London: Jude Law is suing The Sunover alleged interception of his voice mails for stories about his private life, dragging another tabloid of Rupert Murdoch’s shaking media empire into the phone hacking scandal that has rocked Britain.
Law’s action pertains to the time when Rebekah Brooks was the editor and is believed to be the first such legal action against Murdoch’s best-selling daily title.
The group’s largest selling tabloid News of the World was closed down last week after the scandal engulfed it amid revelations that the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler was hacked, among others.
Read More
Fired up … Maroons coach Mal Meninga. Photo: Getty Images
THE revelations of phone hacking by Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World newspaper resurrected memories for a couple of executives of the media magnate’s Super League.
When officials of the News Ltd-funded rugby league organisation reported for work one Monday morning in 1995 at their headquarters in Elizabeth Street, Sydney, they found a small group of technicians busy near their desks.
Told they were ”sweepers”, the league men surveyed the offices, considered them neat and tidy and wondered why they needed vacuuming.
But there wasn’t a Hoover in sight, although J. Edgar Hoover, the old FBI chief, would have felt comfortable in the environment.
Read More
SEOUL – Allegations of bugging involving the state-run broadcaster KBS have sparked criticism over “unethical journalism,” with others denouncing the ongoing investigation into the claims as an infringement on press freedom.
The suspicion is that on June 23, a 33-year-old KBS reporter, surnamed Jang, bugged a closed-door meeting of the main opposition Democratic Party in which its key members discussed strategies against the move to raise the broadcaster’s viewing fees.
Read More
“Tapping and bugging is order of the day in this government. The government is operating under the shadow of suspicion, doubt and conspiracy,” said BJP senior leader Ravi Shankar Prasad.
He said Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee “does not trust the Home Minister [ P Chidambaram] and he writes to the Prime Minister on this.”
After ten months the secret letter is released, said Prasad.
Read More
MI5 wrongly collected subscriber data on 134 telephone numbers as a result of a software error, according to interception of communications commissioner Sir Paul Kennedy’s annual report.
A spreadsheet formatting error caused the service to apply for data on the identity of telephone numbers ending in 000, rather than the actual last three digits. “The subscriber data acquired had no connection or relevance to any investigation or operation being undertaken by the Security Service,” writes Kennedy.
He adds that the resulting material was destroyed, the formatting fault fixed and numbers are now checked manually before MI5 requests subscriber data from communications providers.
MI5 also acquired data on the histories of 927 internet protocol addresses without authorisation from a sufficiently senior officer, of GD3 rank or above. This was due to an “incorrect setting on the system used by the Security Service,” according to Kennedy, although the requests themselves were necessary and proportionate. MI5 has corrected the setting on its systems.
Overall, Kennedy reported that public authorities submitted 552,550 requests for communications data during 2010, and the number is increasing by about 5 per cent a year. He could not give a precise reason for the growth, but said “it is indicative of the growth in communications technology”, with “certain police forces” increasing their use.
Nearly two-thirds of requests for communications data – about communications rather than contents – were for subscriber data. This was usually part of an attempt to find the owner of a mobile phone. About a quarter of requests were for traffic data.
Sir Peter Gibson, the intelligence services commissioner, also published his annual report. Having been granted powers under the Identity Cards Act to monitor use of the National Identity Register by intelligence services, he reported that he is “not aware of any acquisition, storage and use made” by such organisations before the register was destroyed earlier this year.
He collected statistics on the number of warrants and authorisations issued to the security and intelligence agencies or armed forces, but these have only been included in a confidential annex. He defended the secrecy by saying publication would “assist those unfriendly to the UK were they able to know the extent of the work” of those agencies.
This article was originally published at Guardian Government Computing.
Guardian Government Computing is a business division of Guardian Professional, and covers the latest news and analysis of public sector technology. For updates on public sector IT, join the Government Computing Network here.
