Sitting in his office in the home counties last week, a private investigator
leant across his desk and spoke about one of his skills: the art of
obtaining private information on celebrities and other public figures. From
an ex-directory phone number to banking files and health records, they were,
he explained, all readily available from the right person at the end of the
phone, whether they worked at BT or the NHS. “It’s about assessing the
psychology of the person you are speaking to and then convincing them to
give you the information,” he said.
“You have to know the terminology of the organisation you are targeting and
know which people might legitimately be able to ask for the information you
are after. Then you pose as them. You need to be confident and personable.”
The investigator admitted he has sold such information to newspapers, but this
business was an increasingly risky trade. He said he had been investigated
and subsequently charged by the Information Commissioner for alleged
breaches of data protection laws and was no longer willing to work for the
media.
His main clients now are insurance companies, for which discovering evidence
of a criminal record can be a quick and easy way to reject a claim.
This weekend, the work of such investigators faces scrutiny after The Guardian
claimed that the News of the World, which is published by News
International, the owner of The Sunday Times, had used private investigators
to hack illegally into mobile phone voicemails. The Guardian said there were
“thousands” of victims but produced no evidence for its extravagant claims.
Part of this was old news. In January 2007 Clive Goodman, the News of the
World’s former royal reporter, and Glen Mulcaire, a private investigator,
were convicted and jailed for hacking into hundreds of mobile phone
messages, including those of aides to the royal family.
The scandal also cost Andy Coulson his job as editor of News of the World. He
is now the director of communications for the Conservative party under David
Cameron.
The new claims, however, suggested that such practices were not just the
province of one rogue reporter, but a systematic operation that had targeted
thousands of phones. John Prescott, the former deputy prime minister, Tessa
Jowell, the Olympics minister, and Gwyneth Paltrow, the actress, were said
to be among the victims. But again no evidence was produced to show that
they had been on anything but a wish list.
On Friday evening, News International issued a strong rebuttal. It described
some of the most serious allegations as “irresponsible”, “unsubstantiated”
and “false”.
Specifically, it denied that police had uncovered evidence of News of the
World staff, or private investigators commissioned by them, hacking into
thousands of phones. News of the World executives also deny sanctioning
payments for illegal phone intercepts.
John Yates, the assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan police who reviewed
the Goodman case files last week, had already announced that he had found
nothing that warranted further investigations or charges.
Andy Hayman, the former Met assistant commissioner, who led the original
inquiry, said yesterday there was only evidence that a handful of phones had
been tampered with and “we put our best detectives on the case and left no
stone unturned”.
By now, however, a hue and cry was gathering pace across Westminster and the
BBC. There were calls for Cameron to sack Coulson, for newspaper executives
to be hauled before committees of MPs and for police investigations to be
reopened.
For some politicians there was a delicious taste of schadenfreude after Fleet
Street exposed their fiddling of parliamentary expenses. Now the biter was
being bitten.
On Friday, Tom Watson, the former Labour minister, reflected the mood, bowling
up to a journalist from a national newspaper and tugging at the reporter’s
House of Commons pass. “You won’t be needing this much longer,” he grinned.
First it was bankers, then MPs and maybe now it is the turn of the press. In a
recession we all love someone to blame.
In the late 1990s, the rather dishevelled figure of Benjamin Pell, a former
trainee lawyer, could often be spotted around London’s Chancery Lane,
scooping up bags of rubbish from outside law firms. Inside was pay-dirt for
national newspapers.
Pell, it later emerged, was one of the most successful story-getters of those
years. He obtained papers relating to the libel case between Neil Hamilton,
the former Tory MP, and the Harrods owner Mohamed al-Fayed; documents
showing how Jonathan Aitken, the former Tory minister, had been involved in
setting up arms deals in Saudi Arabia and even Sir Elton John’s enormous
bill for flowers. Every story came out of the bins.
David Leigh, the investigations editor at The Guardian, is reported to have
offered Pell – known as “Benji the Binman” - £100 on one occasion and put
him in touch with a freelance journalist who could help Pell find markets
for future stories.
At the time none of the journalists, including some from The Sunday Times,
appeared unduly concerned about Pell’s bin raids.
“The real issue is: should journalists use information from unsavoury
sources?” said Leigh in a letter to Press Gazette, the trade magazine, in
April 2005, when details of Pell’s activities were exposed. “The answer is,
‘Yes, if it’s true and in the public interest; no, if it’s merely
tittle-tattle acquired with a chequebook’.”
This justification was of scant help to Pell, who was subsequently convicted
on five counts of theft from bins.
It was not just rifling through rubbish that was landing the scoops, however.
Many reporters would use private detectives, who could obtain a wealth of
information on an individual, much of which would be considered
confidential. While these private detectives were sometimes being used for
legitimate investigations in the public interest, they were also used by the
tabloids to trawl for stories on celebrities.
In 2006 Richard Thomas, then the information commissioner, published a report
on the unlawful trade in private information, What Price Privacy?. It
included a tariff for various categories of information. For example,
obtaining an ex-directory telephone number cost £75, while a car
number-plate check to match it to an address cost £150.
Six months later Thomas provided more details of one of his team’s cases,
Operation Motorman, which had targeted the private investigator Stephen
Whittamore. In a raid on Whittamore’s Hampshire home, details of 305
journalists who had used the investigator’s services between April 2001 and
March 2003 were found.
According to the report, more than 50 Daily Mail journalists had bought
material from Whittamore on 952 occasions. Other newspapers on the list
included the Daily Mirror (681 transactions) the News of the World (228),
The Observer (103) and The Sunday Times (4).
While Thomas suggested that the evidence bolstered his case that those
convicted of trading unlawfully in personal information should be punished
with a two-year jail term, his report was fundamentally flawed.
He did not identify which of the transactions might be considered unlawful and
which newspapers had public interest defences or were requesting publicly
available information, such as electoral roll checks. Thomas’s report ended
as a damp squib and he later had to apologise to The Sunday Times for
publishing misleading information about the paper.
There was more meat on the Goodman and Mulcaire case the following year. The
pair admitted hacking into more than 600 messages on the mobile phones of
royal family aides.
Mulcaire, who ran his company from Sutton, south London, also admitted
intercepting voicemail messages intended for Max Clifford, the publicist;
Sky Andrew, agent of Sol Campbell, the England footballer; Gordon Taylor,
chairman of the Professional Footballers’ Association; Simon Hughes, the
Liberal Democrat MP; and Elle Macpherson, the model.
Coulson resigned as editor of the News of the World. His successor, Colin
Myler, conducted an internal inquiry and subsequently told the Press
Complaints Commission that Goodman had deceived News International to pay
Mulcaire, had concealed the sourcing on royal stories, and that nobody else
knew Goodman and Mulcaire were tapping phone messages for stories.
On Thursday, The Guardian contradicted News International’s account of the
affair but produced scant evidence for its claims.
The story was picked up with glee by the BBC, which led its bulletins with it.
It provided a useful diversion from its own woes, since the BBC has faced
sustained and heavy criticism from the press since it released the details
of the lavish salaries and expenses paid to some of its senior executives.
Those disclosures showed that 27 of the BBC’s top 50 executives were paid
more than the prime minister.
Prescott, who believed he might have been a victim, exploded in a bluster on
the BBC news. In a letter to Cameron, he wrote: “The claim that up to 3,000
people, including myself, had their mobile phones ‘hacked’ on the
instruction of the News of the World while being edited by your director of
communications, Andy Coulson, must be thoroughly investigated.”
Yet the suggestion that there might be thousands of crimes that had never been
properly investigated was almost immediately dismissed by John Yates in his
review of the Goodman files. Prescott’s phone had never in fact been hacked.
Yates said that while there may have been hundreds of potential targets,
only a small number had had their phone messages compromised. All those
people had been contacted.
A senior source with good knowledge of the case said that police had
categorised those targeted by Mulcaire into three lists. On the first list,
which was fewer than 20 people, were those whose phones had been illegally
hacked. This list is thought to include Boris Johnson, now the London mayor,
a senior executive at the BBC, and the individuals named in the Goodman
court case.
On a second list were 40-50 people. Mulcaire had obtained the mobile numbers
of these individuals, but there was no evidence their phones had been
unlawfully tapped. Jowell and Sir Ian Blair, the former Met commissioner,
are believed to have been on this list.
On the final list were about 400-500 people who were possible targets, but
Mulcaire had not even obtained their phone numbers. This list, referred to
as the “C” list, is believed to have included Prescott.
This account was backed up by Andy Hayman yesterday; he said the inquiry he
headed had uncovered “several hundred names” that had been targeted by
Mulcaire. “Of these, there was a small number - perhaps a handful - where
there was evidence that the phones had actually been tampered with,” he
said.
The source of the confusion about the story may lie in a case that Taylor
launched after Goodman was convicted to seek damages for breaches of the
Data Protection Act.
News International initially resisted the claim, so Taylor’s lawyers
subpoenaed two collections of files - one relating to the police case
against Goodman and Mulcaire; the second relating to journalists in the What
Price Privacy? report.
Taylor’s claim was settled when new evidence emerged out of the police files
that another News of the World reporter knew how Mulcaire was obtaining some
of his information. That reporter has since left the paper and there is no
evidence he committed any offence.
News International executives are not aware of any other evidence in the
police files that show any other News of the World journalist was involved
in commissioning Mulcaire to hack phones.
So it appears The Guardian may have conflated the Goodman case files with the
alleged misdemeanours from the information commissioner’s files, which
detailed a huge number of contacts of journalists with private
investigators, even if it did not outline any specific offences. Did a tip
about 500 names on the Met files become thousands by some extrapolation
based on the information commissioner’s report? The Guardian has still not
provided any documentary evidence for its allegations.
While News of the World executives are angry about what they consider unfair
reporting, the disclosures have touched a nerve with the public. As MPs have
discovered with their expenses, the defence that activities were within the
law or common practice is not always regarded as satisfactory.
Newspapers will have to mount a robust defence if the current system of
self-regulation is not overtaken by a privacy law. Those committed to
serious investigations will argue that they always act in the public
interest when using subterfuge.
Recent cases include the exposure of MPs’ expenses - which technically
breached their right to have their data protected - and The Sunday Times’s
exposure of peers accepting cash-for-amendments in which reporters posed as
businessmen to gain proof of wrongdoing.
Standing more directly in the firing line is Coulson, even if no proof emerges
of further phone hacking by reporters under his editorship. Labour MPs - and
some Tories - have a whiff of blood in their nostrils.
When the scandal first broke Cameron’s spokesman declared that the Tory leader
was “relaxed” about the position of Coulson. But on Thursday an operation
was put in place to build a wall around Cameron’s communications chief. “In
any political scandal the first 24 hours normally determines whether someone
survives or has to be thrown to the wolves,” said a party insider.
The disaffected right wing of the party is restless. There is a feeling that
there is one rule for MPs accused of expenses fiddling whom Cameron regards
as “expendable” and another rule for members of the inner circle. “David
Cameron talks about giving Coulson a ‘second chance’,” said one MP. “Where
were the second chances for people like Peter Viggers [the MP who tried to
claim for the duck island]?”
Labour are, meanwhile, determined to enjoy the Tory discomfort.
“Initially I was disappointed that the police decided not to investigate,”
said a special adviser to a cabinet minister. “But then I slept on it and
thought that if the police had gone in, Coulson would have been out within
24 hours. Now we can drag this out for months. Each day the Tories will be
damaged just a little more.”
Additional reporting: Jonathan Oliver
How to hack mobile phones and what the law says
Hacking into a mobile phone does not necessarily require any advanced
technical knowledge.
Those who do it rely on the fact that many phone users do not bother to change
the default pin codes that allow remote access to their voicemail message
boxes.
Alternatively, if they do alter the four-digit number they often use a number
associated with a family member’s birthdate or an anniversary.
Armed with the pin code the hacker then dials the target phone at a time when
it is off, or engaged, in order to be diverted to the message box. If the
pin number matches, he has access to any new or saved messages.
Listening in on mobile phone messages in this way is an offence under the
Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, legislation which was brought
in to give various government agencies the power to carry out surveillance.
Intercepting telephone communications legally requires the consent of a member
of the cabinet. Transgressors face up to two years in jail.
However, since the act stipulates that the offence occurs if a communication
is intercepted “in the course of its transmission”, hacking into someone’s
old messages may not constitute a crime.
Listening into a mobile phone user’s conversations while they take place is a
far more complicated undertaking. It would usually necessitate either the
cooperation of someone working for the relevant phone company or the placing
of some kind of bug in the target’s handset.
Confidential details such as phone records, bank details and medical records
are obtained by private investigators who con their way into the confidence
of the data keepers. This is an offence under the Data Protection Act and
punishable by a fine of up to £5,000. However, significantly, such
activities may be permissible in serious investigations if there is a public
interest defence.
