murdoch, nor indeed the board of BSkyB. The board of Sky, which contains a majority of nominally independent directors, insists that it will keep a "watching brief" on events. It backed James Murdoch because of his strong record at the business – the thing he is said to be most proud of in his relatively short career – and because he convinced all 14 directors that he had the time and ability to continue while at the same time as dealing with the demands of simultaneous criminal, judicial and parliamentary investigations. Yet with each new revelation of wrongdoing, James Murdoch's own reputation for good governance and management is called further into question, rightly or wrongly. At stake is not only his stewardship of his beloved satellite business but the ability of Rupert Murdoch's youngest son to fulfil his father's wishes and take over the whole of the family firm. Less dramatically, but equally importantly for the investors and directors of BSkyB, will be the questions raised about the company's own independence after today's decision. It only took a cup of tea at Wapping last week to convince the company's lead independent director that James Murdoch deserved support. The options open for Nicholas Ferguson were limited, of course. Let's not forget, there have been no Murdoch charges and the manifold investigations are going to take some time to come to a conclusion. Indeed, while they play out, the chief operating officer of News Corporation as well as chairman of Sky could decide that the job he was supposed to be doing in New York from this summer was really rather onerous after all. But no company likes to have its most senior member subject to such high-profile allegations of wilful blindness or mismanagement. Media regulator Ofcom's examination of whether News Corp and James himself can still be seen as "fit and proper" enough to own TV licences and its 39% share of BSkyB may be in the long grass of a post-criminal investigation environment, but it is still potentially lethal, not to mention humiliating. After today's decision the entire board of BSkyB will be affected by any reputational fallout. For a start, the independence of the eight directors who call themselves so will become more of an issue. Allan Leighton, the former head of Asda and the Post Office, has been on the board for 11 years, two longer than recommended by corporate governance codes, while another director, David Evans, used to work for Rupert Murdoch. To be fair, those changes may have been made before but the abortive News Corp delayed any changes. Watch for any decision to give cash back to shareholders that increases the Murdoch 39% stake, inconceivable in the current environment. If BSkyB is to prove itself an independent company following the collapse of News Corporation's bid, then its actions over the continuing chairmanship of James Murdoch is key. He could have been asked to stand down temporarily today while so much is going on. Only time will tell how wise that decision was

A mere state can't restrain a corporation like Murdoch's Whether News Corp, banks or food giants, transnationals are not so much a state within a state as a power beyond it By Felicity Lawrence guardian.co.uk, Thursday 28 July 2011 18.45 BST The deep corruption of power revealed by the phone-hacking scandal has led many to question how Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation could establish "a state within a state". MPs have trumpeted their determination to make sure it never happens again. They will struggle. As if to rub the point in, BSkyB's board announced it was back to business as usual on Thursday. Despite parliament's question mark over the integrity of its chairman, James Murdoch, the rest of the board said they fully supported him. A few hours later the Guardian reported a new low in the saga – allegations that Sarah Payne's mother's phone may have been hacked. But the corporation marches on. The fact is that the modern globalised corporation is not a state within a state so much as a power above and beyond the state. International development experts stopped talking about multinationals years ago, preferring instead the tag of transnational corporations (TNCs), because these companies now transcend national authorities. Developing countries, dealing with corporations whose revenue often exceeds their own GDPs, have long been aware of their own lack of power. They are familiar with the way world trade rules have been written to benefit corporations and limit what any one country can impose on them. They know about the transnationals' tendency to oligopoly; and their ability to penetrate the heart of government with lobbying. For an affluent country like the UK, it has come as more of a shock. While traditional multinationals identified with a national home, TNCs have no such loyalty. Territorial borders are no longer important. This had been the whole thrust of World Trade Organisation treaties in the past decades. Transnationals can now take advantage of the free movement of capital and the ease of shifting production from country to country to choose the regulatory framework that suits them best. If restrained by legitimate legislative authorities, they can appeal to WTO rules to enforce their rights, as the tobacco company Philip Morris has threatened recently. It says it will sue the Australian government for billions of dollars for violating its intellectual property rights if it goes ahead with its plan to ban branding on cigarette packets. TNCs can and do locate their profits offshore to thwart any individual country's efforts to take revenue from them. The ability to raise taxes to provide services is a core function of democratic government, yet governments have been reduced to supplicants, cutting their tax rates further and further to woo corporates. Meanwhile, as the Rowntree visionary Geoff Tansey has pointed out, transnationals have used patents and intellectual property rights to create their own system of private taxation. If labour laws or environmental regulations become too onerous for them, they can move operations to less regulated jurisdictions. So globalised food and garment manufacturers can move to cheaper centres of production when governments introduce minimum wages or unions win workers' rights. If financial rules curb their ability to invent complex, risky new products to sell, they can set up shop elsewhere. The transnational banks have been past masters at playing off one jurisdiction against another and using the threat of relocation to resist government controls. Much of their activity still takes place in a shadow system beyond the states that have bailed them out. Nearly three years on from the near collapse of the whole system, the structural reform that everyone agreed was needed has not materialised. Lobbying at the heart of governments in Europe and the US has seen off calls for the separation of investment banking from the retail banking that takes ordinary people's deposits. So the banks remain too big and too interconnected to fail. Vince Cable, the business secretary, who still argued forcefully this week for that separation, is nevertheless reduced to hoping that the ringfencing of functions preferred by the big corporates will work. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel – wanting to make sure private banking corporations would share the pain for the Greek loans they made as that country hovers around default – was threatened with not just relocation but with the whole banking system being brought down again. Not surprisingly, she backed off. The most effective checks on transnationals are as likely to come from NGOs and consumers as individual governments these days. Campaigners have found new forms of asymmetric engagement that enable them to take on corporations whose resources dwarf their own. Harnessing the same advances in technology and instant globalised communication that TNCs have used to build up their control, activists have brought together shared interest groups across borders to challenge them. So for example, direct action groups such as Greenpeace have been able to connect protesters against transnational soya traders in the Amazon, with activists across European countries in highly effective simultaneous campaigns against the brands that buy from them. When the Murdochs initially refused to appear before parliament to account for their corporate behaviour, there was much anxious consultation of ancient rules to see if these two foreign citizens could be forced or not. In the end, it was probably the market that got them there, as the damage limitation gurus advised that a dose of humble pie would be the most effective strategy for restoring shareholder confidence. After the Milly Dowler phone-hacking revelation, it was neither our compromised elected representatives nor our law enforcers the police, but activists on Twitter that brought them down. Attacking not just the brands owned by the Murdochs but those owned by their advertisers until they withdrew from the News of the World's pages, they played by the globalised market's rulebook

BSkyB Board Backs James R. Murdoch to Stay as Chairman The New York Times By JULIA WERDIGIER July 28, 2011 LONDON — James R. Murdoch won unanimous backing from British Sky Broadcasting’s board Thursday for his role as chairman of the satellite television company despite the phone hacking scandal that has roiled the News Corporation, his family’s media empire. The board of BSkyB, as it is known, discussed James Murdoch’s role “at length” and decided he should keep the job, said a person with direct knowledge of the decision. The board planned to closely monitor developments linked to the phone hacking scandal, said the person, who declined to be identified because the meeting was private. It was the first time BSkyB’s 14-member board had met since a public and political outcry over phone hacking at the now shuttered The News of the World tabloid forced News Corporation, the global media company controlled by James Murdoch’s father Rupert Murdoch, to withdraw its offer for the rest of BSkyB. News Corporation owns a 39 percent stake in BSkyB. The board meeting had been initially scheduled to discuss BSkyB’s annual earnings, which are to be released on Friday, but the phone hacking scandal had forced it to also address questions about whether James Murdoch should stay on as chairman. James and Rupert Murdoch faced angry questions from British lawmakers earlier this month about how much they knew about phone hacking practices at The News of the World. Keeping James Murdoch on the board of BSkyB, one of the best–performing and most important parts of News Corporation’s British business, is essential to the Murdoch family’s media empire, some analysts said. James Murdoch runs News Corporation’s European operations, which include the BSkyB stake and News International, the newspaper group that published The News of the World. He is also News Corporation’s deputy chief operating officer. Pressure on James Murdoch intensified last week when two former News International executives publicly contradicted testimony he had given to a parliamentary committee. The executives said they had made Mr. Murdoch aware of evidence in 2008 that suggested phone hacking at The News of the World was more widespread. Mr. Murdoch denied he had ever been told that underlying evidence in the case implicated more than one reporter at the tabloid. James Murdoch was appointed as chairman of BSkyB’s board, which also includes three other members that are on the News Corporation’s payroll, at the end of 2007, amid opposition from some institutional investors and pension funds. Some shareholders criticized the election process and said they would have preferred a chairman who was not linked to BSkyB’s biggest shareholder. Lorna Tilbian, an analyst at Numis Securities in London, said James Murdoch’s support among BSkyB’s board members did not come as a surprise. “He’s done a good job as BSkyB’s chairman and it’s innocent until proven guilty,” Ms. Tilbian said. The phone hacking scandal might affect BSkyB in other ways. Ofcom, the British broadcasting regulator, is proceeding with inquiries into whether BSkyB remains “fit and proper” to hold a broadcasting license because of the hacking scandal still unfolding at the News Corporation. The scandal took a toll on BSkyB’s share price because some investors were concerned that new investigations into phone hacking and bribery allegations could distract management for the unforeseeable future. BSkyB’s shares slumped 16 percent from their peak earlier this month. BSkyB’s board also discussed whether to compensate BSkyB shareholders, which includes News Corporation, for the share price drop by paying a special dividend or through a share buyback program.

Hacking probe shocks Sarah Payne's mum The Independent By Sam Marsden Thursday, 28 July 2011 Police have told the mother of murdered schoolgirl Sarah Payne her phone may have been hacked by a private investigator used by the News of the World, a friend said today. Sara Payne, who worked closely with the Sunday paper to campaign for better child protection laws, previously said she had not been told she was a victim of phone hacking. But her friend Shy Keenan confirmed today that Scotland Yard has since informed her that her contact details were found on a list compiled by private detective Glenn Mulcaire. Ms Payne was "absolutely devastated" when the news was broken to her by officers from Operation Weeting, as the Metropolitan Police's phone hacking inquiry is known, her child welfare group, The Phoenix Chief Advocates, said. She became a tireless campaigner on child abuse issues after her eight-year-old daughter was murdered by paedophile Roy Whiting in 2000. The Phoenix Chief Advocates - run by Ms Payne, Ms Keenan and Fiona Crook - said in a statement: "Whilst it was previously confirmed by Operation Weeting that Sara Payne's name was not on private investigator Glenn Mulcaire's list, it has now been confirmed by the Operation Weeting that Sara's details are on his list. "Sara is absolutely devastated by this news, we're all deeply disappointed and are just working to get her through it. "Sara will continue to work with the proper authorities regarding this matter." It has been suggested that the evidence found in Mulcaire's files relates to a phone given to Ms Payne by former News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks as a gift so she could contact her supporters, The Guardian reported today. Ms Payne wrote a column for the final issue of the News of the World on July 10 after it was closed amid growing political and commercial pressure over the phone hacking scandal. Describing the paper as "an old friend", she described how it became a driving force behind her campaign for a "Sarah's law" to give parents the right to find out if people with access to their children are sex offenders. She wrote: "We did not meet under the best of circumstances. In fact, it was the worst, most horrendous time in my life. But from that moment on the News of the World and more importantly the people there became my very good and trusted friends. "And like all good friends they have stuck with me through the good and the bad and helped me through both." The revelation that Ms Payne's phone may have been hacked follows allegations that the News of the World illegally accessed the voicemails of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, 7/7 victims' relatives and grieving military families. As well as resulting in the closure of the paper, the scandal has led to the resignations of Ms Brooks, two of Britain's most senior police officers and Les Hinton, one of Rupert Murdoch's most trusted lieutenants. Ms Brooks said the latest allegations were "abhorrent" and "particularly upsetting" because Ms Payne was a "dear friend". She said in a statement: "For the benefit of the campaign for Sarah's Law, the News of the World have provided Sara with a mobile telephone for the last 11 years. It was not a personal gift. "The idea that anyone on the newspaper knew that Sara or the campaign team were targeted by Mr Mulcaire is unthinkable. The idea of her being targeted is beyond my comprehension. "It is imperative for Sara and the other victims of crime that these allegations are investigated and those culpable brought to justice."

News of the World targeted phone of Sarah Payne's mother Evidence found in private detective's notes believed to relate to phone which Rebekah Brooks gave to Sara Payne as gift By Nick Davies and Amelia Hill guardian.co.uk, Thursday 28 July 2011 16.08 BST Sara Payne, whose eight-year-old daughter Sarah was abducted and murdered in July 2000, has been told by Scotland Yard that they have found evidence to suggest she was targeted by the News of the World's investigator Glenn Mulcaire, who specialised in hacking voicemail. Police had earlier told her correctly that her name was not among those recorded in Mulcaire's notes, but on Tuesday officers from Operation Weeting told her they had found her personal details among the investigator's notes. These had previously been thought to refer to a different target. Friends of Payne have told the Guardian that she is "absolutely devastated and deeply disappointed" at the disclosure. Her cause had been championed by the News of the World, and in particular by its former editor, Rebekah Brooks. Believing that she had not been a target for hacking, Payne wrote a farewell column for the paper's final edition on 10 July, referring to its staff as "my good and trusted friends". The evidence that police have found in Mulcaire's notes is believed to relate to a phone given to Payne by Brooks as a gift to help her stay in touch with her supporters. One of Payne's close colleagues said: "We are all appalled and disgusted. Sara is in bits about it." In a statement, Brooks said the latest allegations were "abhorrent" and "particularly upsetting" because Sara Payne was a "dear friend". Coming after the disclosure that the News of the World hacked and deleted the voicemail of the murdered Surrey schoolgirl Milly Dowler, the news will raise further questions about whether News Corporation is "fit and proper" to own TV licences and its 39% share of BSkyB. It will also revive speculation about any possible role in phone hacking of Brooks, who was personally very closely involved in covering the aftermath of Sarah Payne's murder and has always denied any knowledge of voicemail interception. On 15 July Brooks resigned as chief executive of News International and was arrested and interviewed by police. The Labour MP Tom Watson, who has been an outspoken critic of News International, said of the Payne revelation: "This is a new low. The last edition of the News of the World made great play of the paper's relationship with the Payne family. Brooks talked about it at the committee inquiry. Now this. I have nothing but contempt for the people that did this." Friends of Payne said she had accepted the News of the World as a friend and ally. Journalists from the paper attended the funerals of her mother and father and visited her sick bed after she suffered a severe stroke in December 2009. In the wake of the Guardian's disclosure on 4 July of the hacking of Milly Dowler's phone, there were rumours that Payne also might have been a victim. Police from Operation Weeting, which has been investigating the News of the World's phone hacking since January, checked the names of Payne and her closest associates against its database of all the information contained in the notebooks, computer records and audio tapes seized from Glenn Mulcaire in August 2006. They found nothing. The News of the World's sister paper, the Sun, was quick to report on its website, on 8 July, that Payne had been told there was no evidence to support the rumours. The next day the Sun quoted her paying tribute to the News of the World, whose closure had been announced by News International. "It's like a friend died. I'm so shocked," she told them. In the paper's final edition on Sunday 10 July, Payne registered her own anger at the hacking of Milly Dowler's phone: "We have all seen the news this week and the terrible things that have happened, and I have no wish to sweep it under the carpet. Indeed, there were rumours - which turned out to be untrue - that I and my fellow Phoenix charity chiefs had our phones hacked. But today is a day to reflect, to look back and remember the passing of an old friend, the News of the World." Since then, detectives from Weeting have searched the Mulcaire database for any reference to mobile phone numbers used by Sara Payne or her closest associates or any other personal details. They are believed to have uncovered notes made by Mulcaire which include some of these details but which had previously been thought to refer to a different target of his hacking. Police have some 11,000 pages of notes which Mulcaire made in the course of intercepting the voicemail of targets chosen by the News of the World. Friends of Sara Payne today said that she had made no decision about whether to sue the paper and that she wanted the police to be able to finish their work before she decided. Operation Weeting is reviewing all high-profile cases involving the murder, abduction or assault of any child since 2001 in an attempt to find out if any of those involved was the target of phone-hacking. The statement from Brooks said: "For the benefit of the campaign for Sarah's Law, the News of the World have provided Sara with a mobile telephone for the last 11 years. It was not a personal gift. "The idea that anyone on the newspaper knew that Sara or the campaign team were targeted by Mr Mulcaire is unthinkable. The idea of her being targeted is beyond my comprehension. "It is imperative for Sara and the other victims of crime that these allegations are investigated and those culpable brought to justice."

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20101112.html The Tea Party's Apparent Willingness to Shut Down the Federal Government and What the Consequences May Be By JOHN W. DEAN Friday, November 12, 2010 As the recent mid-term elections progressed towards their culmination, and in their immediate aftermath, one theme clearly emerged for the Tea Party Movement's success: They are ready to shut down the federal government to enforce spending discipline. While choking government operations by fiscal inaction is outrageous, we have all been warned that extreme behavior is the Tea Party's norm. Given the attitude at the White House, unless there is some planning it is more likely than not that these antics will work. And if the Tea Party folks succeed, it will benefit Republicans at the expense of others. The Coming Tea Party-Sponsored Government Shutdowns Mark Meckler, a co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, pounded the shutdown drum before the election. Tea Party supporters in the Republican leadership have now joined the effort, and there is a growing consensus that we are headed towards one or more government shutdowns, or threats of shutdown, to implement the radical Tea Party agenda. Causing shutdowns, of course, is not a new gambit. But bringing the government to a halt by refusing to enact appropriations legislation is, in fact, an exclusive ploy of Republicans, and it has been used by both Capitol Hill and the White House when under GOP control. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service has prepared excellent monographs on prior government shutdowns, looking at their causes, effects and process as well as potential solutions -- which Republicans have made sure have gone nowhere. This tactic operates with about the same finesse as those used by Mexican drug lords. As the Tea Party Movement candidates enter the Washington political arena -- with their penchant for Second Amendment remedies -- shutting down the government could be one of their friendlier strategies, unless, of course, the GOP establishment co-opts this crew. But yesterday's Republican radicals, like Mitchell McConnell and John Boehner, actually look reasonable if put in a room with Rand Paul and Michelle Bachman -- the poster people for the Tea Party. Threatened shutdowns are political tantrums, and thus a form of extortion. If such behavior is rewarded, it will only become more frequent and demanding. Historically, when exposed and dealt with firmly, these efforts have failed. But the Tea Party -- along with other Republicans -- views Barack Obama as a weak president, not without reason, so they have everything to gain and nothing to lose by using this approach. Government-Shutdown Situations: How They Have Historically Played Out Under Article I, Section 9, clause 7 of the Constitution -- often called the "appropriations clause" -- funds cannot be drawn from the Federal Treasury, or obligated by federal officials, unless Congress has appropriated the money by law. In addition, under the Anti-deficiency Act, which has been the law almost from the nation's founding, federal departments and agencies are prohibited from acting -- except in matters of emergency and national defense -- without an appropriation. As the country has grown more polarized, particularly since the Reagan Administration, it has become increasingly difficult for Congress and the White House to agree upon the appropriations needed to fund the federal budget. Accordingly, when Congress fails to adopt the annual appropriation, Congress enacts and the president signs a continuing resolution to temporarily fund departments and agencies until the appropriation has been enacted and signed into law. Refusal to enact an appropriation, or at least to enact this kind of continuing resolution, will bring about forty percent of the government to a halt until differences are resolved. Appropriations must be made annually. Another disruption point is the federal debt limit, which has been steadily increased over the decades. By law, federal spending cannot exceed the debt limit, which is also established by law. Thus, when the federal government reaches its debt limit, Congress must agree to extend it, or the Government will default on its obligations that exceed the limit. Such a default, of course, could have catastrophic implications for the world's financial market. Theoretically, a handful of filibustering U.S. Senators, hell-bent of not extending the debt limit, could create world financial havoc. Economists say that the debt limit will need adjusting by January or February 2011. These situations have created an opportunity for Republicans -- who love to profess fiscal responsibility when they do not control the Congress and the White House -- to employ their extra-constitutional, if not unconstitutional, tactics to impose their will and embarrass Democrats, by using the threat of closing down the government by refusing to appropriate funds or adjust the debt limit. Both Ronald Reagan and George Bush I used vetoes of continuing resolutions that resulted in shutdowns to try to impose their will on Democratic Congresses. And, more famously, Republican Speaker Of The House Newt Gingrich refused to pass a budget when Bill Clinton, a Democrat, was president, unless the Congress was given what the GOP leadership wanted. The Reagan and Bush I shutdowns lasted only days and cost taxpayers only a few million dollars. The Gingrich shutdown, which lasted almost three weeks, cost billions of dollars. Democrats in Congress, and Bill Clinton, refused to be extorted. So the shutdowns failed. Government should not be a costly game of Blindman's Bluff, which hurts our country in the eyes of the world. Indeed, all federal officials, including both presidents and members of Congress, are oath-bound not to do what Republicans have repeatedly done when cutting off funding, or threatening to do so, for government operations. Tea Party candidates will soon be taking that oath as well, but I am not sure they will honor it. More than likely, they see the Congressional Oath as merely a pro forma ceremony before taking office. In fact, oaths are public promises, and pledges for future action. Honoring an oath is a matter of character. And there are not different oaths for Republicans, Tea Party people, and Democrats; one oath applies to all. The Congressional Oath In January of every odd-numbered year, when a new Congress is formed, all members of the House of Representatives and a third of Senate assemble in their respective chambers to take the Congressional Oath: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God." What does it mean to "support and defend" the Constitution? What is bearing "true faith and allegiance" to the Constitution? How do those in Congress "well and faithfully discharge the duties" of their offices? A few years ago, Arkansas Congressman Vic Snyder, a family doctor as well as a graduate of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock School of Law, did what no one else has bothered to do, and took a hard look at these questions. He did so in an article for his former law school's law journal in 2001. (Snyder, first elected to Congress in 1996, is retiring this year and is currently serving the remainder of his term. Unfortunately, his article, at 24 U. Ark. Little Rock L. Rev. 811, is behind pay-walls.) Allow me to distill into a few sentences my understanding of what the Congressman said in several thousands of words, in his wide-ranging survey of the scant existing literature addressing the Congressional Oath. He explored its history; he developed its meaning by examining a few relevant Supreme Court holdings that shed light on it; and he looked at its application in the context of amending the Constitution. Although Congressman Snyder was not looking at the Congressional Oath in the context of those participating in forcing -- or threatening -- a government shutdown, I think what he found is relevant. As I read Congressman Snyder's findings -- along with the comments of several of his congressional colleagues as well as then-Speaker of the House Denny Hastert, who joined him in accompanying essays -- the Congressional Oath is a pledge of conscience that requires a commitment to "abide by our constitutional system," and to operate "by constitutional processes." Most importantly, there is nothing casual about this pledge. Congressman Snyder approvingly cites Justice Story, who found that, because of their oath, federal officeholders have a "sacred obligation" toward the Constitution. In addition, Congressman Snyder believes that the oath embraces George Washington's admonition that the Constitution must "be sacredly maintained" by office holders, and James Madison's call for "veneration" of the Constitution. In short, the Congressional Oath demands a special "seriousness" in honoring its ways and means; it requires not merely following its terms, but also the spirit it represents. The Congressional Oath And Government Shutdowns Threatening, or forcing, a government shutdown is a conspicuous breach of the Congressional Oath. Our Constitution contemplates continuous government, undertaken pursuant to the structure set forth within that document, unless amended by the terms of that document, as spelled out in its Article V. While the Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse, this appropriations process is divided between the Congress and the president, for no appropriation becomes law without the president's approval, unless his veto is overridden by two-thirds of the Congress. Notwithstanding this Constitutional reality, Speaker Gingrich has called the fact that the Congress must appropriate the funds for government to operate Congress's "trump" of the president's powers. As Newt discovered, this was wishful thinking. Remarkably, Gingrich is one of those who are enthusiastically pushing the Tea Party and current GOP leadership to again use the shutdown ploy to get what they want. These threats to shut down the government, and the decisions to actually do so when necessary to make the point, are based on the belief that if a Republican Congress (House or Senate, alone when not together) can take the heat of public outrage, then Republicans can embarrass the Democratic president, who can't take the heat -- especially when a president is seeking reelection. Why can't the president take the heat, in Republicans' view? Because -- as many Republicans have told me -- the public is too stupid to figure out who is to blame for the mess, so they will blame the president. Accordingly, Republicans can use the shutdown threat to get what they want, forcing a president to promise not to veto it. Newt, for example, wanted to abolish a good hunk of the Executive Branch, and lower taxes, along with the other Republican wish-list items set forth in the Contract With America that he spearheaded. The tactic of threatening the shutdown of, or actually shutting down, the federal government by withholding funding will not be found anywhere in the U.S. Constitution. In fact, it is a brazen abuse of power. This is a kind of gaming of the appropriations process, or taking advantage of a president when confronted with a debt limit, in a manner that is far beyond even Richard Nixon's abuse-of-power activities, for which he was forced from office. Disrupting government operations is not merely a blatant violation of the Congressional Oath, which requires honoring our system and using the processes of government as they were intended. It also pushes the give-and-take of politics, in some circumstances, into the area of criminal extortion. A Strong Reason For Concern: It's Possible the Tea Party May Successfully Bully the President The reason I raise this subject at this time is that I am worried that when the thug-talking Tea Party players get going in Washington this coming January, they may successfully bully their way with President Obama. President Obama is a wonderful human being -- smart, caring, a man who wants to do what is best for America. But he has not yet figured out that a president is not simply a super-Senator, a legislator-in-chief, a consensus-seeker extraordinaire, always willing to compromise to keep everyone happy. Being president of the United States is not the same as being president of the Harvard Law Review, which was his prior executive experience. Mr. Obama learned his politics as a legislator, and while he clearly has the talent to do so, he has yet to employ his skills as they are needed by a modern American president. Republicans, using the Tea Party toughs, no doubt feel emboldened. In the last election, they kicked President Obama's behind for doing what he believed to be best for the nation. I do not know when, or if, Mr. Obama will realize his potential as a president. So I worry. For example, as I write this column, he is floating a trial balloon as to what the reaction would be if he collapsed on the issue of prohibiting further ongoing tax cuts for America's super-wealthy, who are the very last to need tax cuts. Such a collapse would please Republicans and really upset Obama's base. Soon, the President will be negotiating with the government shutdown crowd, and I worry he will give up even more of the greater good to appease Republicans. In fact, he should be planning now (and putting Tea Party members on notice of his plans) as to how, at a minimum, he will embarrass them (no easy task) for threatening to shut down our government. Or, better yet, he should place them on notice that he will request his Attorney General to criminal prosecute them if they use such criminal tactics for political ends. (Congressional immunity is very limited.) The bottom line: It is time now to plan for the bad behavior that will be coming to Washington with the Tea Party Movement, and to recognize the high stakes that will be involved when they threaten to shut down the government. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- John W. Dean, a FindLaw columnist, is a former counsel to the president.

Warning over Boris Johnson phone hacking denial The Independent By Sam Marsden Thursday, 28 July 2011 Boris Johnson would have been attempting to pervert the course of justice if he knew police were actively investigating phone hacking when he described fresh allegations as "codswallop", it was claimed today. The London Mayor's deputy for policing, Kit Malthouse, was informed on September 10, 2010 that Scotland Yard detectives were looking into claims made in a New York Times article. Five days later Mr Johnson publicly dismissed questions about the new hacking allegations as "a load of codswallop cooked up by the Labour Party" at Mayor's Question Time. Members of the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA), which oversees Scotland Yard's work, today quizzed Mr Malthouse on whether he discussed the fact that police were investigating the New York Times claims with Mr Johnson between September 10 and 15. Mr Malthouse, chairman of the MPA, replied: "It think it is probably unlikely that we did but I cannot recall precisely." Green Party MPA member Jenny Jones suggested that the mayor must have known there was an active police investigation when he made his "codswallop" comments. She told the meeting at London's City Hall: "If he did know, he was attempting to pervert the course of justice." Asked about Mr Johnson's choice of words, Mr Malthouse said: "The mayor is a personality who likes to express himself in particular ways." Acting Commissioner Tim Godwin, who took over running Scotland Yard on Monday after Sir Paul Stephenson resigned as Commissioner, declined to comment on the Mayor's words. Mr Malthouse confirmed today that former Met assistant commissioner John Yates briefed him on September 10 last year that police were considering whether there was any new evidence in the New York Times report and that a team of officers might fly to the US to conduct interviews. Asked about phone hacking at Mayor's Question Time five days later, Mr Johnson said: "I am almost in continuous conversations with my deputy mayor for policing (Mr Malthouse) about this and other matters. "It would be fair to say that he and I have discussed this. The conclusion of our conversation would be obvious from what I have said. "In other words, this is a load of codswallop cooked up by the Labour Party and that we do not intend to get involved with it."