Phone hacking scandal deepens

[David Guyatt]

"Broadsword to Danny Boy", "the chicken is in the pot" code phrases, DLB's (Dead Letter Boxes), and naming the "disappearing" of evidence from the police as "Operation Blackhawk".

Do these people really think like this? If it wasn't so f**cking pathetic it'd be funny.

Clearly they live and breathe in a different order of existence...

Phone-hacking trial told of Rebekah Brooks' attempt to 'hide evidence'

Jury hears a curious tale involving an underground car park, two pizzas and a famous movie line of Richard Burton's

• Nick Davies
  
• The Guardian, Monday 4 November 2013 21.17 GMT
  

Rebekah Brooks at the Old Bailey. Photograph: Mark Thomas/Rex Features

Rebekah Brooks and her husband hatched a complicated plot to hide evidence from the police only to be foiled by a conscientious cleaner, an Old Bailey jury has heard. It was a curious tale involving an underground car park, two pizzas and a famous movie line of Richard Burton's.
The story was told by the Crown as part of a wider allegation that, as the chief executive of News International, Brooks had tried to conceal evidence of wrongdoing at the News of the World by deleting email records and destroying her journalistic notebooks. She denies two counts of conspiring to pervert the course of justice.
The jury at the phone-hacking trial also heard an opening speech on behalf of Andy Coulson that the Crown had mis-stated his role as editor of the News of the World and that "it is his case that he was never party to an agreement to hack phones whatever others might have been doing on his watch".
Completing his three-day opening argument for the Crown, Andrew Edis QC took the jury back to July 2011, to the aftermath of the Guardian's disclosure of the hacking of Milly Dowler's phone. "A media firestorm was about to engulf the News of the World," he said. "You can imagine the extremely anxious, if not panic-stricken approach to these developments that must have been going on at the News of the World."
With a Scotland Yard inquiry closing in, Edis said, News International announced it would close the News of the World, and Brooks, a former editor of the paper, realised she faced arrest when she kept an appointment with police on Sunday 17 July. It was in this context, Edis claimed, that she and her husband Charlie Brooks came up with a plan to stop police finding computers and records at their country home, Jubilee Barn in Oxfordshire, and their flat at Chelsea Harbour, central London.
That Sunday morning, a chauffeur drove the pair in their Audi from Oxfordshire to London. Back at Jubilee Barn, Edis alleged, the head of security at News International, Mark Hanna, collected items which were to be concealed and set off in a black Range Rover to the company's office in Wapping. Hanna, meanwhile, was in charge of protecting the Brookses from "newspaper people" and others in what had been named internally Operation Blackhawk.
By noon the chauffeur had dropped off Charlie Brooks and driven Rebekah Brooks to Lewisham police station, waiting while she was formally arrested and questioned. At 12.15pm, Edis said, Charlie Brooks was caught by CCTV cameras at Chelsea Harbour going down to the underground car park, carrying a jiffy bag and a laptop computer which he appeared to leave in or around a waste bin. Two hours later, the CCTV recorded Hanna apparently removing both items. According to cell site information from his mobile phone, Hanna then returned to head office at Thomas More Square.
That afternoon the police searched both of the Brookses' homes. Edis suggested to the jury that among the material concealed from there were two iPads and an iPhone which, according to electronic records, the couple had been using recently. "The coast is clear," he said. "The police have been and gone. But of course, it may not be entirely clear because there may be police or press keeping an eye on what was going on."
This became important, the jury heard, when it was decided to return some "safe" items to the Brookses that evening.
Hanna texted one of his men: "Have plan. Can you call please?" Edis suggested to the jury that this security man had been tasked to go to News International headquarters at Wapping, to collect a big bin bag containing some of the concealed items and to take them to Chelsea Harbour where there was some risk of being spotted by police or press. "There has got to be some sort of pretext," he said. Which is where the pizzas allegedly became involved.
According to Edis, the security man had picked up two pizzas, phoned Charlie Brooks, delivered the pizzas to an unnamed man who came down to the underground car park, left the bin bag behind a bin and then texted his immediate boss with a line famously used by Richard Burton when communicating with his commanding officer in Where Eagles Dare.
"Broadsword to Danny Boy" he texted, adding: "Pizzas delivered. The chicken is in the pot."
His boss texted back: "Amateurs! We should have done a DLB or a brush contact on the riverside. Log the hours as pizza delivery." Edis explained that a DLB is a dead letter box of the kind used by spies and that what the text as a whole meant was: "You have done the secret little job. We could have done that better. Log in the hours as pizza delivery because you can't log in the hours as perverting the course of justice."
"The whole exercise," said Edis, "was quite complicated and quite risky and liable to go wrong." On the following morning, the prosecutor told the jury, it had indeed gone wrong: when the chauffeur drove the Brookses to see their solicitor, leaving the bin bag still behind the waste bin.
In their absence, a cleaner, Mr Nascimento, had noticed the bag and its contents and taken it to his manager. When the Brookses returned, CCTV records showed, Charlie Brooks had searched the area around the waste bin and texted the security man who had left the bin bag there: "Need to get Rebekah some lunch. Pizza."
But by then, said Edis, Nascimento's manager had decided to call the police "which is how the police ended up with the bin bag".
Separately, the jury heard that in the previous week, on Friday 8 July, the day after the closure of the News of the World was announced, Rebekah Brooks and her personal assistant, Cheryl Carter, had arranged to remove from the company archive seven boxes allegedly containing all the notebooks Brooks had used from 1995 to 2007. Carter had falsely told the archivist that they were her own notebooks, Edis said, and then falsely told police that Brooks had not been in the office on this day. "It was quite dishonest," the prosecutor said. The notebooks had never been found.
Rebekah and Charlie Brooks, Cheryl Carter and Mark Hanna all deny conspiring to pervert the course of justice.
The trial continues.

[Peter Lemkin]

Pizzagate? Bingate?::

[Magda Hassan]

"Broadsword to Danny Boy", "the chicken is in the pot" code phrases, DLB's (Dead Letter Boxes), and naming the "disappearing" of evidence from the police as "Operation Blackhawk".

Do these people really think like this? If it wasn't so f**cking pathetic it'd be funny.

Clearly they live and breathe in a different order of existence...

Seems it is all a bit of a game for them. Yes, pathetic.

[Magda Hassan]

Murdoch hacking in Oz.

Mark Scott promises investigation after The Australian leaks ABC salary details

Posted 37 minutes ago
"First and foremost, I want to apologise that information like this has not been securely managed," he said in an email to staff.ABC managing director Mark Scott has apologised to staff over the release of individual pay details by The Australian, calling the figures "wrong and out-of-date", and vowing to investigate how the newspaper obtained the information.
"Staff are entitled to be concerned and upset.
"I have asked for a full and complete investigation about how this highly confidential material was accessed."
The Australian this morning published an article focusing on the salaries of major ABC identities such as Tony Jones and Leigh Sales, as well those of senior managers.
It also published a list identifying the top 100 salaries, ranging from $678,940 to $171,041, saying the newspaper has obtained documents containing a breakdown of the amount spent in 2011-12 on 5,511 ABC employees.
The article compares salaries across different states and programs, as well as publishing several salaries of staff earning well below the $171,000 mark.
Mr Scott says it is unfair that ABC staff alone should have their salaries revealed, while other media companies have no such requirement, and doing so puts the corporation at a disadvantage.

AUDIO: Mark Scott speaks with ABC 774's Jon Faine(ABC News)
"The matter of whether ABC staff salaries should be publicly disclosed was subject to debate and a special 'in-camera' hearing by a Senate Committee some years ago," he said in the email.
"Whilst the public might be curious about what particular on-air talent earn, the ABC operates in a highly competitive media environment.
"For the ABC to be the only media organisation where salaries are revealed puts us at a significant disadvantage to our competitors."
He told ABC 774's Jon Faine the figures show in general that high-profile staff are not overpaid compared to their commercial counterparts, and the release will be seized on by competitors keen to lure away ABC talent.
"Today, most private sector media executives looking down that list will not believe the salary rates of the ABC compared to what's paid in commercial radio and television-land," Mr Scott said.
"I'm concerned that this gives people like David Gyngell a list, a target, and it hurts the ABC's ability to attract and retain talent."
According to today's article Mr Scott earns $678,940 per annum, while media website Mumbrella reports his counterpart at Channel 7 earns $2.6 million, and Nine CEO David Gyngell "looks set to pocket a package of around $10m a year".
News Corp has defended the release, with a spokesman saying that as the ABC is a publicly-funded institution, the public is entitled to know details of individual salaries.
But the president of Community and Public Sector Union, which represents ABC staff, says the release is motivated by commercial interests, and News Corp is attempting to reduce the ABC's funding.
"News Corp of course is trying to make people pay for online content so there's a clear commercial interest here for the ABC's competitors to try to reduce ABC's level of funding," Michael Tull said.
"The only thing that really comes out of the disclosures is the reality that the ABC is paying its top online talent much less than they could earn in a commercial world."

20 November, 2013 11:13AM AEDT

ABC salary leak: Mark Scott talks to Jon Faine

ABC Managing Director Mark Scott defends secrecy over staff salaries, while Jon Faine corrects the Australian's figure by revealing exactly how much he earns.

00:00

00:00

Download this mp3 file

The Australian newspaper has published what it claims is leaked information about the salaries of the ABC's highest paid staff.
However, some of the information is either out of date or wrong says ABC Managing Director Mark Scott.
"Clearly they have got a cache of confidential salary and payroll information," says Mark Scott. "I'm very concerned about it."
"An investigation's been launched this morning into how that information could have got out," he says.
He says a Senate hearing has already determined that it is not in the public interest for the ABC to release salary information because it would damage the Corporation's ability to retain staff.
During the interview Jon Faine reveals the Australian's claim he earns $285,249 is out of date.
"I'll cheerfully confirm I was paid that a few years ago, I'm actually paid a little bit more than that now," says Jon Faine.
"I've just agreed to come back for $300,000 a year," says Jon Faine.




"So there you go, put that in your pipe and smoke it at the Australian."

[David Guyatt]

The Dirty Digger digs a deeper hole for his UK journalists by telling them that, in future, they must reveal all their sources on their expenses claims.

The Digger has just about lost his grip on his UK print media journos with this latest diktat.

Revealing sources - especially in light of News Corps recent passing of similar 'sources' information to Scotland Yard in order to protect Rupe's own backside - is almost equivalent to closing his titles down, as henceforward, only official handouts would constitute the news.

Read the full story on Exaro.

[Magda Hassan]

Brooks Had Discreet Coulson Meeting Before Police Hacking Probe

By Jeremy Hodges - Nov 25, 2013 11:34 PM ET

Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive officer of News Corp. (NWSA)'s U.K. unit, had a "discreet" meeting with Andy Coulson days before he stepped down as prime minister David Cameron's director of communications, prosecutors said.
Brooks asked her assistant in an e-mail to book "somewhere discreet," for the Jan. 14, 2011, breakfast meeting at London's Halkin Hotel, prosecution lawyer Mark Bryant-Heron told jurors in the phone-hacking trial today. One week later, U.K. police began a probe into wrongdoing atNews Corp.'s News of the World tabloid leading to both Coulson and Brooks's resignations.
Brooks and Coulson, both 45-year-old former editors of the tabloid, are among eight people on trial for a series of offenses related to phone hacking and bribery at News Corp. publications. Company Chairman Rupert Murdoch closed the News of the World in 2011 in an attempt to contain a scandal over revelations the tabloid hacked the phone of a missing teenager.
Coulson resigned from the newspaper in 2007 when the News of the World's royal reporter,Clive Goodman, and a private investigator were jailed for intercepting voice-mail messages. He was hired to work on Cameron's campaign team later that year. The phone-hacking scandal resurfaced with the police probe in 2011.
Coulson and Brooks had a six-year affair that ended in 2004, prosecutors said earlier in the trial.
Other defendants include Stuart Kuttner, the 73-year-old former managing editor of the News of the World, and Ian Edmondson, a 44-year-old former news editor, who are both accused of phone hacking. Goodman, 56, is charged with conspiring to commit misconduct in a public office while he was the royal reporter at the News of the World.
Brooks's husband, Charlie, her former assistant Cheryl Carter, and the U.K. unit's former head of security, Mark Hanna, face charges of conspiring to pervert the course of justice.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-25...probe.html

[David Guyatt]

The wriggling continues...

Andy Coulson 'was warned of police hacking suspicions seven years ago'

Court hears recorded phone call in which Clive Goodman told former NoW editor of 'quite massive' case against Glenn Mulcaire

• Nick Davies
  
• The Guardian, Monday 25 November 2013 16.20 EST
  

Link to video: Andy Coulson warned by Clive Goodman about possible extent of phone hacking - audio recordingAndy Coulson was warned seven years ago that the police had a "quite massive" case against the News of the World's specialist phone-hacker, Glenn Mulcaire, according to a phone call taped by one of his reporters that was played at the Old Bailey on Monday.
The paper's royal editor, Clive Goodman, also told Coulson in the recorded conversation that police had found "voicemail and Pin numbers" at Mulcaire's address in 2006, and that there were "danger points" for the newspaper in documents obtained by the police at that time.
Goodman warned his editor that Mulcaire was being "very difficult" and "rapidly emerging as something of a nutter". Referring to the hacker and his lawyers, Goodman said at one point: "You've got to worry, haven't you, really to wonder whether they're keeping shtum."
The jury in the phone-hacking trial was told that Goodman secretly taped the phone call with his editor in November 2006 after he had been arrested by police but before the reporter went to court to admit intercepting the voicemails of messages left for aides to Princes William and Harry.
During the conversation, Coulson who was listening to the recording in the dock repeatedly assured the royal editor that he intended to continue to employ him. "You have it from me that, you know, I absolutely see a future for you here," he said. But the jury has been told that after Goodman was jailed in January 2007 he was immediately sacked.
In the call Goodman said: "The case against Glenn [Mulcaire] is quite massive really. All sorts of stuff they picked up in his place, as I told you, the other names, PIN numbers of people and my concern is I don't somehow become associated, I don't somehow get binned off as the, you know, instrument."
Goodman warned Coulson that there was "a real nasty sting in the tail" in the News of the World's phone-billing system which, unlike some switchboards, recorded every number that was called. Later, he asked his editor if he was aware of "danger points" in the documentation held by police.
Following an exchange, Coulson then said: "You know, there's been all sorts of names and all sorts of allegations. It comes down to what they think they can prove. And indeed what the truth is. Those names mean absolutely nothing to me. From what I understand, they're not tracing those names back to the paper … there's no direct link to the News of the World."
"No," replied Goodman. "They've found the voicemails and the PIN numbers at Mulcaire's address."
Goodman said the police had found a contract with Mulcaire, linking the paper's northern editor, Greg Miskiw, to a story about somebody who was claiming they had been hacked but there was no forensic evidence to prove it. "It's an assumption," he said, "but given what Mulcaire does …" "Sure," said Coulson.
"People might think it's fairly solid," Goodman continued.
Goodman went on to explain that Greg Miskiw was in contact with Mulcaire: "I think he's just telling Glenn not to be an idiot as much as he can. You know, without getting too deeply involved himself, coz clearly he doesn't want that can of worms opened."
Coulson replied: "Yeah, quite difficult."
Separately, Colin Montgomerie's former wife, Eimear Cook, was accused of lying to the jury after claiming that Rebekah Brooks had discussed phone-hacking with her at a lunch in September 2005. Cook said Brooks had also talked about an incident when police had been called to deal with her allegedly assaulting her then partner, Ross Kemp an incident which, the court was told, did not happen until November, six weeks after the agreed date of the lunch.
Answering questions from the prosecution, Cook said she remembered that Brooks described how easy it was to listen to another person's voicemail if they failed to change the factory-set PIN code and that she had also described how newspapers, including the Sun which she herself was editing, had reported the police being called to deal with her argument with Kemp and how she had had to explain it to Rupert Murdoch.
. But Jonathan Laidlaw QC, for Rebekah Brooks, told her: "This never happened … not only did it not happen. It could not have happened." The jury was shown Mrs Brooks' desk diary which showed that the lunch had taken place on September 20 2005. The Crown had earlier agreed that this was the date. The jury was then shown newspaper reports of the police dealing with her alleged assault on Ross Kemp, which had not occured until November. Cook replied: "I didn't make it up. I have no grievance against Mrs Brooks personally whatsoever. I didn't make it up. Something was said to that effect."
Brooks, Coulson, Stuart Kuttner and Ian Edmondson deny conspiring to intercept communications. Coulson and Goodman also deny conspiring to commit misconduct in public office. The trial continues.

[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.

[Magda Hassan]

[ATTACH=CONFIG]5491[/ATTACH]
Did she do that?

[ATTACH=CONFIG]5492[/ATTACH]
Or was it more like that.

[David Guyatt]

I've heard some bollocks in my time, but the former NoW Managing Editor claiming to be puzzled by Goodman's expenses claims, takes the blue ribbon prize for 2013 tosh.

Would a managing editor repeatedly sanction payments if he didn't know what they were for. Not bloody likely. The clue in the deceit, imo, is the word "managing" in his title. That was his job. Not to be puzzled, but to know.

Guilty m'laud. Guilty as hell.

But they'll all get away with I suspect.

Ex-News of the World editor puzzled by payment requests, hacking trial hears

Stuart Kuttner says Clive Goodman would ask for approval of payments of up to £300 for stories that were 'little snippets'

• Lisa O'Carroll
  
• theguardian.com, Tuesday 17 December 2013 14.49 GMT
  

Former News of the World editor Stuart Kuttner says he was puzzled by some requests for payments for stories by Clive Goodman. Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP

Clive Goodman, the former royal editor on the News of the World jailed in relation to phone-hacking offences would rarely "stir himself" and go out and get stories, it was claimed at the Old Bailey.
Stuart Kuttner, 73, the paper's former managing editor, told police in an interview after his arrest in 2011, that he was puzzled with the payment requests by Goodman for stories and by his constant presence in the office.
He said Goodman was "irritated" by queries over his requests for payments because he was a former news editor who would have had the authority to sanction payments himself, adding that he never understood why he did not leave the office.
He continued: "I was not his line boss, but eventually, I learned that no matter what, he would not stir himself and go out and cover stories, that seemed to be a negation of a reporter's role."
According to a transcript of his police interview read out to the jury in the Old Bailey phone-hacking trial on Tuesday, Kuttner said eventually he, and the paper's then editor Rebekah Brooks, "did a job in Paris like two journalists that we'd wanted Clive to do."
He told police they went to see "a man called Johnny Bryant" who had had a relationship with Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, and who "had come round to the view that in return for a lot of money he'd sell his story."
Neil Wallis, who was then working for the Sun, was also on the train. "Unfortunately, whoever ran Eurostar managed to make it the longest ever journey to Paris 17 hours."
Kuttner said Goodman would ask to approve payments which, he felt, were sometimes "out of kilter with what appeared in the paper" up to £300 for "little snippets".
In the 2011 police interview, Kuttner repeatedly denied all knowledge of phone hacking, including an alleged conspiracy with Andy Coulson, who was editor between 2003 and 2007, when he had to resign over the conviction and subsequent jailing of Goodman in relation to interception of the voice messages of members of the royal household.
Asked if he "ever conspired with Mr Coulson to hack in to mobile phones," he replied: "No, I did not."
Asked if he was "aware of him conspiring with others or actually hacking into mobile phones himself," he replied: "No, I am not."
He said he liked Coulson, who he described as "competitive, astute" and more "enthusiastic" than some others he had dealt with in his 29-year career.
Asked if he ever knew prior to Goodman's arrest that he was tasking Glenn Mulcaire to hack phones, he said: "Absolutely not". He said the first he heard of Mulcaire "possibly" was when he was arrested along with Goodman in 2006.
He also denied knowing that Goodman was putting through payments for a man called Alexander, a pseudonym used by Mulcaire.
"I trusted staff, I had no reason on earth to think that Clive Goodman or indeed anybody was inventing people," he told police.
"Why Mr Goodman should invent another person, I've no idea. If he was paying Mulcaire, he should have been paying Mulcaire."
Kuttner said he never knew the identities of the people he was paying "beyond the information on the docket".
Asked if there was a culture of inventing names for payment on the paper, he said: "Not that I'm aware."
The trial continues.