A little surprising that a member of the royal family had no
trustworthy advisor or technology aide to warn against 1990s cellphone
message boxes. It's not like nobody knew. Likely someone did, but to
no avail. Same for politicians with their
definitely-not-quite-end-to-end calling and messaging. More than ever
security has to be for everyone because now prominent and key people
are just like everyone. Well, we always knew the royals are just like
us, gawd blessem!
Not all that surprising if you've worked with powerful people. For most of them, technical suggestions don't matter much and are ultimately weighed on a rubric of "whether someone else (who is also important) is doing the same".
Often times I think lawsuit culture in the US is ridiculous, but maybe its justified in some cases. I'm astounded that he only got $180k from these lawsuits. I would expect a conviction like this to result in sums that would bankrupt the news paper. Even if dozens of other celebrities got the similar amounts it would be low. Also this article doesn't discuss the felony aspects of phone hacking. Was it not illgeal in the UK in the 90s?
I might have missed it, but I don't recall seeing anywhere that they identified a specific person who was doing the hacking so I'm not sure who they would criminally charge. I believe it was definitely illegal as they had a computer misuse act in 1990.
The BBC article on the subject mentioned somewhere around £100M of legal fees that were incurred in this case, so the damages are just the tip of the iceberg of what the newspaper company is on the hook for.
The UK legal system damage calculation actually requires some justification of the damages sustained by the claimant.
I would expect, in a just system, jail time for every "reporter" who did this, and every executive who approved of it.
To stop the business I would expect a minimum payout of the entire revenue (not profit) of every published article and paper, payable to in its entirety to each individual victim.
Instead none of the criminals are in jail, and the financial penalty was negligible compared to the income that came about from the crime.
This is the Daily Mirror, who has been doing exactly this for decades. This kind of "activist" behavior is called "tabloid journalism" because of the tabloid format in which the Daily Mirror is printed.
(Along with a few others. I don't know why the half-broadsheet format seems especially popular with such disreputably tactics. But regardless, this is absolutely nothing new for the Daily Mirror and its ilk.)
It's kind of different from activist journalism. "Vendetta journalism" is more "I have a personally grudge against person X, so let's hound this person to settle the score". A lot of times this all revolves around incredibly petty and childish bickering.
I vaguely recall it being possible at one point for an attacker to get into someone's voice mail by spoofing the target's caller ID and calling their carrier's voice mail access number. Was it something trivial to pull off like that? (Not to trivialize how violating that would be.)
Another was some networks had a voicemail number you could dial into from abroad and then enter the phone number and pin of the voicemail box you wanted to access. Before this scandal nobody has ever changed that pin, or known about it, in the entire history of british telephony.
Yeah this was a big one. You’d get a mobile phone with voicemail enabled, and you could call 123 from your phone to collect your voicemails without a PIN.
You could also call something like 07700007123 and then it would ask you to type your phone number and remote access PIN. Almost nobody knew that you could do that, and so almost nobody changed their remote access PIN from the default 1111 or 1234 or 0000.
Yes, it was a combo of either calling from any number and guessing the PIN (which was also likely to be still the default) or number spoofing to bypass the PIN altogether.
One 150-year-old newspaper, News of the World, shut down in 2011 when it came out that they'd hacked the voicemail of a murder victim and, prior to that, several British military personnel who were killed in action. It wasn't publicized as to whether this was done via spoofing or via access to law enforcement tools.
A lot of people overseas have the idea that British newspapers are prestigious titans of journalism due to how old and widespread they are, and I could scream from the heavens about how wrong that is. The tabloids are a dire stain on our society.
This wasn't just Prince Harry or celebrities who were victims of phone hacking, it was ordinary people who weren't prepared for such an industrial violation of privacy and sheer decency from multiple newspapers. And it went on for decades[1]. In one case the mother of a dead teenager thought her daughter was alive because her phone's voicemail was being accessed. It turns out that The News of the World was doing it, it was such a widespread thing. And I'll never forgive the Conservatives for gutting the Leveson Inquiry[2] which went neck-deep in exploring how much of a mess the industry was.
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The sad thing about the court finding that Piers Morgan knew of the phone hacking is that it'll do nothing to him. The man is mired in decades of scandal and certain connections he made allowed him to bounce back every time. That, and the tabloid industry has an incentive not to act against their own lest all their dirty secrets get out there.
I could talk about Morgan all day, but I'm still in awe at how we let him recover his career after 2004. He put British soldiers at risk when he published faked photos of British soldiers torturing Iraqis, and when they were found as fake, he outright refused to apologise for it and got fired. That ought to be a career-ending move, but having connections with Murdoch lets you get away with anything.
Maybe it depends on which sea you mean, but in my primary school, decades ago, British 'press' was held up as an example of what happens when a nation doesn't take newspapers seriously.
What does “taking newspapers seriously” mean? Does it mean limiting free press to “serious” news, or does it mean convincing people that celebrity gossip is boring and they should read investment news instead?
It means that they are wasting their freedom of the press; an example of where newspaper-like productions have become divorced from journalism. People on reading gossip, publishers on shameless pandering and moneymaking.
>In the latest revelations, people linked to missing Madeleine McCann and murdered schoolgirl Danielle Jones are said to have had their mobile messages broken into by the Sunday tabloid’s journalists.
>Police have also contacted families of victims of the July 7 bombings to warn them their phones may have been accessed in the days following the 2005 terrorist attacks.
...
>The News of the World has been accused of hacking on an “industrial scale”.
>Notebooks seized from former employee Glenn Mulcaire – the private investigator at the centre of the scandal who was jailed in 2007 – revealed 11,000 pages of documents and several thousand names of targets.
>Police are now examining every high-profile case involving the murder and abduction of children since 2001.
Linking to a Mirror article about the issue seems kinda shitty. I wouldn't be surprised if they had also hacked the phones of every one of the people mentioned in that story.
Had to do a double take skimming through the headlines. “Woah, did Prince Harry win a Pwn2Own competition or something? That’s badass! Oh…yeah. That makes more sense.”
46 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 96.8 ms ] threadThe UK legal system damage calculation actually requires some justification of the damages sustained by the claimant.
To stop the business I would expect a minimum payout of the entire revenue (not profit) of every published article and paper, payable to in its entirety to each individual victim.
Instead none of the criminals are in jail, and the financial penalty was negligible compared to the income that came about from the crime.
Fast forward to today, it seems journalists are increasingly engaged in activism.
I'm also not sure anyone really expects high journalistic standards from tabloids. This kind of junk 'reporting' has been in Britain since the 1700s.
(Along with a few others. I don't know why the half-broadsheet format seems especially popular with such disreputably tactics. But regardless, this is absolutely nothing new for the Daily Mirror and its ilk.)
I vaguely recall it being possible at one point for an attacker to get into someone's voice mail by spoofing the target's caller ID and calling their carrier's voice mail access number. Was it something trivial to pull off like that? (Not to trivialize how violating that would be.)
Another was some networks had a voicemail number you could dial into from abroad and then enter the phone number and pin of the voicemail box you wanted to access. Before this scandal nobody has ever changed that pin, or known about it, in the entire history of british telephony.
You could also call something like 07700007123 and then it would ask you to type your phone number and remote access PIN. Almost nobody knew that you could do that, and so almost nobody changed their remote access PIN from the default 1111 or 1234 or 0000.
One 150-year-old newspaper, News of the World, shut down in 2011 when it came out that they'd hacked the voicemail of a murder victim and, prior to that, several British military personnel who were killed in action. It wasn't publicized as to whether this was done via spoofing or via access to law enforcement tools.
because they listened to the voicemail the family of the victim thought the victim may have been alive.
no jail time means none of the people doing this will stop.
no meaningful financial penalties mean no businesses will stop, and no jail time for executives that approved it means they'll remain ok with it.
This wasn't just Prince Harry or celebrities who were victims of phone hacking, it was ordinary people who weren't prepared for such an industrial violation of privacy and sheer decency from multiple newspapers. And it went on for decades[1]. In one case the mother of a dead teenager thought her daughter was alive because her phone's voicemail was being accessed. It turns out that The News of the World was doing it, it was such a widespread thing. And I'll never forgive the Conservatives for gutting the Leveson Inquiry[2] which went neck-deep in exploring how much of a mess the industry was.
---
The sad thing about the court finding that Piers Morgan knew of the phone hacking is that it'll do nothing to him. The man is mired in decades of scandal and certain connections he made allowed him to bounce back every time. That, and the tabloid industry has an incentive not to act against their own lest all their dirty secrets get out there.
I could talk about Morgan all day, but I'm still in awe at how we let him recover his career after 2004. He put British soldiers at risk when he published faked photos of British soldiers torturing Iraqis, and when they were found as fake, he outright refused to apologise for it and got fired. That ought to be a career-ending move, but having connections with Murdoch lets you get away with anything.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_of_news_media_phone_h...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveson_Inquiry
Maybe it depends on which sea you mean, but in my primary school, decades ago, British 'press' was held up as an example of what happens when a nation doesn't take newspapers seriously.
https://www.private-eye.co.uk
Also podcasted as 'Page 94' and the editor Ian Hislop is a longtime panelist on highly (have I got news for you), can be seen on youtube.
*Mr Hislop's description of Boris Johnson coming out of make-up and deliberately messing up his hair is very telling.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/news-world-phone-hacki...
>In the latest revelations, people linked to missing Madeleine McCann and murdered schoolgirl Danielle Jones are said to have had their mobile messages broken into by the Sunday tabloid’s journalists.
>Police have also contacted families of victims of the July 7 bombings to warn them their phones may have been accessed in the days following the 2005 terrorist attacks.
...
>The News of the World has been accused of hacking on an “industrial scale”.
>Notebooks seized from former employee Glenn Mulcaire – the private investigator at the centre of the scandal who was jailed in 2007 – revealed 11,000 pages of documents and several thousand names of targets.
>Police are now examining every high-profile case involving the murder and abduction of children since 2001.
edit: nvm, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38658599