Rupert Murdoch and the Corruption of the British Media

[Douglas Caddy]

Phone hacking: News International mass-deleted emails, tech firm says

HCL reveals News International's various requests for deletion but tells MPs it knew of nothing untoward

By Patrick Wintour, political editor

guardian.co.uk,

Monday 1 August 2011 14.48 BST

The technology firm HCL has told the home affairs select committee it was aware of the deletion of hundreds of thousands of emails at the request of News International between April 2010 and July 2011, but said it did not know of anything untoward behind the requests to delete them.

HCL has sent the letter to the home affairs select committee chairman, Keith Vaz , revealing it had been involved in nine separate episodes of email deletion.

HCL says it is not the company responsible for emails on the News International system that are older than a couple of weeks. It says another unnamed vendor is responsible, but confirms it has co-operated with this vendor in deleting material.

Through a letter from HCL's solicitors Stuart Benson, the firm says: "My client is aware of nothing which appeared abnormal, untoward or inconsistent with its contractual role." It adds: "It is entirely for News International, the police and your committee as to whether there was any other agenda or subtext when issues of deletion arose and that is a matter on which my client cannot comment and something you will no doubt wish to explore direct with News International."

It stressed that since it was not the company that stored News International's data "any suggestion or allegation that it has deleted material held on behalf of News International is without foundation".

HCL identified three sets of email deletions in April 2010, including a deletion of a public folder of a live email system that "was owned by a user who no longer needed the emails".

A further 200,000 emails stuck in an outbox were deleted in May 2010 to restore email functionality. In September 2010 a further pruning of historic emails occurred to help stabilise the email archival system, which had been having "frequent outages" since November 2009.

In January 2011 HCL was asked about its ability to truncate a particular database in the email archival systems. HCL "answered in the negative and suggested assistance from the third party vendor". HCL stated no reason as to why it was unable to assist.

In February 2011 emails were deleted in an older version of Microsoft. Finally, in July 2011 HCL helped delete emails from the live system as relocation errors had occurred during migration from one system to the other.

HCL said it did not have the resources to review every set of deletions.

Separately, a firm of solicitors drawn into the News International phone-hacking scandal is expected to reply shortly to the home affairs select committee as to how it came to write a key letter to the newspaper group that was then used by the company to contend that phone hacking had not been widespread.

The firm, Harbottle and Lewis, is consulting the Metropolitan police before deciding how to reply to requests from the select committee to spell out how it came to write a letter taken to mean that only one reporter was aware of phone hacking at the paper.

The New York Times reported at the weekend that the letter sent by Harbottle and Lewis to the culture, media and sport select committee was redrafted more than once. The firm had been hired to review the email of the tabloid's royal reporter, Clive Goodman, who had pleaded guilty to hacking the mobile phone messages of royal household staff members. The letter said "no reasonable evidence" had been found that senior editors knew about the reporter's "illegal actions".

The New York Times alleges that the letter sent to the culture select committee in May 2007 was constructed to give the company a clean bill of health over phone hacking, but was silent on the issue of payments to the police.

The home affairs select committee asked:

• "What was the exact remit given to Harbottle and Lewis when it was instructed by News International in 2007?"

• "The contents of emails and information held in the file you mentioned in your letter."

• "What advice was provided from Harbottle and Lewis to News International in 2007 following examination of the emails and information?"

• "Why the evidence you had in 2007 that was later examined by Lord McDonald in 2011 was not acted upon sooner

[Douglas Caddy]

Met still holding Brooks laptop found in the rubbish

The Independent

By Matt Blake

Monday, 1 August 2011

Police were last night still holding a laptop, an iPad and paperwork that were dumped two weeks ago in a bin near the riverside home of Rebekah Brooks.

Two briefcases containing the items were found in a plastic sack on 18 July among rubbish in an underground car park at Chelsea Harbour in west London, where Ms Brooks lives in an apartment with her husband, Charlie.

The bag was found by binmen before Mr Brooks tried to claim it back, but a security guard refused because he could not prove that he owned its contents.

Instead, the guard called police who took the equipment away.

Met detectives last week contacted Mr Brooks to demand passwords for the computer so they could examine its contents to establish whether it contained anything relevant to their inquiry into criminality at News International.

Mr Brooks said a close friend had accidentally left the objects in the car park when he should have dropped them off and that they must have been placed in the bin by a cleaner.

The incident came 24 hours after Ms Brooks, the former News International chief executive, was arrested on suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications and on suspicion of corrupting police officers.

Mr Brooks' spokesman said yesterday that police were planning to hand back the items, although this could not be confirmed by police sources.

[John Dolva]

''The technology firm HCL...'' - doesn't do off-site backups??? or at the very least on-site?? Doesn't sound particularly pro.

Blaming it on ''others'' is ...er... neat.

''Met detectives last week contacted Mr Brooks to demand passwords...'' - what the f, don't they have any IT Forensic Experts on the payroll???

Edited August 1, 2011 by John Dolva

[Douglas Caddy]

Phone-hacking scandal: Stuart Kuttner is latest NoW exec to be arrested

Former managing editor and one-time public face of the News of the World taken into custody

By Amelia Hill

guardian.co.uk,

Tuesday 2 August 2011 14.27 BST

Stuart Kuttner, the public face of the News of the World and its most vocal public defender for 22 years, has been arrested by police investigating allegations of phone hacking and of bribing police officers to leak sensitive information.

As managing editor until his resignation in July 2009, Kuttner was in charge of finances at the now-defunct tabloid.

Kuttner, 71, was described at the time of his resignation by the last editor of the newspaper, Colin Myler, as a man whose "DNA is absolutely integrated into the newspaper which he has represented across the media with vigour".

Kuttner reportedly did not know he was going to be taken into custody when he arrived by appointment at a police station in London on Tuesday at 11am for questioning over the phone-hacking scandal.

Police from both Operation Weeting (the investigation into phone hacking) and Elveden (the investigation into allegations of inappropriate payments to police), are understood to have arrested Kuttner, who is suffering serious health problems and recently returned from treatment in the US.

Kuttner is believed to have been arrested on suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications, contrary to section 1 (1) of the Criminal Law Act 1977, and on suspicion of corruption contrary to section 1 of the Prevention of Corruption Act 1906.

They are the same allegations that Rebekah Brooks, the former News of the World editor and ex-News International chief executive, faces since her arrest last month.

When Brooks faced a Commons culture, media and sport select committee hearing last month she told MPs that payments to private investigators were the responsibility of the paper's managing editor's office.

Brooks admitted using private investigators during her time as editor of the tabloid between 2000 and 2003 for, she claimed, "purely legitimate" purposes.

When asked whether she had ever discussed individual payments to private investigators with Kuttner, she admitted that "payments to private investigators would have gone through the managing editor's office". But, she added: "I can't remember if we ever discussed individual payments."

Kuttner's role as the public face of the News of the World proved to be key to the tabloid under the editors, Rebekah Brooks – then Rebekah Wade – and her replacement, Andy Coulson, both of whom were reluctant to talk to the media.

When Brooks's "Sarah's Law" campaign caused public hysteria in some towns and cities across the UK, prompting some Portsmouth residents to burn the homes of suspected paedophiles, it was Kuttner who faced the cameras.

He also played a role in the paper's dealing with Sara Payne in the years after her eight-year-old daughter, Sarah, was abducted and murdered in July 2000.

The Guardian revealed last week that Payne's mobile phone had been targeted by private investigator Glenn Mulcaire at a time when key members of the newspaper's executive staff were working hard to forge what Payne believed to be a close and genuine friendship. Kuttner was one of those who attended the funerals of her parents.

No reason was given for Kuttner's departure from the newspaper two years ago, shortly before the Guardian exclusive that blew the phone-hacking story wide open.

At the time, News International said he would continue to work on "specialised projects", including its Sarah's Law campaign.

In February 2008, he appeared on Radio 4's Today programme and claimed the News of the World was a "watchdog" which guarded against corruption among those in positions of power.

"If [the use of private investigators] happens, it shouldn't happen," he said.

"It happened once at the News of the World. The reporter was fired; he went to prison. The editor resigned."

He went on to argue that British journalism is "a very honourable profession" and that newspapers such as the News of the World had to act as watchdogs because "we live in an age of corrosion of politics and of public life – degradation".

His role as the public face of the News of the World continued when he visited Soham in 2002, following the disappearance of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, to defend the tabloid's decision to offer a reward of £150,000 in conjunction with the Sun newspaper for information that could lead to their safe return.

He also appeared on the BBC's Breakfast with Frost, responding to criticism of the reward and saying the man leading the investigation into the girls' disappearance, Detective Superintendent David Hankins, had welcomed it.

The managing editor was also an influential presence behind the scenes. When Gordon Brown and Tony Blair gave their first joint newspaper interview for more than 10 years to the tabloid in April 2005, Kuttner's byline was on the story, along with that of Ian Kirby, the paper's long-serving political editor.

The arrest of Kuttner, who was news editor at the London Evening Standard before moving to the NoW in 1987, is the 11th by Operation Weeting police.

After being questioned by police – a process that lasted 12 hours in the case of Brooks – he is expected to be released on bail until October.

Others arrested and bailed have included Brooks, ex-NoW editor Andy Coulson, ex-NoW assistant editor Ian Edmondson, ex-NoW chief reporter Neville Thurlbeck, senior ex-NoW journalist James Weatherup, freelance journalist Terenia Taras, an unnamed 63-year-old man and ex-NoW royal editor Clive Goodman.

Operation Elveden was also involved in Kuttner's arrest. Officers from Elveden are being supervised by the Independent Police Complaints Commission.

[Douglas Caddy]

Jerome Taylor: Gone but not forgotten: how deleted emails can be traced

The Independent

Tuesday, 2 August 2011

Think your email has been wiped when you press the delete button? Well think again. Removing information from a hard drive or server may seem like a simple one-click procedure, but permanently deleting data is all but impossible without military grade software.

We've all read about how police investigators can rebuild a shattered hard drive to convict paedophiles. With the correct software, forensic investigators can sift through broken data and rebuild it, a little like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle.

Even if you mistakenly delete photos from your camera's memory card, you can often get 60 per cent of the pictures back by running the card through over-the- counter recovery software.

Emails are no different. When you send someone a message it will travel through – and be stored on – a whole host of servers, from a sender's hard drive, to a company's server, through various email gateways and then on to the recipient's server and hard drive.

The only way to delete such an email permanently would be to wipe it at each and every one of those steps. If investigators have access to those steps they can start to piece together the gaps.

If large tranches of News International emails have been deleted it will make it harder for police to piece together what was being sent and by whom.

But they should still be able to get access nonetheless.

To wipe a hard drive it is possible to buy military grade deletion software which effectively wipes the slate clean of any trace of the original file. But emails – which bounce from server to server – are much harder to disappear.

[Douglas Caddy]

Poster's note: What is needed is for a "John Dean" to come forward and testify, using first hand inside knowledge, as to the criminal activities of the Murdoch empire. Such an individual may yet appear on the scene.

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Stuart Kuttner's arrest: a statement of intent from a humbled Met

It is impossible to underplay the importance of the managing editor of the News of the World for 22 years

By Dan Sabbagh

guardian.co.uk,

Tuesday 2 August 2011 21.23 BST

Stuart Kuttner's arrest – leading to hours of questioning before he was bailed – demonstrates the determination of the now humbled Metropolitan police to comprehensively investigate the phone-hacking affair. The move against the former veteran managing editor of the News of the World may well come as no great surprise to those following the saga – not least because people who were both above him (former editors Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson) and below him (ex-news editors Ian Edmondson, Neville Thurlbeck and James Weatherup) have all been arrested already.

But it is impossible to underplay the importance of the managing editor of the Sunday tabloid for 22 years; a man whose job it would have been to deal with budgets and any staffing and personnel issues under a succession of editors. His arrest is a clear statement that the Operation Weeting team, led by the deputy assistant commissioner Sue Akers, intend to be thorough.

News International did its best to appear uninterested on Tuesday – with insiders arguing that Kuttner was no more than an "ex-employee" – as the Rupert Murdoch company tries to ruthlessly distance itself from its chequered past. The company also believes that it is now increasingly on top of the ongoing criminal inquiry, in that it is aware of what information has been handed over to the Weeting team.

But that thinking also depends on the notion that there are no other sources of revelations – and it is far from certain how individuals under arrest, or even just pressure, will behave.

A sign of what may be to come can be seen in the conflict between James Murdoch and News of the World's last editor, Colin Myler, and the title's former chief lawyer Tom Crone, none of whom have been arrested.

Anxious to protect their reputation, Myler and Crone accused the junior Murdoch of providing misleading evidence to the culture, media and sport select committee last month.

On Tuesday, the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal looked like it was hitting back, with a page 7 report in its European edition which said that in 2000 the Sunday Mirror was involved in paying a police officer £50 in exchange for information about the arrest of Tim Blackstone, a PR professional, who was the brother of a Labour peer. High up, in the third paragraph of the already prominent report, the Journal noted that the editor of the Sunday Mirror at the time was Myler, who was also pictured in the title.

The stakes for Murdoch, Myler and Crone are considerable, but for those who have been arrested, they are clearly higher still.

News International may hope it can control the outcome now that so many key figures have left the company, but it is far from clear how the police investigation will develop, or where indeed it will ultimately

[Douglas Caddy]

The message that the deletion of News International emails sends out

News International ordered the mass deletion of emails from its servers several times. Is there anything odd about this?

By Charles Arthur

guardian.co.uk,

Tuesday 2 August 2011 16.52 BST

HCL Limited has told the House of Commons home affairs select committee that since May of last year it deleted "hundreds of thousands of emails on a total of nine occasions" from News International's computer servers. It said, though, that it was aware of "nothing which appeared abnormal, untoward or inconsistent with its contractual role". Keith Vaz, the committee chairman, has indicated that he wants to know more about this.

HCL is an India-based IT firm, which manages NI's email system. It doesn't hold or store the NI data; it simply manages the systems, remotely. (It sets out details of its precise responsibilities in the letter to Keith Vaz, the committee chairman.)

What do companies that are hired to oversee 'live emails' do?

Most companies don't need the hassle of managing their email and other computer systems. It's the sort of job that is best done by experts, and the internet means that you don't have to be in the same building – or even continent – as a computer to control it.

That has created a huge business for companies offering "outsourcing" of email and other systems management. You tell them where your systems are, and they will provide an agreed level of service for you, making sure – for example – that your emails don't fill up the storage on the servers, and guaranteeing that any interruption is limited to, say, less than an hour. That function is handled from HCL's headquarters in India, where skilled staff are plentiful but pay is lower than it would be in the UK. HCL helped with in-house support of the email service, which it could do by controlling the systems via the internet.

From time to time, the emails on the "live" system (going back about 15 days) would be copied off to an archive. In the past, such archives would use tape-based systems, but hard drives are cheap and commonly used now. The archiving system was provided by another company, which HCL and NI have not yet named.

Can you really delete emails or do they always survive somewhere?

You can delete emails from the sender's or receiver's machine, but if one of those is outside the organisation that's trying to delete the emails, deleting the "sent" version won't get rid of the "received" version. (It might make it hard to track down, of course.) Inside the organisation, the archiving system means that almost anything more than 15 days old will have been stored somewhere. In addition, newer emails will be copied onto a temporary archive as they travel through the system (either arriving, leaving or travelling through the company): this means that if there is a catastrophic failure of the email server, no work is lost.

Between the 15-day archive backup and the temporary backup, it's almost impossible for an email to vanish forever. For any message, that would require reaching into backups and getting rid of the relevant part of an email conversation – not easy, since modern emails use "threading", which would indicate where part of a conversation had been deleted – or the whole of it. Modern forensic systems can map out email conversations by the thread "headers" and show any gaps or inconsistencies.

So deleting an email forever requires special access to the email system, which would be flagged at a high level by the company managing the systems. Difficult? Very. Impossible? Not completely.

Is it unusual to be asked to delete huge numbers of emails?

HCL cites examples of what it was asked to delete: email "boxes" of users who had left (HCL decided not to as they weren't affecting the system); 200,000 "delivery failure" messages generated by misaddressed emails (these were deleted by someone else); a "public folder" of older emails by a user who "didn't need them" any more; 21,000 outgoing emails that were "stuck" in the email server; deletion of emails when moving from an older version of Microsoft Exchange to a newer one; and so on. Such requests aren't unusual, because large organisations generate and deal with large amounts of email, and things do go wrong with it – which is why you need experts looking after it.

The challenge, though, is spotting when a deletion of something like a public folder is requested because it really isn't needed – and when there's some different motive. But an outsourcing company such as HCL wouldn't be expected to know that. Which may be why it has referred further questions back to NI

[Douglas Caddy]

Tom Watson: 'Phone hacking is only the start. There's a lot more to come out'

The Labour MP has won the admiration of fellow politicians for doggedly investigating the phone-hacking scandal. What has the experience taught him, how has it changed his life – and what revelations are still to come?

By John Harris

guardian.co.uk,

Tuesday 2 August 2011 19.59 BST

A month ago, Tom Watson received word that the Guardian was about to expose the hacking of Milly Dowler's phone by the News of the World. With 72 hours to go, he cleared his diary; a few days later, he was averaging three hours sleep a night, as he and his staff picked through leaked documents, newspaper archives, personal testimony from phone-hacking victims, and more. As the MP who had been obsessively trying to cut through the murk surrounding News International for two years, he well knew that the most dramatic chapter in the two-year phone-hacking saga had arrived – and the imperative now was to work harder than ever.

So how have the last few weeks been? "Sleep-deprived, totally crazy," he says, sitting in his parliamentary office during what seems to be a rare moment of calm. "But also, there's been a great sense of relief. I think I said something to David Cameron about a month before: that there were powerful forces trying to cover this story up. At some points over the last two years, I thought it might blow. But I've also thought that the lid could be welded back on. But when Nick Davies broke the Milly Dowler story, that was the point where I knew they'd never get the lid back on."

And has he been surprised by what's happened since?

"Yeah. I guess two years ago, I felt that all this would probably cost Rebekah Brooks her job. I thought the scale of wrongdoing was so great that somebody on the UK side of the company would have to take responsibility. And I was absolutely convinced that there was a cover-up. But I didn't know that it would all travel abroad. I didn't know it would get to America and Australia, and everywhere that it has." The closure of the News of the World, he says, came as "a genuine shock" to him, but he says that the same applied to News International: "There was a huge consumer boycott, there was going to be no advertising . . . I don't think they had a choice."

Raised in Kidderminster in a family split between communists and passionate Labour supporters, Watson has been the MP for West Bromwich East since 2001. In the eyes of his parliamentary colleagues, he has undoubtedly been one of the heroes of the phone-hacking story – so much so, that when he speaks on the subject in the House of Commons, he is now greeted with a reverential hush. But three or four years ago, his reputation was very different: he was routinely described as a "bruiser", and known as one of a small circle of insiders that linked Gordon Brown's coterie to some of the most powerful elements in the trade unions.

In 2006, he was a junior defence minister, but resigned as part of the so-called "curry-house plot": the attempt at toppling Tony Blair that placed fatal cracks in his premiership, and led to his departure the following year. Six months after Gordon Brown's arrival in Downing Street, Watson became a minister in the cabinet office with a focus on "digital engagement", though this phase of his progress did not last long. In 2009, he was falsely accused of involvement in the infamous plan to set up an unseemly website for anti-Tory political gossip known as "Red Rag", and returned from a trip to Cornwall to find his next-door neighbour upset after the latter's bins had been rooted through. This, he says, was time of "constant anxiety" and "sleepless nights": he considered standing down as an MP, but settled for returning to the backbenches.

In response to the Red Rag accusations, he took legal action against the Sun and the Mail on Sunday. In short order, the Mail on Sunday apologised for the Red Rag story and paid him damages (the Sun soon followed suit), Watson joined the culture, media and sport select committee, and the Guardian broke the first stories about phone hacking at the News of the World running wider than a "rogue reporter", and big pay-offs to victims – all of which fed into a watershed select committee hearing on 21 July 2009.

That day, Watson and his colleagues interviewed four key people: Stuart Kuttner, who had just resigned as managing editor of the News of the World (and who yesterday became the latest NI figure to be arrested as part of Operation Weeting), former editor Andy Coulson (by then Cameron's head of communications), the then News of the World editor Colin Myler, and the company's legal head Tom Crone (who left the company three weeks ago). The latter had tried to have Watson excluded from the hearing on account of his legal action against the Sun, which gave the proceedings an additional charge. Watson's key questions focused on the £700,000 payment NI had made to Gordon Taylor, chief executive of footballers' union the PFA, though by his own admission, he wasn't quite sure what he was doing.

"When Myler and Crone first turned up, my knowledge was novice-level," he says. "I knew about three facts. But what I knew was that in any great scandal, you've got to follow the money. They were hick, amateur questions: I think I opened with: 'When did you tell Rupert Murdoch [about the payment]?' I thought that you might as well start at the top.

"They said: 'Oh no – we didn't tell Rupert Murdoch.' Then it was, 'Well, who did you tell? Who authorised it?' Myler got frustrated me with me, because I came back to this four or five times. He ranted. And don't forget: Crone had already tried to get me off the committee. So at that point, I thought: 'You're rude, you've tried to remove me from this committee, you've put me under extreme pressure for a number of years – there's more to this, and I'm getting to the bottom of it.' "When Myler was so over the top . . . it was like there was a big neon light behind his head, saying, 'Dig here.'"

So began two years of dogged work. In the build-up to last year's general election, the select committee's drive to investigate hacking temporarily faded – but Watson was already talking to hacking victims, dealing with "one killer insider at News International" who was secretly sending him material, and piecing together evidence already in the public domain. At one point, he and his staff went through five years of News of the World back-issues. ("You learn a lot about Kerry Katona," he says.) He was also liaising with his fellow Labour MP – and phone-hacking victim – Chris Bryant, and a small handful of journalists.

There is one fascinating subtext to the whole story: Watson's claim that Brooks has long been driven to damage him, which he says dates back to his move against Blair. "I had one particular chilling conversation in 2006," he says, "when I was told that she would never forgive me for doing what I did to 'her Tony'. When I was made an assistant whip under Brown, the Sun did a story saying it was an outrageous I'd been awarded a job. Whenever I moved, there was a dig. It's painful and it's not easy, but that's the job, and the culture we operated in. It's when it's scaled up that those attack pieces take on a greater significance."

How was it scaled up?

"Well, there was the Red Rag week, where they ran stories for six or seven days, accusing me of lying and worse, on the basis of a story that wasn't true. And then things like . . . people coming back to me, reporting conversations. Bob Ainsworth [then Labour defence secretary] met Brooks for a lunch and said she spent 15 minutes slagging me off before they could talk about defence policy. Those things end up coming back to you."

Of late, there have been reports that she told Labour insiders she would pursue Watson "for the rest of his life" – a story he dates to the Labour party conference of 2006. When the Red Rag story broke, he claims Brooks texted Labour cabinet ministers, demanding that he was sacked.

At one point, he says, a senior editor at the Sun made a point of sending him a message via another Labour MP: "Tell that fat bastard Watson we know about his little planning matter." This, he says, was a reference to his application to put a conservatory on his family home in the Midlands: a typical "non-newsy, low-level thing" that played its part in making him "start to think like a conspiracy theorist".

From a credible source, he has just discovered that in 2009, all of this turned completely pantomimic. "There were always people outside my flat, and I felt pursued," he says. "But then last Thursday, the home affairs correspondent of the BBC told me they had a story that they [the News of the World] hired private investigators to follow me around Labour party conference in 2009, when we were right in the middle of the first select committee enquiry.

"I laughed at that, because they'd have basically followed me around drinking Guinness with a load of fat blokes. If you're an ex-minister, it's a bit of a holiday. It wouldn't have been very productive. But in all seriousness, at that point the pressure was immense. There were little conversations with people: 'We've had News International on the phone, how aggressive are you going to be on this committee? What are you going to ask?'"

Who was asking that?

"People who worked at No 10. People I'd worked with before. In conversations, these things were dropped in."

On 10 July, his old friends at the Mail on Sunday ran a story claiming that Tony Blair had urged Brown to get him to back off News International. How much truth does he think there is in that?

"Er . . . They've both denied it. But if Rupert Murdoch were to phone Blair to ask him to get me to back off, it wouldn't surprise me. They're very close."

What does that mean? That he may well have done?

"Well, he's denied it. Two or three people in the party have told me that happened, but I can't stand it up."

Two weeks ago, Watson played his part in the select committee's questioning of James Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch and Brooks, which was followed by Myler and Crone's claim that a crucial part of James Murdoch's evidence had been "mistaken". Watson pushed for him to be issued with an immediate summons to return and give evidence, but was outvoted: the committee has now written to James Murdoch seeking further explanation, and its chairman, the Tory MP John Whittingdale, says it's "very likely" that he will eventually be recalled in person. Meanwhile, the story about the targeting of Sara Payne has broken ("I didn't think it could get any lower, and it has," he tells me), there are regular stories about the Metropolitan police (their reputation, says Watson, is "in tatters") and new information about the deletion of thousands of News International emails. So how much more is there to come?

"I think we're probably only about halfway through the number of revelations. I'm pretty certain there will be quite detailed stuff on other uses of covert surveillance. I suspect that emails will be the next scandal. And devices that track people moving around. That's just starting to come out."

Does he expect confirmation of the targeting of 9/11 victims?

"I don't know that. I want the prime minister to put pressure on as far as that's concerned, because it's internationally significant. What we know from the evidence we took in 2009 is that Glenn Mulcaire worked exclusively for the News of the World from 2001. He was on a £10,000-a-month contract. So if he was prepared to hack Milly Dowler's phone . . . you know . . . it's entirely conceivable that he would have been told to hack the phones of victims, and families of victims, of 9/11. What we need is certainty, so people can move on from there."

What other things will become public?

"People who aren't household names, but who are associated with people who have been the victims of high-profile crimes . . . I think there's a lot more of them to come out. Ordinary people whose lives have been turned inside out."

Ten days ago, Watson said he had seen no evidence that implicated any newspaper group other than News International in phone hacking – since when, there has been news of prospective cases against Trinity Mirror, the publisher of titles including the Sunday Mirror – and the barrage of accusation and denial surrounding Piers Morgan. A copy of Morgan's diaries, I notice, is sitting on the coffee table in front of us.

"I'm doing my research now," he says. "There are a lot of people on Twitter who are raising different points of fact with me. The good that I want to come from this is the industry recognising that it's got to reform and change. Everyone's got to play their role in that. And that probably requires other media groups, if there was wrongdoing, to get it out there and be honest about it."

Hanging over just about everything we talk about is a slightly awkward implied presence: the politician Watson used to be, a man happy enough to play his part in New Labour's often moronic dances with the Murdoch press, and issue shrill messages either aimed at, or inspired by, the red-tops. Not for the first time, he says he's "totally ashamed" about an occasion in 2001 when he called for Kate Adie to be sacked by the BBC after she was alleged to have revealed the details of a trip by Blair to Middle East: his quote was given at the behest of Downing Street and used for a characteristic BBC-bashing splash in the Sun.

He acknowledges the Blair and Brown governments' neurotic focus on "media management", and their cynical fondness for dishing out "populist messages to the newspapers". On the latter count, he again has form: in 2004, he ran Labour's infamous by-election campaign in the Birmingham seat of Hodge Hill, among whose choicest messages was: "Labour is on your side – the Lib Dems are on the side of failed asylum seekers."

That sounds, I tell him, like the kind of rhetoric that Labour copied from the tabloids. "It's not a great line," he says. "I don't think I'd write that again." By way of underlining another kind of repentance, he reminds me that though he voted for the Iraq war in 2003, he recently abstained when it came to the UK intervention in Libya, "because I'd never again vote for a war on the promise of a prime minister."

So, he has changed. "I have changed. This has been a profoundly life-changing event for me, in many ways. It's certainly changed my politics. When I was first elected, I was a completely naive and gauche politician. You look at the pillars of the state: politics, the media, police, lawyers – they've all got their formal role, and then nestling above that is that power elite who are networked in through soft, social links, that are actually running the show. Why didn't I know that 10 years ago, and why didn't I rail against it? Why did I become part of it? I was 34. I'm 44 now. I was naive. But I'll never let that happen again

[Douglas Caddy]

Latest Arrest Highlights a Tabloid’s Cash Payments

The New York Times

By JO BECKER and RAVI SOMAIYA

August 3, 2011

LONDON — On the ground floor of the sprawling office complex that was, until recently, the home of The News of the World, a bespectacled clerk sat at a counter behind a reinforced glass cashier’s window. When reporters needed cash to pursue articles, they simply filled out a green form and, after getting authorization from the managing editor, exchanged it at the window for up to tens of thousands of pounds, said several journalists who worked there.

As the police on Tuesday arrested the former managing editor, Stuart Kuttner, on suspicion of conspiring to hack cellphones and pay police officers, that cash payment system has become the focus of inquiries by Scotland Yard and by News International, which owned the tabloid until it closed in July.

Mr. Kuttner, who is the 11th former News of the World employee arrested in the scandal surrounding the tabloid, personally authorized cash expenses until his retirement two years ago in his role as managing editor, said multiple current and former company employees, who, like most people interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the continuing police investigations and to avoid jeopardizing their ties with the company. Mr. Kuttner did not respond to requests for comment.

A person familiar with the company’s internal investigation said the regular infusions of cash, usually also authorized by newsroom editors as well as Mr. Kuttner, contributed to the newsroom’s “wild West” atmosphere. The funds were used as advances on expenses and also to pay sources for articles, said the former journalists. So far a search by the company of the cash records has found more than $200,000 in payments to police officers from The News of the World, according to two people with knowledge of the documents.

The investigation of payoffs to the police is one part of what has become a three-pronged inquiry that began by focusing on the hacking of cellphone voice messages and has also expanded to the hacking of e-mails.

An official at News International, a British subsidiary of the News Corporation, said the records of cash payment went back as far as 2002, covering the editorships of Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks, both of whom were arrested in recent weeks. The News International internal review has been expanded to examine both cash payments and the use of private investigators at the company’s other British newspapers, which include The Sun, The Times of London and The Sunday Times, the official familiar with the News Corporation inquiry said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

A press officer for News International said the police agreed to allow the company to retain possession of the records while it conducted the first examination of them. The company said it could not hand the evidence directly to police without ensuring that journalistic sources, and legally privileged documents, were protected.

That arrangement drew criticism from a former senior Scotland Yard official, who was not involved in the hacking inquiry. “On the day News Corp. announced it was shutting down the newspaper, what I would have done is gotten a warrant, raided the premises and taken everything so that I could have looked at it myself,” the former official said.

Scotland Yard declined to comment because investigations were still under way.

Mr. Kuttner, 71, who worked at the tabloid for 22 years, is known to have kept meticulous written records. Former reporters describe him as a penny pincher, prone to calling journalists to demand justification for expenses. Reporters had to give details about whom the cash was intended for, and the nature of the article. “He didn’t see it as Rupert’s money you were spending,” said one, referring to the tabloid’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, “he saw it as Stuart’s money.”

In a 2003 e-mail exchange that has partly formed the basis for the investigation into police payments, the newspaper’s royal reporter complained about a management push, spearheaded by Mr. Kuttner, to cut back on payments to sources. The reporter, Clive Goodman, told Mr. Coulson, the top editor at the time, that he needed to pay his contacts in the Scotland Yard unit that protects the royal family. Mr. Goodman pleaded guilty to phone hacking in 2006 and was jailed. He was recently rearrested on suspicion of making payments to the police.

In the years after Mr. Goodman’s initial arrest, and as the newspaper moved to a new building, the payments system changed, said two former journalists. Small payments were doled out from a safe in a senior editor’s office, the journalists said. Larger amounts of money, if needed, were brought from banks, said a senior News International official.

The company is also reviewing its own records at the request of the police, in an effort to uncover hacking and other potentially illegal practices.

Also Tuesday, a London court imposed a six-week jail term on a 26-year-old man who threw a paper plate of foam at Mr. Murdoch two weeks ago during a parliamentary hearing. The lawyer for the man, Jonathan May-Bowles, a stand-up comic known as Jonnie Marbles, said the court had been told that Mr. Murdoch had not wanted charges to be brought. But the district judge said the comic had aimed to disrupt a parliamentary hearing that was of “huge importance.”

John F. Burns contributed reporting.

[Douglas Caddy]

Heather Mills claims Mirror Group journalist admitted hacking her phone

Former model told BBC's Newsnight that in 2001 journalist admitted listening to message following row with Paul McCartney

By James Robinson

guardian.co.uk,

Wednesday 3 August 2011 18.44 BST

Heather Mills on Wednesday claimed a journalist from the Mirror Group admitted to her that he had obtained a story about her and her former husband Sir Paul McCartney by hacking into her mobile phone messages.

The former model told the BBC's Newsnight that the unidentified journalist called her in 2001, following a row with the ex-Beatle, who was then her boyfriend, and quoted parts of a message McCartney had left on her voicemail after she had travelled to India.

According to Ms Mills, the journalist rang her and "started quoting verbatim the messages from my machine".

Ms Mills said she challenged the journalist, saying: "You've obviously hacked my phone and if you do anything with this story ... I'll go to the police."

She said the individual responded: "OK, OK, yeah we did hear it on your voice messages, I won't run it."

Nancy Dell'Olio, the ex-partner of former England manager Sven Göran Eriksson also told Newsnight that she believes the Mirror hacked their voicemails.

"There were strange coincidences that made me to believe it absolutely," Dell'Olio said. "How they could get hold of some information? I do know that in some particular circumstances the only person who knew was me and my ex-partner so it was absolutely unbelievably strange how they could get hold of such information."

The interviews were recorded for Wednesday's programme.

The Mills accusation will place the spotlight back on the Mirror's publisher, Trinity Mirror, and the paper's editor at the time, Piers Morgan. Mills told the BBC it was not Morgan who called her, but the corporation has chosen not to identify the journalist.

Morgan, who now hosts a chat show for CNN, has consistently denied hacking into phones, having any knowledge about hacking at the title, or running stories obtained by using the method.

A spokesman for Trinity Mirror said: "Trinity Mirror's position is clear: all our journalists work within the criminal law and the PCC code of conduct".

Morgan wrote a column in the Mail on Sunday in 2006 in which he described being played a message that had been left by McCartney for Mills.

"It was heartbreaking," Morgan wrote. "The couple had clearly had a tiff, Heather had fled to India, and Paul was pleading with her to come back. He sounded lonely, miserable and desperate, and even sang 'We Can Work it Out' into the answer phone."

Mills was the subject of intense tabloid interest before, during and after her marriage from the former Beatle.

She is considering launching legal action against the News of the World after the Metropolitan police confirmed to her earlier this year that her mobile-phone number and other details had been found in notebooks belonging to Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator who worked for the News of the World.

Morgan wrote in his published diary, The Insider, that following a personal request from McCartney he had pulled a story about Mills and McCartney arguing in 2001 over Mills's decision to go to India to help the victims of an earthquake.

Newsnight also claims it has established that other celebrities, including Ulrika Jonsson, beleive their phones were hacked by the Daily Mirror or its Sunday sister title the Sunday Mirror.

[Douglas Caddy]

Phone hacking: Piers Morgan has questions to answer, says Harman

Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman says former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan needs to answer the phone-hacking allegations by Heather Mills

By James Robinson

guardian.co.uk,

Thursday 4 August 2011 10.44 BST

Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman said on Thursday that former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan "has got to answer" questions about phone hacking at the paper during the period he was editor.

Harman told Sky News: "Morgan … said he heard a 'heart-breaking' phone message, which clearly gives rise to the assumption that he'd heard a tape-recorded message."

Morgan wrote in the Mail on Sunday five years ago that he had once been played a message left by Sir Paul McCartney on the mobile phone of his then-girlfriend Heather Mills, in which the former Beatle sounded "lonely, miserable and desperate".

Harman said: "It is not good enough for him to say – or for someone to say on his behalf – 'I always complied with the law and the Press Complaints Commission code of conduct'. He's got to answer now we've got these allegations from Heather Mills."

Mills claimed on Wednesday that a senior journalist at one of the Mirror Group titles told her in 2001 they had hacked into her mobile phone messages.

She told the BBC the unidentified journalist read out parts of a message left for her by her then-boyfriend Sir Paul McCartney and, when challenged, admitted it had been obtained by listening to her phone messages.

The reporter in question is not thought to have worked for the Daily Mirror, which was edited by Morgan from 1995 to 2004. Its parent company, Trinity Mirror, also owns two other national titles, the Sunday Mirror and the People.

In a 2006 Mail on Sunday article, Morgan seems to be referring to a similar phone message to the one Mills claimed had been hacked by the senior Mirror Group journalist.

Mills said the message read out to her had been left by McCartney while she was in India, following a row the couple had back in London.

According to Mills, the journalist rang her and "started quoting verbatim the messages from my machine".

She said she challenged the journalist, saying: "You've obviously hacked my phone and if you do anything with this story … I'll go to the police."

Mills said he responded: "OK, OK, yeah, we did hear it on your voice messages, I won't run it."

Trinity Mirror said: "Trinity Mirror's position is clear: all our journalists work within the criminal law and the PCC code of conduct."

Morgan issued a statement through CNN, for whom he records a chat show, Tonight with Piers Morgan, late on Wednesday reiterating he had no knowledge of phone hacking at the Mirror.

He added: "Heather Mills has made unsubstantiated claims about a conversation she may or may not have had with a senior executive from a Trinity Mirror newspaper in 2001. The BBC has confirmed to me that this executive was not employed by the Daily Mirror.

"I have no knowledge of any conversation any executive from other newspapers at Trinity Mirror may or may not have had with Heather Mills.

"What I can say and have knowledge of is that Sir Paul McCartney asserted that Heather Mills illegally intercepted his telephones, and leaked confidential material to the media. This is well documented, and was stated in their divorce case."

[Douglas Caddy]

FBI widens News Corp inquiry after alleged computer hacking by subsidiary

US authorities reportedly looking into 'larger pattern of behaviour' by Murdoch companies following claims of strong-arm tactics

By Ed Pilkington in New York

guardian.co.uk,

Thursday 4 August 2011 20.41 BST

The FBI is widening its investigation of News Corporation's activities within the US to look at whether alleged computer hacking by one of its subsidiaries was an isolated case or part of a "larger pattern of behaviour", Time magazine is reporting.

Time suggests that the FBI inquiry has been extended from a relatively narrow look at alleged malpractices by News Corp in America into a more general investigation of whether the company used possibly illegal strong-arm tactics to browbeat rival firms.

The allegation of computer hacking was made by the retail advertising company Floorgraphics against the advertising branch of News Corp, News America. In a civil lawsuit against News Corp in 2004, Floorgraphics told a court that its website, protected by password security, had been breached 11 times over four months without authorisation.

The source of the alleged hacking was traced back to an IP address registered to News America in Connecticut.

Time has obtained a copy of a confidential fax sent in the same year by a major investor in Floorgraphics to News Corp's chief financial officer, David DeVoe. William Berkley wrote: "We have just discovered evidence that our proprietary and password-protected computer files … has been breached by News America."

Berkley accuses the News Corp subsidiary of carrying out "some sort of corporate espionage" to obtain the password.

The CEO of News America was later promoted to be the publisher of the Murdoch newspaper the New York Post.

A spokeswoman for News Corp told Time that this was the only incidence of computer hacking that had been brought to the company's attention, and said News America had condemned the act as a violation of its standards.

[Douglas Caddy]

Trinity Mirror: Remember what happened to Murdoch

The owner of the Mirror titles is close to taking an unresponsive approach to phone hacking reminiscent of Murdoch

By Dan Sabbagh

guardian.co.uk,

Thursday 4 August 2011 21.24 BST

It may not be owned by Rupert Murdoch, but Trinity Mirror, owner of the Mirror titles, is perilously close to taking an unresponsive approach reminiscent of Murdoch's Wapping as it contends with vague allegations of phone hacking swirling around its stable of titles.

On the face of it, the accusations are limited. There is an allegation from Heather Mills that a journalist admitted her phone had been hacked, a sense of suspicion from Nancy Dell'Olio, and the same set of remarks made by Piers Morgan to the Daily Mail and Desert Island Discs. There are not – as in the case of Glenn Mulcaire, the News of the World's private investigator – 11,000 pages of notes about hacking held by the police.

Mirror journalists past and present feel considerable frustration over how the story has acquired momentum. Some argue that Mills has not always been a reliable source in the past – although there is no evidence to disprove her account on this occasion – while others point out that the most cited pieces of evidence seem to consist of statements made by Morgan himself, who would be unlikely to admit his own guilt.

Trinity Mirror's official response has been muted. Last month it announced an internal review into phone hacking, led by Paul Vickers, the company's legal director. But he is focusing only on current practices at the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and People, and the company has been careful to describe his work as "review rather than an investigation".

Now, as the likes of Mills make their allegations, Trinity Mirror has little more to say. It has repeatedly described claims made by her, and former journalist James Hipwell, as "unsubstantiated" and said its reporters "work within the criminal law and the PCC code of conduct". There is no sense that the company is prepared to conduct a backwards looking review – which is risky, because there always remains the possibility that, as News International found out, new, more clearcut evidence could emerge.

It has been known for some weeks that the Mirror Group used Southern Investigations, the firm headed by Jonathan Rees, who was jailed in 2000 for conspiring to plant cocaine on an innocent person. Rees, who was involved in the hacking of phones and the blagging of bank account details, may not have worked for the Mirror newspapers since then but his firm was used 230 times between October 1997 and September 1999.

Trinity Mirror may, at the very least, want to investigate that period of its newspapers' history

[Douglas Caddy]

Alex Salmond accused of pandering to Rupert Murdoch

Scottish first minister has met with media mogul or his News International executives 25 times since taking officeBy Severin Carrell, Scotland correspondent

guardian.co.uk,

Thursday 4 August 2011 22.44 BST

Alex Salmond has been accused of trying to "seduce" Rupert Murdoch and News International after it emerged that he offered the media baron a series of gifts and has met him or his executives 25 times since becoming Scotland's first minister.

Labour's Scottish leader, Iain Gray, said Salmond was guilty of "highly questionable behaviour", adding: "What is now clear is Alex Salmond has waged a four-year campaign since he became first minister to seduce Rupert Murdoch and News International, which has included gifts.

"It has been a top priority and he has spent more of his media time in the last year with News International than any other party leader in Britain."

In the latest set of ministerial disclosures in the News of the World hacking scandal, the Scottish government revealed that Salmond had met or spoken to Murdoch senior four times and his son James once since becoming first minister. The latest meeting with Murdoch senior was in June in London, shortly before the hacking scandal erupted.

Salmond's officials insisted the latest contacts with the Murdochs, including a private meeting with James Murdoch in London in January, were "perfectly proper and reasonable". They discussed BSkyB's investments in Scotland, where it employs 6,000 people and is one of Scotland's largest private employers.

Salmond's spokesmen did not deny that the first minister also discussed the significant political support for the SNP from the Sun and News of the World's Scottish editions in the run up to Salmond's landslide victory in the Holyrood elections in May. The titles are now Scotland's highest-selling papers.

Among 25 meetings with NI and News Corp executives since June 2007, Salmond met editors and executives from the Sun, NoW, the Times, the Sunday Times and Sky, including Rebekah Brooks in 2008when she was editor of the Sun. The frequency of those meetings increased sharply this year, before the Sun and NoW announced they were backing the SNP in March.

Pressed several times on whether the tabloids' editorial backing for the SNP was discussed at either meeting with the Murdochs, Salmond's spokesman said: "All I can say is, not to my knowledge."

He insisted that Salmond's lobbying of the Murdochs was to press for increasing BSkyB investment and jobs, and to highlight his government's transport investments. This year the broadcaster has added a further 150 jobs in Scotland.

He said Salmond had begun lobbying the Murdochs in 2007 even though the Sun had published a noose on its front page in an attack on the SNP before the 2007 Scottish elections. "I would say he has been really assiduous in doing his job as first minister," Salmond's spokesman said.

There is no allegation of any undue influence involving the Scottish government, Nnews International and the police in Scotland in the hacking scandal or any other criminal investigation.

Labour accusations about the increasingly close links between Salmond and NI came after the Scottish government published 17 pages of correspondence between the first minister, the Murdochs and other NI executives, including Les Hinton, who resigned from News Corp last month.

After referring to Salmond's previous role as a horse racing tipster for the News of the World when Brooks was editor, Gray said: "SNP claims that these meetings were to promote Scotland are laughable as it is clear they were all about promoting Alex Salmond and the SNP."

The Liberal Democrats also went on the offensive. Willie Rennie, the Scottish party leader, said: "The blatant sycophantic behaviour laid out for all to see should make the first minister squirm. The crucial letter following the meeting in January does not contain one mention of Alex Salmond quizzing James Murdoch about phone hacking."

The four-page list of Salmond's meetings with other media executives show he met Richard Desmond, owner of the SNP-supporting Express newspapers, three times, Alexander Lebedev once and Michael Johnston, of the Scotsman, once.

The correspondence shows that Murdoch and Salmond began exchanging gifts in October 2007 after the News Corporation chairman met Salmond in New York and accepted his invitation to join the Scottish government's "Globalscots" network, an "elite sales force" of 900 business people with Scottish connections.

Murdoch responded by sending Salmond a book, and made the first minister guest of honour at the opening of a new NI printing plant near Glasgow. Salmond reciprocated by offering Murdoch tickets to see Black Watch, a Scottish theatre production in New York about the Iraq war, and meet the cast. He said Murdoch could "attend incognito" if he wished.

Murdoch was offered tickets to a Ryder Cup golf tournament in Kentucky by Salmond in September 2008. In October and December 2008, Salmond twice invited Murdoch to be his "special guest" at events to celebrate the year of Homecoming in 2009, and sent him a DVD narrated by Sir Sean Connery.

In February 2009, the first minister repeated his guest of honour offer and also lobbied Murdoch directly with an offer to give Sky the exclusive broadcasting rights to a pageant launching the year of Homecoming. In March 2009, Murdoch replied: "I can't promise to be there but I am trying." Murdoch promised to pass on Salmond's broadcasting offer to Sky.

In April 2009, the then Scottish Sun editor David Dinsmore thanked Salmond for helping to raise £27,000 at a charity lunch, and offered him a golfing trip. In February 2010, Dinsmore offered Salmond and his wife Moira tickets to see Scottish Opera in Glasgow.

In April 2011, two weeks before the Scottish election, Salmond appeared as the sole party leader at a NI-organised "political breakfast" in Edinburgh. On 9 May 2011, Dinsmore, now NI's general manager in Scotland, congratulated Salmond on his "quite astonishing" election victory. Sun executives in Scotland then treated Salmond to a curry dinner after the election.

Dinsmore wrote: "I look forward to News International playing its part in helping to make the country a place where outward looking, forward thinking and risk taking are the norm. You have been given great power – I wish you wisdom, strength – and patience – in wielding it."

[Douglas Caddy]

Elisabeth Murdoch opts not to join board of News Corporation

Statement from conglomerate says she suggested it would be 'inappropriate' for her to join board of father's company

By Damien Pearse

The Guardian,

Saturday 6 August 2011

Elisabeth Murdoch will not be joining the board of her father Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation conglomerate, despite expectations that she would do so.

The company said in a statement that she had suggested to its directors it would be "inappropriate" for her to make the move. She had been expected to join the board after News Corp bought Shine Group, the television production company she runs, in a deal worth £415m.

Viet Dinh, chairman of the nominating and corporate governance committee of the News Corporation board of directors, said: "Elisabeth Murdoch suggested to the independent directors some weeks ago that she felt it would be inappropriate to include her nomination to the board of News Corp at this year's AGM, as had been announced by chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch at the time of the acquisition of Shine Group earlier this year.

"The independent directors agreed that the previously planned nomination should be delayed. Both Elisabeth and the board hope this decision reaffirms that News Corp aspires to the highest standards of corporate governance and will continue to act in the best interests of all stakeholders, be they shareholders, employees or the billions of consumers who News Corp content informs, entertains and sometimes provokes every year."

Murdoch founded Shine, which has produced shows such as The Tudors, Ashes to Ashes and Masterchef, a decade ago, and built it into a powerhouse in the British independent television sector and a transatlantic business. Other popular programmes for the group include Merlin, and Spooks.

It is understood Murdoch, who owned a 53% stake in the company, with Sony holding 20% and BSkyB a further 13%, made £153m after completing the sale to News Corp. She is is married to the public relations executive Matthew Freud.

Reports have suggested that some shareholders believe the 16-member board of News Corp is too beholden to Rupert Murdoch. The Murdoch family controls nearly 40% of the company's voting shares through a family trust, and Murdoch's sons James, 38, and Lachlan, 39, already sit alongside him on the board.

In February, after announcing News Corp's plans to buy Shine, Rupert Murdoch said: "Shine has an outstanding creative team that has built a significant independent production company in major markets in very few years, and I look forward to them becoming an important part of our varied and large content creation activities. I expect Liz Murdoch to join the board of News Corporation on completion of this transaction."