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Andy Coulson, the Met Police and Murdoch

Oh dear. Vodafone is implicated. That's a bad PR hat-trick for them then. :cool:

"Andy Coulson knew a lot of people did it at the Sun on his Bizarre [showbiz] column and after that at the NOTW," McMullan claimed.

McMullan, who is now a pub landlord, also described a flourishing trade in private information at the News of the World, which he said was regularly supplied with details of celebrities' medical records and mobile phone pin numbers.

"People who worked for Vodaphone [sic] etc would sometimes ring up the newsdesk offering to sell numbers and codes of stars' phones," he said, "as indeed people at the tax office, people in doctors' receptions."

In separate evidence also published today, Vodafone told the committee: "A small minority of customers were targeted by unscrupulous individuals."

The company said it had passed all evidence to the police during their 2006 investigation into phone hacking carried out by former News of the World journalist Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/feb/04/andy-coulson-phone-hacking
Click to expand...
 
And, all you had to do to avoid this IIRC was change your access code from the default 0000 to something else.

Anyone in public life today who has not changed their code is a mug.
 
weltweit said:
And, all you had to do to avoid this IIRC was change your access code from the default 0000 to something else.

Anyone in public life today who has not changed their code is a mug.
Click to expand...

Except when someone from Vodafone rang up the News of the World and sold them your new code.
 
Santino said:
Except when someone from Vodafone rang up the News of the World and sold them your new code.
Click to expand...

I accept that that is possible but I expect only a small number of people at Vodafone would have had access to such information so with any luck they should be nabbed.
 
weltweit said:
I accept that that is possible but I expect only a small number of people at Vodafone would have had access to such information so with any luck they should be nabbed.
Click to expand...

Yes, but its precisely those sort of people that the papers / private investigators dealt with, not only with Vodafone but with nearly any public or private body (including the police and NHS) who held data that might be of interest to the story (or in Ian Hislops case, to get his unlisted phone number so a hack could ring him up and brag about it).
 
weltweit said:
I accept that that is possible but I expect only a small number of people at Vodafone would have had access to such information so with any luck they should be nabbed.
Click to expand...

It doesn't necessarily require collusion from Vodafone. Hacks could also phone up Vodafone with easily found personal information, pretending to be the person and claiming they forgot their PIN.
 
Ticking along nicely:

The Guardian said:
Just a fortnight after reopening their inquiry, in the wake of an 18-month campaign by the Guardian, police said a re-examination of the evidence they had held for years, but failed to fully investigate, combined with new evidence from the Sunday tabloid, had thrown up an "important and immediate new line of inquiry". The new investigation, they said, had already established "reasonable evidence" that up to 20 people, mainly prominent public figures, were targeted by the paper.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/feb/09/phone-hacking-lord-prescott
 
Read last night that the Fire union dude is thinking of suing the Sun for the same thing after they ran the stories about his extra-marital shagging at the TU Congress, during the LFU strike.
 
So did Coulson lie under oath in the Sheridan perjury trial? It would extraordinary chutzpah to lie in a perjury trial then again it takes extraordinary chutzpah to pretend he knew nothing about the whole mess.

Is Coulson going to join Sheridan in prison?
 
Combustible said:
It doesn't necessarily require collusion from Vodafone. Hacks could also phone up Vodafone with easily found personal information, pretending to be the person and claiming they forgot their PIN.
Click to expand...

FWIW I know this has happened on more than a few occasions, if only because an acquaintance was working for one of the big operators on key accounts and took phonecalls from a pretend Simon Cowell amongst others.
 
Oopsie!

Phone hacking: Senior Met officers dined with News of the World editors

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/feb/22/phone-hacking-police-editor-dinners

Senior Metropolitan police officers were enjoying private dinners with News of the World editors at the same time as the force was responsible for investigating the phone-hacking scandal, it has been disclosed.

A list of meetings that Scotland Yard has handed over to the Metropolitan Police Authority, which supervises the service, discloses eight previously unpublicised private dinners and five other occasions during which senior officers met with newspaper executives.

Two of the dinners came at particularly sensitive moments and are likely to revive fears that Scotland Yard's handling of the phone-hacking scandal may have been compromised by a desire to avoid alienating the UK's biggest-selling newspaper.
Click to expand...
 
More:

Murder trial collapse exposes News of the World links to police corruption

A man cleared of murder can be named as a private investigator with links to corrupt police officers who earned £150,000 a year from the News of the World for supplying illegally obtained information on people in the public eye.

Jonathan Rees was acquitted of the murder of his former business partner, Daniel Morgan, who was found in a south London car park in 1987 with an axe in the back of his head. The case collapsed after 18 months of legal argument, during which it has been impossible for media to write about Rees's Fleet Street connections.

The ending of the trial means it is now possible for the first time to tell how Rees went to prison in December 2000 after a period of earning six-figure sums from the News of the World.

Rees, who had worked for the paper for seven years, was jailed for planting cocaine on a woman in order to discredit her during divorce proceedings. After his release from prison Rees, who had been bugged for six months by Scotland Yard because of his links with corrupt police officers, was rehired by the News of the World, which was being edited by Andy Coulson.
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In countries where the press don't resort to spying and blackmail and thuggery to obtain gossip on celebrities, newspapers aren't anything like as interesting.
 
Combustible said:
It doesn't necessarily require collusion from Vodafone. Hacks could also phone up Vodafone with easily found personal information, pretending to be the person and claiming they forgot their PIN.
Click to expand...

Yep I happen to know one of the <insert name of mobile operator here> bods who happened to take a phone call from a pretend Simon Cowell with much the same story. It's actually such a known scam that they had in place a key account team not based in India- something of a selling point for the network in those circles apparently.
 
Gingerman said:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/mar/11/jonathan-rees-private-investigator-tabloid
More on Rees,looking very icky for Coulson
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Indeedy. What a tasty story...

Rees, who had worked for the paper for seven years, was jailed for planting cocaine on a woman in order to discredit her during divorce proceedings. After his release from prison Rees, who had been bugged for six months by Scotland Yard because of his links with corrupt police officers, was rehired by the News of the World, which was being edited by Andy Coulson.

The revelations call into question David Cameron's judgment in choosing Coulson as director of communications at 10 Downing Street in May 2010. Both he and the deputy prime minister had been warned in March 2010 about Coulson's responsibility for rehiring Rees after his prison sentence.
Click to expand...

You don't say :D
 
Just when you thought it couldn't get any more sordid:

A man cleared of murder can be named as a private investigator with links to corrupt police officers who earned £150,000 a year from the News of the World for supplying illegally obtained information on people in the public eye.

Jonathan Rees was acquitted of the murder of his former business partner, Daniel Morgan, who was found in a south London car park in 1987 with an axe in the back of his head. The case collapsed after 18 months of legal argument, during which it has been impossible for media to write about Rees's Fleet Street connections....
Click to expand...


http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/mar/11/news-of-the-world-police-corruption
 
With Coulson up to his neck in it, I might add. I wonder if he's being held onto as a convenient head to roll at the right time.
 
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