Phone hacking scandal deepens

[David Guyatt]

Becky just wanted to clean up the NI system. I'm sure there was no intention at all to deprive the authorities of evidence...

Rebekah Brooks 'ordered deletion of millions of News International emails'

Phone-hacking trial hears 90m emails were recovered from company's system but millions of others were lost permanently

• Nick Davies
  
• The Guardian, Wednesday 27 November 2013 14.01 EST
  

Rebekah Brooks outside the Old Bailey in London. Photograph: Mark Thomas/Rex

Rebekah Brooks ordered the deletion of millions of emails on News International servers, but many of the messages survived as a result of technical problems and the instructions of other senior executives, the phone-hacking trial has heard.
A jury at the Old Bailey was told that 90m emails had been recovered from the company's system but that many millions of others had been lost permanently whether by accident or deliberate policy. Some of the recovered emails were read out in court as part of a set of agreed facts about the lost material.
The jury heard that from the period before 2005, very few messages survived simply because the company had no archiving system. After an archive was created in 2005, some 10.4m messages were naturally purged from the servers over the following five years and could not be recovered since there was no back-up system.
The court was told that by 2008 the servers were struggling to deal with the weight of stored traffic and that some users were having to wait 30 minutes to log on. In November 2009 at a time when, the jury has been told, there was publicity about phone hacking surviving emails recorded that senior executives were asking for "a more aggressive purging policy".
In January 2010, an email recorded a new official policy whose stated aim was "to eliminate in a consistent manner across NI (subject to compliance with legal and regulatory requirements as to retention) emails that could be unhelpful in the context of future litigation in which an NI company is a defendant".
By May 2010, it had been agreed that the company would delete from the system all messages sent up to 1 December 2007. The jury has heard that police originally investigated phone hacking at the News of the World during 2006 and that the paper's specialist hacker, Glenn Mulcaire, was jailed along with the royal editor Clive Goodman in January 2007.
In August 2010, Brooks emailed the IT department asking what progress had been made with the deletions. She was told: "This has and is being done" but that they had not sent out a company-wide message about their deletion plans "because it could be misconstrued if leaked externally".
In the same message, Brooks suggested a new cut-off date, saying that "everyone needs to know that anything before January 2010 will not be kept". The IT department replied, pointing out that the agreed policy was to delete only up to 1 December 2007. Brooks replied: "Yes to Jan 2010. Clean sweep."
During the following month, however, as the IT department attempted to implement the policy at the same time as they moved all their data to new servers in the company's new offices, they found "the task was putting extreme strain on the servers" and they halted the process.
On 7 October, Brooks wrote to ask about progress on email deletion. On 8 October, the company's legal director, Jon Chapman, wrote to the IT department referring to "current interest in the News of the World 2005/6 voicemail interceptions" and asking them to preserve messages sent by Andy Coulson and eight others.
From 10 January 2011, the company's new general manager, Will Lewis, sent a sequence of instructions asking for the preservation of more messages in connection with an internal inquiry which he was leading into Ian Edmondson, who, the jury has heard, had been suspended the previous month from his job as the News of the World's assistant editor.
At first, Lewis asked for the retention of messages sent and received by Coulson and 11 other named individuals. The following day, Lewis added 19 more names from the news and features departments. On 18 January, he added 52 more names. By 20 January, he was asking for some or all of the messages involving a total of 105 users to be extracted from the servers before any further deletions were made. The court was told that their messages were saved on to a laptop. Brooks, Coulson, Stuart Kuttner and Edmondson deny conspiring to intercept communications. The trial continues.