Were the police hacking phones too?

“As an American who spent many years in this underground industry, I can tell you that the British phone hacking scandal has exposed only a tiny part of a vast criminal network.” So Frank Ahearn wrote in The Spectator a few weeks ago: he spent his life as a “skip-tracer” (as they’re called in America), dealing in the black market for information. There are many clients, he says, and journalists are just one part of it. The people he worked for included husbands investigating wives, insurance companies trying to expose dodgy claims and – yes – even the police, using “skip-tracers” to solve cases.

Finally, this aspect of the British hacking industry is beginning to be made public. A legal campaign group called Justice has today claimed that, in Britain, illegal phone hacking may well have been carried out by police officers too. Its report “Freedom from Suspicion” includes a section discussing the police’s response to the News of the World scandal:

“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.”

OK, so they didn’t consider it a crime. But that doesn’t mean they were doing it themselves, does it? Actually, it might mean exactly that:

“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.”

Ahearn argued that what Britain knows as the News of the World hacking scandal was just the tip of a far larger iceberg – the thriving, global black market in illegal information. Glenn Muclaire, a former footballer, might just have been one of the few stupid enough to keep meticulous records of his crimes. Ahearn said that a professional “skip-tracer” had a motto: “once the information has gone to the client, erase all trace of the transaction”.

It makes you wonder just how big the British industry is, how many Glenn Mulcaires there are out there – and if this scandal may yet be far bigger than we realise.