I have always had a very low opinion of Murdoch and his media companies, but this is really flabbergasting!
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43781013/ns/world_news-the_new_york_times/
By Don Van Natta Jr.
updated 7/16/2011 5:13:46 PM ET
LONDON — For nearly four years they lay piled in a Scotland Yard evidence room, six overstuffed plastic bags gathering dust and little else.
Inside was a treasure-trove of evidence: 11,000 pages of handwritten notes listing nearly 4,000 celebrities, politicians, sports stars, police officials and crime victims whose phones may have been hacked by The News of the World, a now defunct British tabloid newspaper.
Yet from August 2006, when the items were seized, until the autumn of 2010, no one at the Metropolitan Police Service, commonly referred to as Scotland Yard, bothered to sort through all the material and catalog every page, said former and current senior police officials.
During that same time, senior Scotland Yard officials assured Parliament, judges, lawyers, potential hacking victims, the news media and the public that there was no evidence of widespread hacking by the tabloid. They steadfastly maintained that their original inquiry, which led to the conviction of one reporter and one private investigator, had put an end to what they called an isolated incident.
After the past week, that assertion has been reduced to tatters, torn apart by a spectacular avalanche of contradictory evidence, admissions by News International executives that hacking was more widespread, and a reversal by police officials who now admit to mishandling the case.
[.....]
At best, former Scotland Yard senior officers acknowledged in interviews, the police have been lazy, incompetent and too cozy with the people they should have regarded as suspects. At worst, they said, some officers might be guilty of crimes themselves.
[...]
The testimony and evidence that emerged last week, as well as interviews with current and former officials, indicate that the police agency and News International, the British subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and the publisher of The News of the World, became so intertwined that they wound up sharing the goal of containing the investigation.
Members of Parliament said in interviews that they were troubled by a “revolving door” between the police and News International, which included a former top editor at The News of the World at the time of the hacking who went on to work as a media strategist for Scotland Yard.
On Friday, The New York Times learned that the former editor, Neil Wallis, was reporting back to News International while he was working for the police on the hacking case.
Executives and others at the company also enjoyed close social ties to Scotland Yard’s top officials. Since the hacking scandal began in 2006, Mr. Yates and others regularly dined with editors from News International papers, records show. Sir Paul Stephenson, the police commissioner, met for meals 18 times with company executives and editors during the investigation, including on eight occasions with Mr. Wallis while he was still working at The News of the World.
[...]
Scotland Yard’s new inquiry, dubbed Operation Weeting, has led to the arrests of a total of nine reporters and editors, with more expected. And the police have opened another inquiry into allegations that some officers were paid for confidential information by reporters at The News of the World and elsewhere.
[...] [People going back and forth working for police/Scotland Yard and Murdoch media companies, or both at the same time.]
Current and former officials said that shortly after Scotland Yard began looking into the hacking, five senior police investigators discovered that their own phones might have been broken into by The News of the World.
[...]
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/world/europe/17britain.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss
[...]
The crisis seemed far from over for Mr. Murdoch, as the scandal that began over illegal phone hacking by one of his newspapers, The News of the World, now defunct, widened to include a second newspaper in his stable, The Sunday Times, officials said Saturday.
[...]
While the police investigation has largely centered on cellphone hacking by journalists at The News of the World, it has now spread to the investigative unit of The Sunday Times, a person familiar with internal News Corporation discussions said. That person, as well as a person with knowledge of the scope of the inquiry, said the investigation would expand to include hacking into e-mail accounts and other online privacy invasions.
[...]
..
No comments:
Post a Comment