In setting up the Leveson Inquiry, David Cameron made a major mistake. He accepted the premise – so powerfully advocated by Murdoch’s rivals – that hacking was a problem because the Dirty Digger was so wicked. The inquiry should have been into the black market for illegal information, of which the hacking scandal exposed a tiny part. Hacking is done by skip tracers, a phrase you never heard in the inquiry because it acknowledges the existence of a wider industry. Buyers are insurance companies, policemen, cuckolded husbands – anyone. The Spectator is (as far as I’m aware) the only publication to have drawn attention to the fact by running a piece by a reformed hacker (here) explaining how his market worked. This narrative didn’t suit anyone. The Guardian and the BBC (who led the prosecution) wanted to take out a commercial rival – Rupert Murdoch – and carefully set the parameters of the debate.
The Independent reveals today, that the Leveson Inquiry was told about the real situation. The Serious Organised Crime Agency submitted a report on all of this.
It is understood that one of the key hackers mentioned in the confidential Soca report admitted that 80 per cent of his client list was taken up by law firms, wealthy individuals and insurance companies. Only 20 per cent was attributed to the media…
It is to the credit of the Independent that it published this information: its selfish interest lay in making out that Murdoch was responsible for all the evil stuff. You certainly notice the Guardian taking far less interest in hacking at the Daily Mirror, as it upsets its general narrative about hacking emerging from once source alone: the blackness of Rupert Murdoch’s heart.
This is not the first time we have heard that others have been at it too, including the police. In November 2011 a report (pdf) by a group called Justice had this to say…
“In September 2009, however, Assistant Commissioner John Yates gave evidence to the House of Commons Committee on Culture, Media and Sport in which he stated with some confidence that the Metropolitan Police did not regard the activity of hacking into another person’s voicemail as a criminal offence if the voicemail had already been listened to by its intended recipient. For if the Metropolitan Police believed in good faith that section 1(1) of RIPA did not criminalise listening to voicemail or reading email after they had been heard or read by the intended recipient, then it was surely reasonable for the police to conclude that they themselves did not need an interception warrant to intercept voicemail or email in similar circumstances.”
Frank Ahearn, who wrote the Spectator piece, said his clients in the US certainly included policemen. His industry is global, he says, and the truth is that the lawyers, police and insurers are at it too. Why should this not be true for Britain? Especially given that so much of it was no illegal. Yates certainly seemed to believe that intercepting listened-to voicemail was no more illegal than going through someone’s rubbish. The concept of police and private investigators colluding on occasion is hardly new.
I hope the Independent keeps digging. It suits a great many media players not to acknowledge that the vast majority of what we know as the hacking scandal was mainly one imbecile – an footballer-turned-private investigator Glenn Mulcaire – who was stupid enough to keep records of every thing he ever did wrong. Don’t get me wrong: the hacking was deplorable, and the News of the World deserved to close. But how many more people like Mulcaire are there? How widespread is hacking now? It’s strange, after years of fuss, how little we have learned.
UPDATE: One of the few other examples of a hacker being caught, with records, is the case of Steve Whittamore. These private investigators sell perfectly-legal information, but also some under-the-counter dodgy info. The below, from the Information Commissioner, gives a sample of Whittamore’s media clients. There is a clear negative correlation between newspapers in the habit of using such services, and the propensity of these newspapers to be shocked by this practise and declare it the greatest scandal ever – yet not care much about wider abuses.
There are plenty of tricks the papers can deploy to exaggerate the wickedness of their rivals. If a tabloid was caught intercepting voicemail, then you shorten this to “phone hacking” which the average reader will assume means tapping into voice calls. If you’re the BBC, trying to stop your rival Sky being wholly-owned (and beefed up) by News Corporation, then you hype this up as much as you can – making sure your outrage over hacking is Murdoch-specific. And if you’re the BBC, you never admit to viewers that you are an actor in this media war and that your director-general signed a letter asking the government to stop Murdoch buying Sky. You keep to the pretence of impartiality, presenting yourself as a neutral (and shocked) observer. The games, the games.
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