Phone hacking scandal deepens

[Magda Hassan]

Hacking inquiry spreads to Murdoch's Sky News

April 24, 2012 - 12:56PM

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John Ryley of Sky News leaves the High Court after giving evidence to The Leveson Inquiry. Photo: GETTY/Peter Macdiarmid

Britain's broadcast regulator announced it was investigating email hacking by Rupert Murdoch's Sky News, only minutes before the channel's head of news told the Leveson inquiry into media ethics that his station had broken the law and misled a senior judge.
An Ofcom spokesman said that the investigation would centre on "fairness and privacy issues" stemming from Sky News' admission that it had authorised journalists to hack into email accounts to score exclusives.
Sky's head of news, John Ryley, appeared before the Leveson inquiry yesterday ahead of the appearance tomorrow and Thursday of James and Rupert Murdoch.
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John Darwin and his wife Anne Darwin faked John's death in a 2002 canoe accident before starting a new life in Panama with the insurance payout. Sky News has admitted hacking Anne Darwin's email account. Photo: AFP/Cleveland Police

Mr Ryley told the inquiry that the chief executive of BSkyB knew that a Sky News reporter was hacking email accounts even though it was "a breach of the criminal law".
Jeremy Darroch was "made aware" last September that reporter Gerard Tubb had been given permission by his managers to hack into the email account of Lianne Smith, who was awaiting trial for killing her children after her husband was convicted of child rape.
Mr Ryley also said it would have been "obvious" to executives that Tubb had hacked the emails of "canoe man" John Darwin in 2008 because of his reports based on what he found in the emails. Darwin had been accused of faking his own death to allow his wife to claim on his life insurance policy.
Mr Ryley has previously defended the actions of Tubb, saying his investigations breached Darwin's privacy but were in the public interest, but Lord Justice Leveson asked him: "What you were doing was not just breaching someone's privacy, it was breaking the criminal law?"
Mr Ryley said: "It was."
Lord Justice Leveson continued: "Where does the [Ofcom code of conduct] give the right to a breach of the criminal law?"
Mr Ryley replied: "It doesn't."
Simon Cole, the managing editor of Sky News at the time, resigned this month when Sky confirmed he had given authorisation to Mr Tubb to hack Darwin's email account in 2008 and also Lianne Smith's emails in 2011.
Mr Ryley acknowledged this month that hacking had happened twice under his watch, a revelation that spread Britain's phone hacking scandal to a new branch of Murdoch's media empire and dealt a further blow to the tycoon's hope of winning full control of Sky News's owner, British Sky Broadcasting Group.
Sky has insisted that the computer breaches were carried out in the public interest, noting that, in one case, it had handed over the hacked information to police.
But legal experts say that such an argument carries little legal weight, and Lord Justice Brian Leveson, the judge charged with investigating Britain's media in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal that erupted at Murdoch's News of the World tabloid, seemed incredulous when quizzing Ryley about the practice Monday.
Lord Leveson said that Sky might get away with the hacking if prosecutors decide not to press charges, "but at the end of the day you've committed a crime".
"I understand," Mr Ryley said.
In a terse exchange with inquiry lawyer David Barr, Mr Ryley said it was "highly unlikely in the future that Sky will consider breaking the law".
"But you're not ruling it out?" Mr Barr asked.
"I am pretty much ruling it out," Mr Ryley said. "There might be an occasion, but it would be very, very rare."
Mr Ryley also admitted that Sky News had misled Leveson's inquiry when it insisted, in a 2011 letter, that the channel had never intercepted communications. He acknowledged that those assurances were false.
"It is very regrettable indeed, and I apologise," he told the inquiry.
Lord Leveson's inquiry was set up following last year's revelations that journalists at Murdoch's top-selling Sunday newspaper News of the World routinely broke the law to stay ahead of the competition. The practice incensed Britain, particularly when it emerged that Murdoch journalists had sought to violate the privacy of a murdered teenager.
The scandal has since spread to Murdoch's The Sun, where many prominent journalists have been arrested on suspicion of bribery, and The Times of London, which is being sued over email hacking.




Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/hacking-inqu...z1svcCJUrH