Monday, December 22, 2014 

Sony Pictures! Fuck yeah!

There's something for absolutely everyone in the on-going Sony Pictures hacking saga.  Everyone really meaning everyone, as anyone with even the tiniest bit invested in the entire clusterfuck, with the possible exception of President Obama, has ended up looking the worst kind of self-absorbed hypocritical tool.

Congratulations must go first and foremost to Sony Pictures themselves, for oh so many reasons.  We can start with commissioning The Interview to begin with, merely the latest attempt by Seth Rogen to convince the entire world he's even less talented than James Corden.  Many people have pointed out that Kim Jong-un is just about the only real life national leader a Hollywood studio could get away with depicting the assassination of, as they certainly wouldn't dare to do the same to Xi Jingping of China, not least when it's an emerging market and any criticism of the country is most certainly now off limits, and when it comes to say, Iran, they have to be slightly more subtle about it, as we saw with Argo.  Not so subtle that when it came to handing the Oscar over, it was Michelle Obama doing it mind.

Up next has to be Sony's lamentable security in general.  This isn't the first time it's been found wanting: LulzSec first gained access to personal data from Sony Pictures via a SQL injection attack back in 2011, only a couple of months after the Playstation Network had been taken offline for a month following the stealing of data from the near 77 million accounts made on there.  Quite how the "Guardians of Peace" gained access to so much of Sony Pictures' data isn't yet clear, although suspicion is they were given help from within.  Whatever the case, you certainly wouldn't bet against Sony falling victim again.

Then we have the withdrawal of the film itself.  There are some caveats here: despite the chains now claiming they merely wanted the release delayed until it became clear how serious the threat from GoP was, it would only have taken one idiot to do something vaguely menacing at a screening for the lawsuits to start flying.  Delaying the release indefinitely would also have sparked the same hyperbolic reaction as we've seen, as though not immediately releasing a turkey of a comedy is somehow akin to 30s appeasement.  This said, and even bearing in mind how the past year has been one long episode of people saying things and then hastily withdrawing them and/or apologising after others have declared themselves offended, Sony must have known there was no realistic threat.  North Korea being one and the same as the Guardians of Peace or otherwise, neither is about to fly a hijacked airliner into a cinema showing the film.  I'm not one to start crying about censorship or giving in to dictators or "cyberterrorism" over a Seth Rogen vehicle, but plenty will, and indeed have.

Which brings us to the luvvies themselves.  If like me you'd prefer celebrities to be seen and not heard, or for that matter not seen either, nothing is more likely to get them spouting forth than first their extremely private emails to studio executives getting leaked, followed by their unreleased films (for which also see Madonna) and then finally a studio withholding a film mocking the easiest target in the entire world.  Still, if the likes of Rogen, Brad Pitt and Aaron Sorkin hadn't spoken up there wouldn't have been the delightful sight of celebs condemning a free press for reporting on information in the public domain, something that just slightly undermines the whole horrified reaction to Sony then withdrawing the film.  Not that reporting on the information dumped by GoP doesn't raise ethical issues: after all, the very same organisations that professed themselves shocked and outraged anyone would so much as look at the images and video leaked during the "fappening" (while telling everyone precisely where to find them, natch) didn't have the slightest qualms about spreading the news of Angelina Jolie being described as a spoilt brat and Sony executives telling hilarious racially flavoured gags about President Obama's favourite movies.  That North Korea could be ultimately responsible for the leaks seized upon just adds to the amusement.

Finally, there is the "cyberterrorism" aspect.  Cyberwarfare ranks only slightly behind anti-terrorism itself in the bullshit stakes.  Cyberespionage is a problem, yes, as proved by just how many designs the Chinese have ripped off in recent times, yet when it comes to actual direct threat to lives there simply isn't one.  As every single domestic appliance starts connecting to the internet for God knows what reason there might be, but those times aren't here quite yet.  This hasn't though stopped the usual suspects from shrieking about the Sony hack being an act of war, before even the slightest evidence has been produced to prove this really is the work of North Korea rather than just those with a certain amount of sympathy for the hermit kingdom.  Real state sponsored hacks in the past have been to steal things worth having, or to send a message directly to a country, if we take the Estonia attack for example as being the work of the Russian state, or say the Stuxnet worm.  As embarrassing as this whole incident has been for Sony, not to mention costly, no one could have seriously expected them to decide to pull the film entirely.  Credit must go to Obama for describing the attack as cybervandalism rather than jumping on the bandwagon, even if discussions are taking place about putting North Korea back on the state sponsors of terrorism list.

North Korea then.  Villain of choice for Hollywood film-makers who don't want to make their antagonists just generic terrorists, for which see Die Another Day, the remake of Red Dawn (the invaders were meant to be Chinese only for the studio to decide to make them North Korean in post-production) and Olympus Has Fallen.  Strangely, the latter two make the country seem threatening when it most assuredly isn't, at least to the wider world, as both South Korea and Japan have legitimate reasons to worry about the stability and sanity of those in charge.  The reason the country has made such an issue out of The Interview and didn't about say Team America is fairly obvious: Kim Jong-un is still consolidating his power and ranting about this outrageous American insult, or even doing something about it makes clear he is not to be crossed or underestimated.  It certainly isn't, as some have ludicrously suggested, that such a film could through the power of mocking alone help conjure up opposition to his rule.  If that was the concern, Team America would have received more of a response, although frankly Kim Jong-il's being "so ronery" is the best part of the entire, very flawed thing.

Directly responsible or not, Jong-un's point has been made.  As for the rest, they've responded in the only way they know how: by making it about themselves.

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12/22/2014 11:59:00 pm | |

Thursday, October 09, 2014 

Perpetuating abuse?

And there is no point saying this again / There is no point saying this again / But I forgive you, I forgive you / Always I do forgive you

There comes a time in every man's life where he has to sit down and ask himself: am I a rapist?  Not am I a potential rapist, as in the age old formulation not all men are rapists, but all rapists are men, like you know, the just as accurate not all Muslims are terrorists but all terrorists are Muslims.  No, have I without realising it committed hundreds, possibly thousands of sex crimes?

Horrified as I am to admit, it seems to be the case.  According to Jennifer Lawrence, by so much as looking at her stolen naked self-shots I have perpetuated a sexual offence.  I don't know her, she certainly doesn't know me, and yet without her knowledge I have violated her.  Nor is this limited just to Lawrence.  I have raped dozens of other celebrities, and by extension hundreds if not thousands of ordinary women and men.  Some may well have consented to or even been paid to appear in the images and videos I've seen of them, but what if they later regretted it, they were doing it only to feed a habit, or were even coerced, as some have said they were?

But even this doesn't begin to scratch the surface of my depravity.  Should I find someone attractive while going about my everyday life, there is no way for them to consent to what might be going through my mind.  Of course, all the liaisons in my head are consensual, and I don't imagine having sex with every attractive woman I see, but they can't know what I'm thinking and so therefore can't tell me to stop.  Just how many people is it I've abused?  Did the Bible have it right in suggesting you merely have to look at a married woman in a lustful way to have committed adultery?

We have been, to drop the pretence, thrust right back into the old and increasingly hoary question of complicity.  Despite its decrepitude, it still bears examining and in politics if nothing else it remains a vital one.  Just this week the Sun has been urging those of faiths and none to come together to condemn Islamic State, with the usual edge of steel just beneath the surface as there always is.  "Their imams must ceaselessly condemn IS", the paper intones, with the use of "their" perhaps a bit of a giveaway.  There's also more than a certain irony in the recycling of the "not in my name" slogan some took up during the protests against the Iraq war of 11 years ago, this time with even less meaning than the last.  More pertinent questions could be asked concerning how government policy encouraged the growth of IS in the first place, but first Muslims ought to deny responsibility for something they have no control over.

Have us ordinary mortals transgressed then for merely looking at Lawrence and the other celebrities as they only wanted themselves or partners to see them?  Quite simply, no.  I say this despite pretty much agreeing with Lawrence on every other point she made in the interview with Vanity Fair.  She doesn't have a thing to apologise for, and the people who broke into her iCloud or however they obtained the images quite possibly are detached from humanity.  This was beyond mere "revenge porn", where an embittered ex releases images shared with them in confidence; it was targeted and criminal.  All the same, when there's nothing you can do to get the images taken down, not least when they existed in the "cloud" in the first place, looking for yourself does not perpetuate the offence.  The abuse has already occurred; you can't make things any worse unless you join in by attempting to profit from the crime.  Watching something that has already occurred does not make you complicit in it; as previously argued, it's only when it goes beyond the looking for the unusual into something darker, to the point where you're changed by it that we need to start worrying.

I don't recall for instance anyone having a problem with Caitlin Moran relating how she felt after watching the leaked video of the "Dnepropetrovsk maniacs" murdering Sergei Yatzenko.  It probably encouraged more than a few other people to go and watch it, just as it was a passing craze to show the infamous "2 girls 1 cup" clip to someone unsuspecting and film their reaction.  Few pointed out the women in the video most likely earned a relative pittance, at least by American porn standards for their performance, nor worried about how it becoming a minor phenomenon could have affected them personally.  Ex-porn actors in the US have come under pressure to quit positions they've merely volunteered for, so you can only ponder how difficult it could have made life in Brazil for the women.  As a porn producer related in the Graun just this week, there are still those who might shoot perhaps one scene without realising that once it's online it's next to impossible to remove, even if the producer themselves acquiesces to their request to take it down.  The internet, if you want it to be, is a test of morals in itself.

The question to ask is where such a standpoint leads, and then there's the paradox within it, as Lawrence hints at.  You can't properly comment on something without seeing it, unless that is you're Mary Whitehouse or a politician.  At the same time, to look is to perpetuate the abuse.  Presumably the Vanity Fair interviewer had seen them prior to conducting the interview, and if Jessica Valenti hasn't also I'd be extremely surprised.

To give Lawrence the last word, in the interview she expresses disappointment rather than anger at how those she knows and loves had also looked at the pictures, which gives a better indication of how our minds work than anything else.  When even those closest to her, the most likely to empathise with her plight couldn't resist temptation, what chance the rest of us?

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10/09/2014 10:08:00 pm | |

Wednesday, September 03, 2014 

Of walking abortion.

(Excuse the lack of source links in this post, for apparent reasons.  You without a doubt know the sites I'm talking about anyway.)

Loser / liar / fake or phoney, no one cares / everyone is guilty / fucked up, dunno why, you poor little boy

Do you really need me to point out the almost myriad hypocrisies, ironies and contradictions involved in the new and old media coverage of the leaked celebrity pictures, or "the fappening", as it was quickly christened (please don't ask me to explain what fapping is, as if you either don't know or can't guess we'll all be better off in the long run)?  Probably not.  The most obvious, as this blog is nothing if not obvious, was running articles about how so much as looking at the pictures is to perpetuate the abuse, a position in itself which has been examined and argued over, addressed in horror films, pornography and often come up found wanting, while at the same time hosting news stories explaining precisely where it was you needed to go if you wanted to find them.  If indeed, dear reader, you had not already sought them out, had them posted in your social media timeline or found out about them on a forum or elsewhere.  The BBC's report last night even included a picture of the front page of the site in question, for crying out loud.

Instead, let's start off with some of the basic inaccuracies which are still appearing in many of the articles on the leak.  Some give the impression that stolen images of around 100 celebrities have been posted.  They have not, or haven't been as yet.  Rather, a list of the names of around 100 celebrities/famous women was posted alongside the images, with the implication being that if images/videos of them hadn't been released, they would be shortly, or could be as on some forums the poster was asking for bitcoins to be paid to their account, whereafter they would then release more images.  Instead, images of around 25 celebrities have been released, not all of which are explicit, and in some cases there have only been one or two pictures of the celebrity posted.  By far the largest caches were of files stolen/hacked from either the iClouds or phones of Ali Michael and Kate Upton, or to be precise in Upton's case, from her partner Justin Verlander's account.  Contrary to some of the reports, there have been no images posted of Rhianna, Kim Kardashian or Scarlett Johansson to name but three, despite their appearing on the list.  Simply down to how their names are among the most recognisable, they seem to have been included.  All three have also had explicit images and or videos leaked in the past, which might have added to the confusion.

The main problem has been that as of yet we still don't definitively know how the images were acquired, what method was used or whether there was a "gang" in the real sense involved or rather just a few individuals who then swapped files with each other.  The most compelling explanation for how the leak happened so far is there was a group of people who individually had gained access to the cloud accounts of celebrities, who then started exchanging their finds with others who had also managed to "rip" the accounts of famous women.  To gain access to more of the cache you had to provide new material, or "wins".

Whether one of these individuals then went rogue, or gave the files to a friend, on Sunday afternoon a thread was posted on a well known image board that contained most of the pictures since available everywhere.  Others were posted later on Sunday, with a couple of new images shared on Monday, but there's been nothing since.  This could mean there's nothing else to release, the list of names was a masturbatory fabrication, and that screengrabs of folders containing censored thumbnails of as yet unreleased further images/videos posted were also fake, or that in time they will also be leaked.  What we do know is that on other boards prior to last Sunday there had been people saying they could rip iCloud accounts in exchange for either other images or bitcoins, and also talk of specific celebrities, of whom images were then leaked.  Whether as Apple claims an exploit wasn't used, and this was "hacking" of the old, brute force method, with an element of "social engineering" (which in the context of phone hacking we called blagging), also isn't as yet fully clear.

If there wasn't then enough dissonance around how it happened, there's much, more more about the ethics of all concerned.  It would be easier to just say we're all guilty, and we are, but that doesn't begin to cover it.  Obviously, the hacking itself is reprehensible; the images and videos leaked are the personal, intensely private and intimate record of the celebrities' lives.  At the same time however, that doesn't make the crime any worse than ripping the accounts of ordinary people in the search for explicit images, or a bitter, jealous ex-boyfriend or girlfriend posting the images shared with them in confidence, as part of a relationship, as "revenge".  The FBI have got involved entirely down to whom the victims are; if they were to do so in every case of "revenge porn" they wouldn't have time to keep entrapping American Muslims.

As we have to accept, once something is online it's incredibly difficult to get it removed. The European Court of Justice ruling on the "right to be forgotten", as welcome in principle as it is, will be and has already been abused by the rich and famous.  The argument is often made in the case of child abuse images, to so much as seek them out is to abuse that child and to encourage the people who produced that image to abuse others.  This is questionable when child pornography is not made to order; it is not marketed or produced by an industry; it is made by abusers for abusers yes, but once out in the wild it does not as porn does, make stars out of those depicted in it; quite the contrary in fact.  The more people who view it, the more likely it is the child will be rescued or the perpetrators will be caught.  This is why, unlike with ordinary porn, images that have existed for decades are still exchanged far more often than newly produced material is.  Vintage porn is a niche for those who get nostalgic for the so-called "golden age", in fact a time when despite the higher production values, the women were treated abysmally and the industry was riddled with criminals and chancers.  There are still instances of both today, but nowhere near to the same extent.

When explicit images of the already famous or the almost famous are leaked, it can go one of two ways.  It can make the person even more famous, such as in the case of the aforementioned Kim Kardashian, or it can ruin them, destroying their career, resilience and confidence.  Despite the initially supportive reaction when an explicit video of Tulisa Contostavlos was posted online, she was then targeted by Mazher Mahmood, in a despicable instance of someone already down on their luck being abused to sell newspapers.  By the same token, the newspapers and news sites pretending to be disgusted and outraged by this most base invasion of privacy fall over themselves to buy long-lens shots of celebrities either in bikinis or topless on holiday, and fill their columns with instances of "side-boob" or "wardrobe malfunctions", when that is the paparazzi aren't sticking their cameras right up the skirts of starlets.  They ridicule their fashion sense, or alternatively praise them when they get it "right".  Not so long ago Emma Watson tweeted a photo of her make-up bag, filled with all the beauty products she uses to get the "perfect" look demanded of her, the kind of quiet act of rebellion that ought to shame those invested at every level of the fame game and surrounding culture, but doesn't.

There is something additionally transgressive in seeing the famous as they want their partners to see them, rather than the public, just as some of it also as much about the modern need to record everything.  Taking naked self-shots has become entirely ordinary; when Jennifer Lawrence also does, an actress who doesn't so much as have a Twitter account, the urge to see behind the facade is easy to understand.  The vast majority of the stars also have nothing to be embarrassed about, beyond how they will undoubtedly blame themselves for not realising their photos were in the cloud, or their passwords weren't secure enough, regardless of how it's not their fault.  The more explicit images of Lawrence circulating are not her; the ones that are simply show a beautiful young woman, confident in her sexuality.  Only those she trusted should have seen them; it would be a further abuse if this was to shatter that confidence.

The hope has to be none of those caught up in the leak suffer a similar fate to Contostavlos, victory over Mahmood in court notwithstanding, although frankly it's difficult not to fear for Jessica Brown Findlay, something best left at that.  Looking at or for the outré, the unusual, is normal; it's when it goes beyond that into the unhealthy, the obsessional, the genuinely degrading and abusive that we have to worry and make judgements.

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9/03/2014 11:07:00 pm | |

Monday, September 01, 2014 

Y'all are breaking the first two rules of Fight Club.

EXCLUSIVE TO ALL NEWSPAPERS AND NEWS SITES


  • IF YOU DOWNLOAD THE LEAKED CELEBRITY PICTURES YOU'RE JUST AS BAD AS THE EVIL, VILE PERVERT WHO RELEASED THEM IN THE FIRST PLACE, PERPETUATING THE ABUSE
  • A COMPLETE HISTORY OF EBAUM'S WORLD, THE WEBSITE WHERE YOU CAN FIND THE LEAKED CELEBRITY PICTURES

In related news:

  • Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, Hadley Freeman and Jess Cartner-Morley on how to take a better naked selfie - "get the lighting right and the rest will follow"
  • Kate Upton joins Arsenal on season-long loan in defensive midfielder role
  • Seth MacFarlane Oscar routine suddenly even creepier in retrospect
  • David Cameron attacks Magna Carta, media uninterested after finding she hasn't had risqué self-shots leaked
  • Jessica Brown Findlay, in all seriousness, we're really, really sorry

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9/01/2014 09:55:00 pm | |

Thursday, August 07, 2014 

If Simon Cowell wants us to stay together, then who are Scots to argue?

One of the absolute finest qualities we as humans possess is our ability to admit when we're wrong, or when we don't know something.  By contrast, never back down, never apologise is the mantra of such towering figures as Kelvin MacKenzie, and even if not immediately, such principles tend to eventually catch up with you.

I will then freely set out how at times this politics thing completely and utterly bewilders me.  Do politicians seriously commission focus groups, which are often nothing of the sort, and use them as their ultimate guide for which policies are most likely to reach the nation's collective erogenous zones?  Did they really imagine that an obviously catastrophic in retrospect ploy would work, when anyone with half a brain could of told them it was beyond idiotic?  Is Grant Shapps a real person and not a fictional creation designed to destroy the Tories from within, ever ready with a charmless, redundant anti-Labour soundbite?

The ultimate example of this has to be, at least in my eyes, the celebrity endorsement.  Absolutely no good can come of it, either to the famous person or the cause they take up/are persuaded to support.  It doesn't matter how noble it is, whether it be trying to stop Sexual Violence in Conflict, a notion that seems to ignore that they the two have always and will always go together and the best way to end the former is to stop the latter, or as we're getting on to, urging the United Kingdom to stay united, someone out there will take against you for it.  Just tweeting #FreePalestine is enough to make an image consultant have kittens, while Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz are naturally, according to the Times of Israel and other celebs, antisemites for their comments.  Bono was always a twat, but he didn't really become such a stupendous bell end (yes, equal opportunities sexual organ based insults are here again) until he started his philanthropic work.  At the same time as being a tax exile, natch.

So it is with the 200 or so celebs and semi-celebs who've signed the Let's Stay Together letter.  The sentiment expressed is mild, and done in such a way as to make it unlikely anyone could be genuinely offended by the simple plea for voters to consider all that we've shared over the past 300 years of union.  At the same time, those behind the campaign have what could be described as a murky past, and the message is one anyone contemplating voting yes will have already thought over themselves.  They really don't need people without a vote, famous ones at that, to tell them something they already know.  Some might also recall the Guardian's Clark Country fiasco back in 2004, when the paper urged readers to write to voters in America as to why they shouldn't re-elect George Bush.  It didn't go well.

Nor does it help when the vast majority of those who've added their signature are exactly the kind of celebs you'd be tempted to move to an independent Scotland to avoid.  The very first name is David Aaronovitch, for crying out loud.  Kirstie Allsopp swiftly follows, and once you realise both Trinny and Susannah have signed, along with Neil "paedophiles have more genes in common with crabs than they do with you and me" Fox, it's easier to note those on the list who aren't complete tools.  Like Olivia Colman, David Mitchell and Tamsin Greig.  Or Stephen Hawking and Doreen Lawrence.  Then you realise Simon Cowell, Tracey Emin and Andrew Lloyd-Webber have also etched their initials, and heading north of Gretna after a Yes vote once again looks incredibly attractive.

It wouldn't be so bad if the lead No has in the opinion polls didn't look all but impregnable, or had Alex Salmond trounced Alistair Darling in the debate as so many expected he would.  As it happened, Salmond fell shortest on the currency question, the exact quandary Yes campaigners have repeatedly and with some justification said is a non-issue.  The problem is voters don't believe the rUK will roll over after a Yes vote and say OK, let's discuss this in a civilised fashion now it's happened, even if that's most likely what would happen.  Nor did Salmond help himself by bringing up the scare stories over a Yes vote, as it's one thing for a blog like Wings to do it, and quite another for the prospective first prime minister of an independent Scotland to.

Much as you don't want it to be the case, Project Fear looks as though it's done its job.  The Yes campaign's insistence everything will be absolutely fine post-independence just hasn't worked when set against the apocalyptic visions painted by Better Together.  A better society as Salmond promises is a fine sentiment, it just doesn't seem able to win out against those worried about what might happen if things don't go according to the SNP's plan.  Add in what you can only describe as the naivety of the Radical Independence campaigners, convinced supporting the SNP now will mean jam tomorrow, and it will take something miraculous for the gap to be made up.  A bunch of well-meaning if jumped up celebrities aren't going to piss off that many wavering voters, sadly.

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8/07/2014 10:36:00 pm | |

Monday, March 15, 2010 

Celebrity endorsements.

Is there, or can you think of a less exciting celebrity endorsement of a political party than that of today's quite brilliant Sun front page, announcing to the world Andy McNab has switched his support to the Conservatives? I've been racking my brains, but I can only mainly come up with slightly contentious or potentially offensive endorsements, such as Michael Barrymore pledging his vote to Labour, or just naff ones, such as Noel Edmonds bigging up the Lib Dems.

Then again, perhaps this is just part of the way in which political programmes have tried to get down with the kids or have non-political but "normal" guests, hence the appearance of Monty Don on Question Time or Lady Sovereign deciding she didn't want to be on This Week after all (She says she had a panic attack, which is fair enough). Closer to May the 6th, can we look forward to learning who Maggot from Goldie Lookin' Chain is going to put an x in the box for, or whether Daniella Westbrook is going to use her vote?

(I mean, that's presuming that actually is Andy McNab behind the porn-like obscuring black block with Dave; after all, it could be some bloke that was wandering around Westminster that they got to pose with him for a fiver. How do we even know that Andy McNab exists, or that he really is voting for the Tories? Why am I writing this unfunny crap?)

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3/15/2010 09:57:00 pm | |

Wednesday, September 02, 2009 

Yates in not trying very hard shocker.

If you needed confirmation that the Met's investigation into the News of the Screws wasn't as thorough as they claimed, and that the "re-investigation" into it after the Graun's allegations was even less so, you only had to see both John Yates and Chief Superintendent Philip Williams before the culture committee today. Apparently the transcript of messages on Gordon Taylor's voicemail, provided for Neville Thurlbeck, wasn't a "viable live inquiry", despite Taylor and his legal adviser subsequently successfully securing the largest privacy payout from News International in legal history in this country. Just to add insult to injury, Yates then went on to say that there was no evidence of Thurlbeck reading the message, or that it could even be another Neville, to which Adam Price acidly stated that they would find out how many Nevilles were working at the Screws at the time before publishing their report.

Price though does seem to have scored a direct hit with his bringing up of the story involving a message left on Harry's voicemail by his brother pretending to be Harry's then girlfriend, Chelsy Davy. Philip Williams stated that although the police had never been able to prove it, again raising the spectre of them not trying very hard, they had "solid reasons" for suspecting that their phones had been tapped into as well as those of the royal aides which led to the conviction of both Mulcaire and Goodman. The can of worms opened up by the Graun has by no means yet been dumped in the dustbin of history.

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9/02/2009 09:53:00 pm | |

Monday, August 31, 2009 

Steve Whittamore's database exposed and Murdoch's victory.

Finally then, we learn some of the identities of those who were targeted by various national newspapers and magazines via Steve Whittamore, the details of which have previously been kept back by the Information Commissioner's office.

And what an obvious collection of searches in the wider public interest they are. Whether blagging their way into BT's databases to get home addresses and ex-directory numbers, the social security system, the DVLA or the police national computer, these are names to conjure with: the former director general of the National Trust, the Southampton football manager, the father of a Big Brother contestant, the former head of Ofsted, Chris Woodhead, MP Clive Betts, Wayne Rooney's mother, Carol Vorderman's brother, Andrew Motion's ex-wife.

To lay off the sarcasm for a moment, some of these uses of a private detective to obtain information could have been in the public interest: politicians from all the main parties are also represented, among them Peter Mandelson, Peter Hain, Chris Patten, Peter Kilfoyle, a couple of then union leaders. Most though are just scurrilous attempts to back up gossip: Joanna Lumley, sainted by the newspapers this year for her role in the campaign to allow Gurkhas to move here, was targeted repeatedly in attempts to find out who the father of her child was. Ian Hislop seems to have been had his details accessed mainly because of a vendetta against him by the paparazzo Jason Fraser, while Frances Lawrence, wife of the murdered headmaster Philip was also attempted to be tracked down, and so the list goes on.

Some of the requests, as Nick Davies notes, appear to be down to either sheer laziness or the need to meet deadlines: some of the information sought is almost certainly freely available on the electoral register. Most though just seem to be fishing expeditions, trying to find what information they can get on someone, possibly to back up a story, possibly just in case they ever need it. The other thing that Guardian's obtaining of the information signifies is that it also knows exactly which journalists or even editors were themselves requesting information, as Whittamore also kept their details, maybe in case he was caught and so he could attempt to bring them down with him. Private Eye has already revealed that Rebekah Wade herself made a personal request to Whittamore for information while she was editor of the News of the World; doubtless there are other "big" names in here that would cause a major stir were they to be released.

It also brings into sharp relief James Murdoch's rant at the weekend:

Above all we must have genuine independence in news media. …independence is characterised by the absence of the apparatus of supervision and dependency. Independence of faction, industrial or political. Independence of subsidy, gift and patronage.

It doesn't of course matter that Murdoch himself is the purest example of patronage in a supposedly free and independent market, but put that to one side. The "independence" and lack of any supervision which he craves leads directly to the abuses detailed above. It leads not to the public service journalism which the BBC provides, but to the trash which fills the Sun and News of the World, which in turn subsidise his "serious" newspapers. His market fundamentalism is just as bad as the BBC would be if it was his caricature of it. Little wonder that News International's reaction to the Guardian's revelations of widespread phone hacking were so ferocious: they'd been caught when they need to be seen, in Tony Blair's parlance, as purer than pure. The sad thing is that with an incoming Conservative government, desperate to buy off the Murdoch press, we might well see Young Murdoch's dreams become something close to reality.

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8/31/2009 05:56:00 pm | |

Wednesday, July 22, 2009 

Phone hacking: Rebekah Wade gets snared.

As might have been expected, Private Eye (1241) has some additional information on the phone hacking scandal:

"... There was, however, one bit of evidence he [Nick Davies, at the Graun's appearance before the Culture committee last week] omitted. A file seized by the Information Committee from private investigator Steve Whittamore in 2003, which was later obtained by lawyers for Professional Footballers' Association boss Gordon Taylor, included a personal request for Whittamore to trace someone's address via his phone number. The request came from Rebekah Wade when she was editor of the News of the Screws.

Davies was asked to keep quiet about this by the man who accompanied him to the committee hearing, Grauniad editor Alan Rusbridger, who feared that the skirmishes between the Grauniad and News International would turn into all-out war if there were any mention of the flame-haired weirdo who has now become NI's chief executive.

This may also be why the Guardian has yet to reveal that the secret payment of £700,000 in damages and costs to buy the silence of Gordon Taylor was not a mere executive order. It was decided by the directors of News Group Newspapers Ltd, the NI subsidary which owns the Sun and the Screws, at their board meeting on 10 June last year. If their involvement were revealed, it could cause grave embarrassment for the directors of News Group Newspapers Ltd - not least one James Murdoch."


The latter more or less came out yesterday, when we learned that James Murdoch had known about the settlement and agreed with it. The Wade revelation is though entirely new, and while there is no indication that Wade was using Whittamore for anything specifically illegal, it is an example that editors at the Screws knew about the "dark arts" and even personally used them. That makes it all the more ridiculous that both Andy Coulson and Tom Crone were so ignorant about what was happening all around them. It's also surprising that Wade herself was so tenacious in accusing the Graun of being "deliberately misleading" when they had such information on her; either she knew they wouldn't dare use it, as PE suggests, or she decided to try to tough it out. Either that, or she didn't know.

By far the best comment on yesterday's reprise of Manuel from Fawlty Towers was from Peter Burden, who also interpreted their body language.

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7/22/2009 10:55:00 pm | |

Tuesday, July 21, 2009 

Deny nothing, deny everything, know nothing.

After the statement from News International over a week ago, and last Sunday's News of the World editorial, you might have expected that Tom Crone, Colin Myler, Stuart Kuttner and Andy Coulson might have came out defiant and dismissive to the Commons culture committee, especially after last week's bravura performance from Nick Davies.

The News of the World stance appears to have now changed three times. First it was to deny nothing; then it was to deny everything; now it seems to be know nothing. The four men were remarkable reticent, or remarkably ill-informed, perhaps deliberately. The only real fire came when first Tom Crone objected to Tom Watson's presence on the committee (under the "hated" Human Rights Act!), as he's currently taking legal action against the Sun, then Kuttner objected to Philip Davies, as he had connected Kuttner's resignation with the Guardian's revelations.

Predictably, all involved denied knowing anything about the phone hacking; all could be blamed on those who had since left, or those who are still at the paper strangely don't seem to be able to remember anything about it. The junior reporter who wrote the email which Davies revealed last week couldn't remember much about it, and was currently in Peru, Neville Thurlbeck couldn't remember receiving it, and there was no trace of the email on the NotW email system. The more cynical might imagine that was all very convenient. Thurlbeck was only supposed to be involved in the Taylor story with a view to door-stepping Taylor to confirm it. Coulson, later on, confirmed that he couldn't remember anything about a story involving Taylor.

Alongside the denials and non-denials, new information that did come out was that both Mulcaire and Goodman received payments along with their dismissals. You would have thought that being convicted of criminal offences while doing their job would have enabled them to be fired for gross misconduct, but apparently the payments were made in line with employment law and certainly not to buy their silence. James Murdoch, if not Murdoch himself, knew about the settlement with Gordon Taylor. Adam Price, who had discovered a story in the paper by-lined as by Goodman and Thurlbeck had a direct line that could only have come from Prince William's voicemail. Coulson of course couldn't remember the story, and Crone doesn't remember "page 7" stories, while Goodman's lawyer said in court nothing was ever published as a result of the voicemail hacking.

Some of the denials though were just ridiculous. Crone claims that he hadn't even heard of Mulcaire until Goodman was arrested, had never heard of phones being hacked and had never heard of payments for illegal activity. He seems to have been the only other person in Fleet Street, along with Andy Coulson, to have been so ignorant, who also had never met Mulcaire or spoke to him.

The frustrating thing about the whole story and investigation is that the suspicion is everything the Guardian has alleged is true and more besides, but it's simply impossible to prove. The police investigation seems to have based purely on getting a conviction on the count of hacking the royals, despite also looking into, if not prosecuting the other allegations and suggestions that numerous others were also hacked, or at least looked into the possibility of being hacked. Goodman and Mulcaire have been the fall guys for what was almost certainly a culture of contempt for the law in the News of the World newsroom. The ends justified the means, and through the silence and paying off of all involved, it's impossible to prove beyond what we already know. Coulson looks certain to survive, and the damage done to him seems to have been only slight. Tabloid culture also seems likely to remain unchanged, as ever.

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7/21/2009 10:12:00 pm | |

Tuesday, July 14, 2009 

News of the Screws turns out to be screwed.

At the weekend the News of the World was unequivocal. According to their leader column, the phone hacking story was almost completely baseless. There were no inquiries, no charges and no evidence. It quoted Andy Hayman, the former Metropolitan head of counter-terrorism, to suggest that the police inquiry had looked into everything alleged, and that Goodman was the only journo who had accessed voicemail messages. In an act of extreme chutzpah, it even called on the Guardian to practice what it preached when it said that "decent journalism had never been more necessary".

All eyes were then on the Commons culture committee, where first Tim Toulmin of the Press Complaints Commission, then Nick Davies, the journalist who broke the story last week and Paul Johnson, Guardian News and Media's deputy editor were to give evidence. As it turned out, Graun editor Alan Rusbridger also turned up, perhaps to underline just how seriously the paper is taking both the story and the investigations triggered by it.

Toulmin, as evidenced by a log of his evidence, hardly did the Press Complaints Commission any favours. It seems remarkably relaxed by the allegations made by the Graun, as it has been from the beginning. The very fact that the PCC, despite claiming to investigate such allegations, cannot demand that those covered by it hand over documents or interview those who have since left the newspaper industry behind, as Andy Coulson had, undermines any attempt to get to the bottom of such indiscretions.

Davies then did the equivalent of setting the session alight. Far from not having any new evidence, as the News of the World had claimed, he distributed two documents (huge PDF, nearly 50 meg) which directly named two News of the World employees who clearly did know about the phone hacking carried out by Glenn Mulcaire. It also quickly became clear why Davies and the paper had not previously released this evidence: Davies said it was both NI's statement at the weekend which had prompted them to, which he said one source had told him was "designed to deceive", and that they had wanted to protect the NotW's lower journos from being treated in the same way as Clive Goodman was. The first is a transcript, heavily redacted by the Graun, by a NotW hack of the messages intercepted from Gordon Taylor's voicemail. The email, which is seen from Mulcaire's Yahoo account, opens with "[T]his is the transcript for Neville". Davies identified this Neville as none other than Neville Thurlbeck, the senior Screws journalist also responsible for the Max Mosley "Nazi" orgy which cost the paper so dearly last year. The second is a contract, between Mulcaire and the NotW, with Mulcaire known by the name Paul Williams, which promises the private investigator £7,000 if a story can be formed around information which he provides on Gordon Taylor. The contract is signed by Greg Miskiw, the former assistant editor of the paper.

This raises significant questions for both News International and the police. Quite clearly, while Mulcaire is the link between both examples of hacking into voicemails, other journalists were involved. Why then, despite the police being well aware that Gordon Taylor had been specifically targeted and that NotW hacks other than Goodman were complicit in that hacking was Goodman the only one who was actually charged? Were charges actually considered against Thurlbeck, for example, as well as the unnamed journo who put together the transcript of Taylor's messages? Why were charges also not considered against Greg Miskiw for promising Mulcaire payment should a story be developed as a result of his breaking the law?

We also learned today, in emails released between the Home Office and John Yates, that Yates' review of the evidence in the case was nothing of the sort. All he was asked do to by the Met commissioner was to "establish the facts and consider wider issues that arose in the reporting from the Guardian". In other words, all he did was look at the conclusions reached and repeat them. He even makes clear that this was not a review.

As for the NotW itself, this makes the following three sentences from its leader at the weekend even more laughable:
So let us be clear. Neither the police, nor our own internal investigations, has found any evidence to support allegations that News of the World journalists have accessed voicemails of any individuals.

Nor instructed private investigators or other third parties to access voicemails of any individual.

Nor found that there was any systemic corporate illegality by any executive to suppress evidence to the contrary.


Finally, this brings it all back to Andy Coulson. If the assistant editor knew, and was commissioning Mulcaire to conduct such trawling expeditions, then are we really meant to believe that Coulson himself didn't know? If he truly didn't, as he and the NotW have persistently claimed, then the reason seems to be because he didn't want to know. Yet as editor of the paper he was the person ultimately responsible for what those below him got up to. Either way, he was the person in charge when those below him blatantly and deliberately breached the law in attempts to get stories which were clearly not even slightly in the public interest. David Cameron should be once again continuing his chief spin doctor's position.

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7/14/2009 09:55:00 pm | |

Friday, July 10, 2009 

The Graun vs News International: fight!

Battle then has finally been joined in what could turn out to be a titanic struggle between News International and the Guardian. After two days of silence and not bothering to dispute any of the Nick Davies' initial report, Rebekah Wade released a letter written to the head of the Commons Media Select Committee, John Wittingdale (PDF), and News International as a whole has released a point by point supposed refutation of the Guardian's claims.

To go from denying almost nothing to denying everything is quite a step change, and one which could yet turn out to be disastrous for News International. Wade's letter is especially laughable, and further evidence perhaps of why she has long been shielded from the public eye, something she won't be able to do once she becomes chief executive. Notably, Wade informs Wittingdale that Colin Myler, Andy Coulson's replacement as editor of the NotW and Tom Crone, the paper's longstanding legal counsel will appear before his committee, and not just to give evidence but "refute" the Guardian's allegations that voicemail hacking was endemic at the paper. The fact that Myler hadn't been working at the paper prior to his appointment as editor doesn't inspire confidence that he'll be an any better witness than Les Hinton was previously. As for Tom Crone, if his presence is meant to inspire dread in the committee, they should remember that it was he who advised Mazher Mahmood to pursue George Galloway for publishing his image on the net following his failure to entrap him, while his performance at the Max Mosley trial as the paper's counsel helped the paper to its defeat. Myler himself also gave evidence that hardly helped the paper's case.

Wade goes on to claim that the Guardian has "substantially and likely deliberately misled the British public". That is a very serious allegation to make, and one which Wade provides no evidence to back up. It's also rather hilarious, making you wonder whether News International is so peeved because that's their job. Even those of us who are severe critics of tabloid journalism as a whole, and especially Wade's work, would baulk at alleging that she has deliberately misled readers on stories such as that involving Alfie Patten. The hypocrisy and irony also keeps on coming, as Wade complains that the Guardian is "repeating allegations by such sources as unnamed Met officers". If it wasn't for unnamed police sources, the Sun wouldn't have published such brilliant exclusives as the claim that Rochelle Holness was dismembered while alive, which is unbelievably still uncorrected on their website, or that Janet Hossain was found dead wearing S&M gear, both of which were untrue and hurtful beyond belief to the relatives who were trying to come to terms with their loss.

Next, she claims that both the Guardian and television coverage of Nick Davies' initial report has "deliberately or recklessly" combined references to the Peter Taylor and Prince William voicemail hacking with the revelations in the Information Commissioner's two reports, and that there is no connection between the two. This is inaccurate on both points: most of the references made to the ICO reports have been clear, while even if there is no direct connection between the two separate cases, the work of Steve Whittamore is an example of just what the tabloids and some broadsheets have been up to, and undermines the claims made by the NotW that Clive Goodman was just one bad apple, when at least 19 separate NotW hacks made use of Whittamore.

The News International statement is rather more robust, although still full of holes and in places deliberately pulls its punches. It also seems as if the NotW itself was kept well abreast of the police investigation, and robustly claims that it's the police that confirm that the Guardian's allegations are inaccurate. Even tonight though it has began to fall apart, following further responses from the Graun. The statement claims:

Apart from matters raised in the Mulcaire and Goodman proceedings, the only other evidence connecting News of the World reporters to information gained as a result of accessing a person's voicemail emerged in April 2008, during the course of the Gordon Taylor litigation. Neither this information nor any story arising from it was ever published. Once senior executives became aware of this, immediate steps were taken to resolve Mr Taylor's complaint.

 From our own investigation, but more importantly that of the police, we can state with confidence that, apart from the matters referred to above, there is not and never has been evidence to support allegations that:
  • News of the World journalists have accessed the voicemails of any individual.
  • News of the World or its journalists have instructed private investigators or other third parties to access the voicemails of any individuals.
  • There was systemic corporate illegality by News International to suppress evidence.

Yet tomorrow the Guardian reveals that one of the others that News International settled with was Jo Armstrong, a legal adviser at the PFA, who also had her voicemail hacked into. If she isn't being included along with Peter Taylor, then that's another case which the organisation has conveniently forgotten about. The statement goes on:

It goes without saying that had the police uncovered such evidence, charges would have been brought against other News of the World personnel. Not only have there been no such charges, but the police have not considered it necessary to arrest or question any other member of News of the World staff.

Considering then the NotW admits that Peter Taylor's voicemail was illegally accessed, why weren't the journalists involved in the tapping of Peter Taylor's phone considered for prosecution as Mulcaire was, when Goodman had no involvement in it? Is it because he informed them that he intended to take his own legal action and so they left it at that or otherwise? The situation remains that News International's relationship with the police is incredibly cosy. The fact also that it took far longer for NI to look through the evidence before making their statement than it did for Yates of the Yard furthers the suspicion that the police have no intention of endangering that relationship unless forced to.

Based on the above, we can state categorically in relation to the following allegations which have been made primarily by the Guardian and widely reported as fact by Sky News, BBC, ITN and others this week:
  • It is untrue that officers found evidence of News Group staff, either themselves or using private investigators, hacking into "thousands" of mobile phones.
  • It is untrue that apart from Goodman, officers found evidence that other members of News Group staff hacked into mobile phones or accessed individuals' voicemails.
  • It is untrue that there is evidence that News Group reporters, or indeed anyone, hacked into the telephone voicemails of John Prescott.
  • It is untrue that “Murdoch journalists” used private investigators to illegally hack into the mobile phone messages of numerous public figures to gain unlawful access to confidential personal data, including: tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemised phone bills.
  • It is untrue that News Group reporters have hacked into telephone voicemail services of various footballers, politicians and celebrities named in reports this week.
  • It is untrue that News of the World executives knowingly sanctioned payment for illegal phone intercepts.

This is instructive as much by how it words each denial as the denial is itself. It is perhaps untrue that "thousands" of phones were hacked into; maybe it was only hundreds and the Guardian's source exaggerated slightly. It might be that there were attempts to hack into thousands of phones, rather than that thousands were successfully compromised. It also might be untrue that journalists personally hacked into mobile phones; after all, they had Mulcaire and doubtless others paid handsomely to do that for them. What exactly was Mulcaire doing other than blagging and hacking which made him worth £2,000 a week, with extra for specific work? No hack other than star columnists and the executive staff themselves would earn such massive remuneration. Similarly, if John Prescott's voicemail wasn't hacked into, or wasn't even attempted to be hacked into, how did the Guardian know specifically which month it was said to have been done, unless their source was expert at covering his tracks? The next denial is the most remarkable of all. No one claimed that the NotW hacked into voicemail messages in order to get access to personal data; they had other private detectives who blagged their way in to do that.

All of this is potentially setting NI up for a massive fall. They must be pretty damn certain that the Met's investigation doesn't contradict their denials, and that the investigation is not going to enter the public domain, because if it does, one imagines that the Guardian will do a rerun of their Jonathan Aitken front page, except with the headline changed from "He lied and lied and lied" to "They lied and lied and lied". Instead, they must be incredibly confident that all that's going to come of this is some further legal claims by those named, in which they will only pay out again in return for silence and confidentiality.

The statement then rehashes Wade's comments about the ICO investigations:
The report concerned the activities of a private investigator who, between April 2001 and March 2003, supplied information to 32 newspapers and magazines including, incidentally, the Guardian's sister newspaper, The Observer, which according to the Information Commissioner was ninth worst "offender" out of the 32. The information supplied was deemed to be in breach of the Data Protection Act 1998.

The Guardian though made no attempt to hide the fact that the Observer had featured on Richard Thomas's list, unlike the Sun, which unsurprisingly didn't so much as mention the IC's revelations. The Times meanwhile printed part of the list, while making no mention of the fact that its parent company also owned the Sunday Times and News of the World, while snipping the list so that the Sun didn't feature on it.

Perhaps the most revealing part of the statement is left until near the end:

Since February 2007, News International has continued to work with its journalists and its industry partners to ensure that its journalists fully comply with both the relevant legislation and the rigorous requirements of the PCC’s Code of Conduct.

Since Feburary 2007. In other words, NI is making no attempt to defend Andy Coulson, who isn't so much as mentioned. If there was funny business going on, it was his fault and no one else's, and our executives are blameless. Speaking of which:

Finally, we would like to make it clear that despite the Guardian suggesting otherwise, the departure of Managing Editor Stuart Kuttner has no connection whatsoever with the events referred to above. The Guardian were informed of this position from the outset and chose to mislead the British public.

Except the Guardian did no such thing. The closest it came to alleging any connection was this article by James Robinson.

In the end, it might come down to who you're more likely to believe. Is it News International and the News of the World, which we now know repeatedly did what it previously denied it, and attempted through cosy confidentiality to deny the public and other potential victims from knowing about its payouts, or is it the Guardian, whose original report has at least partially now been fully vindicated by NI themselves? I know what my choice is.

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7/10/2009 10:08:00 pm | |

Thursday, July 09, 2009 

The dark arts come back to haunt Andy Coulson.

In a way, it's surprising that the "phone hacking" story has only gone nuclear now. The only real new information Nick Davies provided yesterday was that the News of the World had to pay out to three different people after their messages were intercepted, about which News International must be absolutely seething; that potentially "thousands" of celebrities and politicians had their voicemail illegally accessed; and that, perhaps in good faith, News International executives misled a parliamentary select committee, not to mention also the Press Complaints Commission and the public.

While most are only following this story back to when Clive Goodman was found, with the help of the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, to have intercepted the messages of Prince William, as well as other flunkies in the royal household, it in fact goes further back to the arrest of Stephen Whittamore, a private detective who was used by almost every national tabloid, as well as a few broadsheets, to gain information not just from cracking into mobile phones but also from national databases which he had more than a knack of blagging into. Whittamore, for reasons known only to himself, kept a complete database of every request from every newspaper and from every journalist, a database which was then seized by the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, and released back in December 2006, albeit sans the details concerning the journalists themselves. The News of the World wasn't even top of the list, although there were still 19 journalists making 182 separate transactions. Top was the Daily Mail, clearly Whittamore's top clients, with a staggering 58 separate hacks or employees making a total of 952 requests for information. The ICO's reports, What Price Privacy? and What Price Privacy Now? (both PDFs) went into further details on the extent of blagging.

The most comprehensive account of Whittamore's arrest and subsequent trial was in... Flat Earth News by none other than Nick Davies. Davies dedicates an entire chapter in the book to what became known in various newspaper offices as "the dark arts". Some, it must be stated, have used "the dark arts" quite legitimately in stories which were clearly in the public interest, especially during the 90s. Equally clearly however it soon got completely out of control, and the laziest of journalists turned to these "private investigators" as their first port of call, even just to gain home addresses which were otherwise freely available. The key difference between Whittamore and Goodman and Mulcaire is that they were prosecuted under different legislation. Whittamore was tried under the Data Protection Act, having breached and blagged his way into numerous national databases, including the police's, which was his undoing, while Goodman and Mulcaire, having only been identified as gaining access to mobile phone voicemail boxes, were tried under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. The then Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, had wanted the law tightened so that journalists caught using private detectives to access national databases would face a potential jail sentence; this was fought off through lobbying by Associated Newspapers, News International and the Telegraph group, which remarkably today said nothing about the Guardian's new revelations, although tomorrow it does have a follow up.

It is then ridiculous that this is the Graun out to get Andy Coulson in some sort of pact with Labour, as some Tory bloggers have claimed, especially considering just how critical the paper has been recently of Gordon Brown. Rather, this is simply good old-fashioned journalism by Nick Davies, following his investigation up to the bitter end, and having found an uncannily good source that told him about the payouts to Gordon Taylor and others. It's also remarkable that News International has not denied a single thing about the Guardian story, instead simply stating that they are bound by the confidentiality of the settling of the cases.

What does stink however, and is even more remarkable has been the Metropolitan police's amazingly fast review of the evidence, which established in double quick time that there was no need for a reinvestigation, and that John Prescott's phone, as alleged by the Graun, had not been one of those hacked into. Before passing judgement and looking into potential conspiracy theories, we should note that we're still uncertain just how far the Met's investigation into the hacking and blagging which was going on in Wapping went. Nick Davies on Newsnight made his own thinking clear on John Yates' statement, suggesting that they had narrowed it down specifically to that which Clive Goodman was involved in, or at least had so that they wouldn't have to look again. Instead, as the papers revealed during Gordon Taylor's civil action suggested, the police appear to have conducted a thorough investigation into what had been going on as a whole, and this uncovered the at least hundreds of examples, if not thousands as the Guardian has said, of phones being hacked into.

Whatever the case, that Yates has reviewed the case so quickly, not even taking a whole day to delve into what could well have hundreds if not thousands pages of evidence, suggests that the police were minded from the outset only to go after the hacking of the royals. That, it seems, was crossing an invisible line. It's worth remembering that the Metropolitan police and indeed the police as a whole have had remarkably good relations, not just with the News of the World, but also with the News International stable as a whole. There was Rebekah Wade back in 2003 inadvertently spilling the beans that her papers had previously paid the police for information, not to mention the times when the Met was more than willing to believe the line that was spun at them by Mahzer Mahmood, both in the Victoria Beckham kidnap plot that never was, and in the "red mercury" plot that equally never existed. Then there was the Forest Gate terror raid, where the News of the World was first provided with mugshots of the brothers involved and of an account which claimed one of them had in fact shot the other, rather than the police shooting one of them, which was completely untrue. Later the paper was leaked claims that a search of a computer from the home and of a mobile phone revealed child pornography, although no prosecution was forthcoming. It would be no surprise whatsoever if the Met simply decided that it was in no one's interests, and certainly not theirs, that anyone other than Goodman and his partner in crime should be the ones to cop the blame. Whether the Crown Prosecution Service will feel the same way remains to be seen, and their announcement that they would be reviewing the evidence might yet reveal them as being more willing to take on the might of News International.

To treat Andy Coulson with some fairness which he perhaps doesn't deserve, it's unfortunate that this entire mess has been raked over now. It was utterly laughable from the very beginning that he didn't know what was going on right under his nose; the simple fact that Mulcaire was being paid such vast sums of money for his work, over £100,000 a year, far in advance of what the hacks themselves would have been earning, and this in an organisation in which the ultimate authority is notoriously parsimonious about how his money is spent, makes a nonsense of the idea that he didn't know what he was doing. What should have happened back in January 2007 was a complete audit of the press by its regulatory body, a thorough investigation in which it demanded to know just how widespread such practices were, and from which specific guidelines, if not legislation, would be drawn up to stop the casual breaking of the law in search of such petty and not in the public interest information. Instead it almost seems as if there was an agreement between the PCC and the News International that as long as Andy Coulson also went, it would say nothing and everything could return to normal, as Roy Greenslade insinuates might well have happened. This was just a one-off, even if the Steve Whittamore raid proved comprehensively that it wasn't.

Indeed, if we were being fair this wouldn't be about the News of the World, Murdoch or Coulson at all. This would about a press that is getting ever more desperate as its condition weakens. Perhaps the excesses which it once resorted to, especially during the 80s, are not quite being plumbed, although the Alfie Patten case, the Sunday Express's Dunblane story and now this all certainly come close. The one thing that is now needed is confirmation that these practices, except in cases of the utmost public interest, have ceased. The PCC has shown itself to be woefully inadequate to confirm just that. Self-regulation, at least in its current toothless form, has failed. If Coulson wants to save his job, he perhaps ought to be telling his boss that those hated privacy laws might now be needed after all.

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7/09/2009 10:36:00 pm | |

Tuesday, December 02, 2008 

Tracking tabloid hypocrisy.

The thing about arguing against the excesses of the gutter press is often that those they target are little more pleasant than the papers themselves. Even when you consider the utter hypocrisy of the tabloids attacking Paul Burrell for making money out of his relationship with Princess Diana, something they've been doing for over two decades, there's little doubt that going from the princess's rock to helming reality series' in the US and Australia and promoting "Royal Butler" wine is somewhat plumbing the depths. That doesn't however mean that you should be allowed to get away with printing such trash as "BURRELL: I HAD SEX WITH DIANA" by paying his brother-in-law to "remember" conversations they had 15 years ago, and then fail to allow the man himself to deny such scurrilous allegations.

Much the same is the case with another bastion of good taste, Simon Cowell. There's nothing quite like making a good amount of your yearly wage out of humiliating those who have the temerity to believe that they have something resembling a talent - which, after all, is conspicuous in its absence in Cowell himself. There has been at least one recent case of someone who auditioned in front of Cowell subsequently committing suicide, although the woman in that instance was apparently more "obsessed" with another female judge. Nonetheless, however much of an arrogant git Cowell might be, he has the right like everyone else to a private life. Hence the apparent revelation that a "tracking device" was attached to his car, in a letter sent around to media organisations by his lawyers Carter-Fuck, is another sign of the kind of desperation which is still afflicting the tabloids in the media environment.

Paul Dacre, of course, just a couple of weeks back told us that "[U]nder the auspices of PressBoF, we have produced a guidance note on DPA [Data Protection Act] that has been sent to every paper in Britain." Fat lot of good that obviously did. In the same speech Dacre boasted about how he, along with representatives from the Telegraph and News International had successfully lobbied the government to drop the threat of journalists being jailed for obtaining information via deception, i.e. using private detectives as almost all the press instutitions in this country had to get information from government databases. Tracking devices are just as illegal as getting the likes of Stephen Whittamore to break the law for you to track the activities of celebrities and their relatives. It would be nice for Paul Dacre to explain how the use of such a device would be in the public interest, and how and why the journalist responsible for attempting to spy on Cowell shouldn't lose his job as a result.

It is after all the same newspapers responsible for such intrusion into private lives that so rail against the state doing exactly that. The ones currently screaming blue murder over the arrest of Damian Green and how the arrest of an opposition politician means we are living in a police state, but who when not fulminating against the government think nothing of indulging in almost identical practices to that of the police and security services just to be able to be ahead of the game when it comes to the celebrity exclusives which in Dacre's terms now provide the press with the means to be able to report on politics at all. Take away the scandal, he more or less argued, and you can forget their contribution to our democracy entirely. Nick Davies in Flat Earth News (criticised by Dacre) argued that the Whittamore case had came very close to bringing down the entire edifice of the media's "dark arts", and that it was only continuing now under far more cover. Doubtless then the discovery of the "tracking device" on Cowell's car will probably give them further pause for thought, at least for a while. Then they'll be back to harassing celebrities for our amusement.

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12/02/2008 10:14:00 pm | |

Friday, August 01, 2008 

Jordan gets her kit off for the Times.

A couple of years back the Guardian delighted its readers by giving column space to Peaches Honeyblossom Michelle Charlotte Angel Vanessa Geldof to talk about herself whilst one of the regulars was away. Giving Simon Jenkins a run for his money, she wrote of MySpace, her boyfriend and her dog.

At least Peaches probably wrote the column herself. You can't necessarily say the same for Katie Price, who's taken to the pages of the Times (yes, that's the Times) to bemoan the fact that she wasn't allowed to attend a polo meeting, told, despite paying £6,000, that she wasn't the sort of person they wanted.

Normally this blog would be completely opposed to snobbery it all its forms, including to a thick as horse shit glamour model who personifies everything wrong with modern culture. Can you however imagine a more suitable place for a missile or meteor to strike than the Cartier Polo International, at the Chinawhite tent, where those inside have paid £6,000 for the privilege of watching people who resemble horses ride horses while whacking around a white ball?

No, we couldn't afford to lose Jordan in such a way. There has to surely be a more fitting, violent and amusing demise for her to suffer. Like a knitting needle to the chest.

(I'm dreadfully sorry for this unfunny rubbish. Jenni Russell, incidentally, metaphorically eviscerates her.)

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8/01/2008 10:11:00 pm | |

Wednesday, April 02, 2008 

The dark arts and the real power in the land.

As mentioned in one of the previous posts, the government appears to be backtracking about making the buying and selling of private data an imprisonable offence. This is almost certainly a direct result of lobbying by Associated Newspapers, News International and even apparently the Telegraph group, all under the pretext that it would have a chilling effect on investigative journalism.

That claim and defence is rubbish. Journalism in the clear public interest is already protected, and if the Guardian was duly concerned, then the very journalists that got the story, David Leigh and Rob Evans, would be incredibly worried, as it was they that broke the story over BAE's Saudi slush fund, which would have almost certainly employed some of the methods that the information commissioner, Richard Thomas, wants to crack down on, as did their investigations into Jonathan Aitken in the 1990s.

Rather what bill is meant to target is the widespread use, especially by the tabloids, but also increasingly by the broadsheets, to employ private detectives who through their own contacts sell information, often from government or public services databases, direct to journalists. This all stems directly from the case of Steve Whittamore, the private detective who was raided back in 2003. When the police subsequently went through his computer, they found that he had kept exact details of every transaction with each publication, information which the information commissioner subsequently released back in December of 2006. It showed that the Daily Mail alone used his services 952 times, with almost 60 different journalists making separate requests. At Whittamore's trial the prosecution outlined that his associate Paul Marshall had used Scotland Yard's computer databases to access information for newspapers on two actresses from EastEnders, the family of Ricky Tomlinson, and a former Big Brother contestant, alongside information on Ken Livingstone and his partner and Bow Crow, head of the RMT. Despite this, Whittamore and his friend were all given conditional discharges, as a result of a previous ruling in a trial involving Marshall, where the judge accepted that he was seriously ill and about to die. Whittamore was meant to face another case brought by the Information Commission itself, but the cost to the public purse, and the fact that all the men could point to the previous trial and the sentences given there meant that they forced to drop it. They all in effect completely got away with it.

This isn't then out of high principles and making sure that investigative journalism, what little of it remains in the British press, is protected. This is so the tabloids and others like them can continue to stalk and chase celebrities and their families if necessary, and that as soon as a major crime and happens and suspects are named that they can get as much information on them as they possibly can. As Nick Davies outlines in the entire chapter on this in Flat Earth News, these are known as the "dark arts". One ex-Mail journalist told Davies that they used to use the social security computer as if it were an extension of the Daily Mail library, just having to phone their contact who would then supply the information or the persons with the same name in around five minutes time, with their home address, phone numbers and maybe their workplace. Another said that if the Mail comes after you, they'll get all your information, phone numbers, schoolmates, what's on your credit card and every call from your phone. This was probably how the Mail recently turned up at the home of Fiona MacKeown, breaking in and taking photographs of her murdered daughter Scarlett's "bedroom".

Some of this isn't of course high-tech or even strictly breaking the law. Clive Goodman, jailed after he was caught "hacking" into the mobile phone of Prince William, just used the well-known trick of phoning his voicemail and then seeing if the password was unchanged, as most are, enabling him to "intercept" his messages. Goodman went down because the charges were brought under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, not the Data Protection Act, which deals with the "blagging" offences and those involving the breaching of databases. This measure was really about bring the punishments into line, and upping the costs of getting caught so that there's far more of a deterrent. Getting a conditional discharge or an "unlimited" fine won't stop private detectives that have been raking in hundreds of thousands of pounds through such work, but a prison sentence will.

It's little wonder then that the Mail and Sun groups are so opposed to this measure. It threatens their incredibly lucrative phishing expeditions which so contribute to their celebrity exposes and who's shagging who nonsense which arrives on Sunday mornings. One of Gordon Brown's dearest friends just happens to be Paul Dacre, so much so that Brown has even given him a review to overlook. As for the Conservatives, the editor of the News of the Screws at the time of Goodman's offences, for which he too had resign was none other than Andy Coulson, now their chief spin doctor. Aside from protecting the privacy of celebrities and those caught up in events beyond their control, this is another reason to oppose the continuing obsession with databases across government and public services sphere. The amount of information that'll be on the ID card database has journalists and private dicks drooling already, as will the Spine, the NHS database that'll have the records of every patient on, not to mention ContactPoint, the children's database, which might have celebrities' children omitted from it, directly because of the fear of that information being sold on to the highest bidder. It just does go to continue to show that those who have the most power in Britain are not the politicians themselves, but the media barons and their editors who have obsessions with crime and criminals, except when themselves commit it in the pursuit of a good story. The information commissioner had little chance when coming up against them.

Related post:
Chicken Yoghurt - Newspapers and personal data: a level playing field at last

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4/02/2008 11:53:00 pm | |

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