Rebekah Brooks...
...is one ugly, disgusting person. I live on the other side of the Atlantic but that's how she comes across: an ugly, opportunistic, unscrupulous cold bitch, with no moral compass whatsoever.
A good fit for Murdoch, that is.
The mother of murdered eight-year-old girl Sarah Payne reportedly had her mobile phone targeted by the News of the World's private investigator Glen Mulcaire. Ex-News International boss Rebekah Brooks, who edited the Sunday tabloid between 2000 and 2003, has repeatedly championed Sarah's Law, a scheme that allows parents to …
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Given what we now know about NotW, I would suspect that the all the services for that phone such as voicemail would have been setup by NotW employees before the phone ever reached Sara Payne, they already had the passwords, would Sara Payne have changed the PINs?
In fact given the time frame, is it possible Sara Payne was one of the first victims and giving the phone was necessary because the voicemail interception technique hadn't been perfected yet?
I wonder if that phone/logs from the service provide still exists, probably not.
You do realise the "interception technique" of which you speak is ringing the voicemail number and guessing the PIN. Hardly a complicated process.
I don't doubt the NOTW might have given Payne a phone to be able to listen to the voicemails, after all she was a major investment for the company. She was an unknown quantity and it would be a lack of due diligence if they did not want to know if she was talking to another paper.
..the phone hacking saga does not exist for your entertainment, but is actually real news. This goes to the very top - the Prime Minister, and the police. If it's moved on for the sake of something more exciting to you, it will be swept under the carpet, and nothing will change.
Not that it's an easy process as it is - anecdotally, I know far too many people who say "oh isn't it terrible they hacked a dead girl's phone? Still, it was right of the NOTW to close" while holding today's copy of The Sun, without a trace of irony or self-awareness.
Yeah, yeah, we do wish people would stop going on about this. Didn't we make it clear months ago? Nothing more to see... rogue reporters.... definitely nothing to do with anyone else.. didn't know a thing about it. Move along now. Excitement over... everyone back to work.
<sigh>
Oooh look! Is that someone famous over there snogging someone?! And what about those liberals!
While I appreciate Mrs Payne needed to publicize the story to get her cause as much attention as it deserved, I would have thought twice getting too chummy with media-corps like these. They are, have always been and will always be, two-faced lying scum purely interested in copy sales to fill their coffers.
You're right but it's always too easy for some unscrupulous person to take advantage of another when they are extremely distressed. Things like judgement and objectivity go out the window when extreme emotions are involved. It's how most cults operate; targeting the needy and/or weak, offering "help".
I have no doubt Mrs Payne honestly believed she was doing the right thing. It's such a damn shame some heartless, immoral bastards manipulated her in order to further their own agenda.
"You're right but it's always too easy for some unscrupulous person to take advantage of another when they are extremely distressed. "
This sort of thing infuriates me.
As a former NoTW journalist it's very hard work to keep faking that level of sincerity hour after hour as they continue to blubber on about "She was my little angel, who could have done this" blah, blah when what you really want to do is ransack her bedroom to see if there's anything juicy in her diary, or if the parents have any pron she might have found.
Some days £70k PA (plus bonus) hardly seemed worth it. I'd barely have enough left over for a bottle of decent whiskey, 50g of Coke and a couple of East European hookers on a Friday night.
Yours sociopathically, A Journalist.
Sources have recently revealed that many more phones may have been hacked than anyone previously suspected after Police discovered a books containing literally 100,000s of phone numbers in Glen Mulcaire's house. In these books, entitled "BT Phone Directory", there were page after page of names with associated phone numbers all meticulously alphabetically ordered. A Police spokesman stated that "it was going to take a very long time to inform all these people that Geln Mulcaire had access to their phone number - and we're going to need a lot of overtime pay"
If I had a job "hacking" phones (ringing the voicemail number and guessing the pin), the first thing I would do is keep a good record of all of the numbers I came across as they might well come in handy in the future. People often leave their number when they leave a voicemail message. This simple fact could explain the quantity of numbers and notes found. So if I "hack" 200 numbers, how many new numbers can I gather by listening to the messages of those 200.
I'm not suggesting the NOTW did not "hack" phones but I am suggesting Mulcaire's notes may not reflect just NOTW funded activities.
Finally, if anyone believes that the NOTW was the only "news" organisation doing this, I have a bridge they might be interested in.
... I always though they were the type of scum that even scum disowns.
P.S. noticed how the new Sun ad campaign refers to the 'Sun on Saturday'. The sacked NotW journo's won't have long to wait for their new jobs on the Sun on Sunday. I for one can't wait for the pun-tastic ads when that launches. Not.
P.P.S. I wonder it will start up with a campaign to clean up journalistic standards?
Even if you ignore the potential vigilantes as this information always gets out.
A friend of mine was raped by her father.
Sarah's law could out her as a victim without her consent.
Something she would find absolutely devastating and the fact that everyone knew would make it almost impossible for her to get on with her life.
If you ever need to think of the children then surely it's the actual victims.
They probably had been dialling into voicemail prior to Sara Payne, but this was probably a step down for most hacks. I would think it is almost inevitable that back when networks were analogue they simply used a scanner to eavesdrop on calls.
It could be an interesting experiment to recruit the power of the internet masses to trawl the online archives of tabloid papers searching for news stories involving call transcripts, texts and voicemails and log them in a database. Could help show the general public how widespread a practice it was (or is...).