The newspapers’ detective agency

Interesting stuff on The Guardian’s front page about the newspapers which have made potentially illegal requests to private investigators to track down phone numbers and addresses of people they were stalking. The Daily Mail used a private investigator 1,728 times between 2000 and 2003, which is close to the total amount for every other newspaper combined — and with the Mail on Sunday, much more than the total amount. The News International stable is scarcely represented. The Guardian’s glee, of course, is probably even greater as a consequence of the money spent by its despised brother, The Observer – which used a PI 201 times. Now we need to know whether those ‘potentially illegal’ inquiries were, actually, illegal.