God, those NoW journos were utter scum weren't they?

[headfairy]

apparently by deleting Milly's messages her family still had some hope that she might still be alive

I don't agree jenny. If he had come out with this at the time I think he would have shown backbone integrity and a bit of fire sadly lacking in him when in power!

I don't think the focus is on why individuals as private people did nothing. It's why senior members of government kept quiet about what was going on, thereby colluding with it.

Thing is, noddyholder, nobody cared back then. "Everyone" knew, the information was kind of there, in full view us, yes all of us, could have asked "how did the Sun get this splash?", and if we'd paused for a moment, would have thought "Oh yeah. right." We would not have been surprised -it is only very, very recently, and perhaps only temporarily ,that the culture of tolerance has changed.

Maybe Noddy but without the kind of evidence we have now, the political will and the clear indication of just how far this poison has spread, he would have been digging his own grave and the grave of the Labour Party for decades. Can you imagine how TB, the then PM, would have reacted to that? GB would, in any case, have been accused of sour grapes, crying wolf, looking for a sympathy vote via his son's illness.

I'm disappointed that none of them stood up to him but the heroic two labour MPs who have kept this going over the years., But remember, it looks as though even the police weren't prepared to come clean and tackle NI. Now is the time and I for one hope all the politicians and private individuals who were targatted come forward and kick NI for all the years of manipulation, bullying and threats. They affectively have an amnesty now and we should support them in exposing the depravity of this company and its leadership.

Yes, the power of NI should worry us profoundly.

But we need also to keep an eye on the other papers. Here's that 2006 ICO report again: Daily Mail waaay outstrips NOTW in number of illegal personal data transactions (table p9).

And i can't find it, but someone did a lovely bar chart of column inches about phone hacking published by each paper - compared to amount of phone hacking done by each paper. Quelle surprise, the more they'd hacked, the quieter they were on the subject.

So we actually don't yet know what might come out about the other papers.

Have they also been dictating to politicians and corrupting the police and invading all our state databases? Or did they restrict themselves to picking on the bereaved and "mere" phone hacking?

^^Wot jenny said. Esp 2nd para.

TIANC: bracing reading, that graph. Thanks for linking. I hope they are all hung out to dry.

"at the very core of it all he didn't go to the police! Why not?"

Well, let's see.

1. The police have never been very keen to investigate NI; higher-ups nervous of their affairs etc being revealed, rank-and-file not wanting to look too closely into who NI have paid for information, for some reason.

2. A newspaper will not reveal its sources for a story. Could've been any of the hospital staff. Couldn't prove the hacking/blagging.

3. A hypothetical politican wanting to be PM might hypothetically have something in their own medical records they don't want coming out, who knows what other info RB threatened him with.

NI would have suffered no harm at all, and GB's political career would have been completely destroyed by continual attacks from the NI stable. So not a great trade-off maybe?

Thanks for the link, TIANC. We haven't been hearing much about blagging, have we - only hacking? Blagging was what got the information about Fraser.

here's the table, it's a bit of a scroll to find on that document. i have separated out the top ten.

the first number is 'number of transactions positively identified', and the second is ''number of clients/journalists using services'.

much as it goes wildly against the current news thrust, NI titles appear reasonably far down the list, and the number of people involved is certainly considerably fewer than at the Mail, People and Mirror (if you want your eyes to pop out of your heads, add up the two Mail titles).

it is entirely in THEIR interests to make this a story about Rupert Murdoch...

Daily Mail 952 58

Sunday People 802 50

Daily Mirror 681 45

Mail on Sunday 266 33

News of the World 182 19

Sunday Mirror 143 25

Best Magazine 134 20

Evening Standard 130 1

The Observer 103 4

Daily Sport 62 4

Sunday Times 52 7
The People 37 19
Daily Express 36 7
Weekend Magazine (Daily Mail) 30 4
Sunday Express 29 8
The Sun 24 4
Closer Magazine 22 5
Sunday Sport 15 1
Night and Day (Mail on Sunday) 9 2
Sunday Business News 8 1
Daily Record 7 2
Saturday (Express) 7 1
Sunday Mirror Magazine 6 1
Real Magazine 4 1
Woman?s Own 4 2
Daily Mirror Magazine 3 2
Mail in Ireland 3 1
Daily Star 2 4
Marie Claire 2 1
Personal Magazine 1 1
Sunday World 1 1

I think he didn't go to the police (or all the other politicians NI have hacked into) because it has suited the political establishment to have NI on their side. The police, our politicians and our media all seem to be revolting corrupt. We have far bigger things to worry about than whether Brooks keeps her job.

Not so much that it has suited the political establishment to have NI on their side, more they wouldn't be the political establishment without NI on their side. They'd be the opposition.

"Mrs Brooks had told Mrs Brown that she knew four-month-old Fraser had cystic fibrosis - something which was thought to be known only by the family and medical staff - and that the paper intended to run a story."

my italics

"Last night Sky News quoted News International sources as being 'comfortable' that stories reported by The Sun about Mr Brown's children were obtained via legitimate means "

my italics again

\link{http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2013534/Rebekah-Brooks-rang-Gordon-Brown-say-Ive-seen-sons-medical-files.html\from here}

Harriet Harman on Newsnight last week described it the Tories enjoying cosying up to Murdoch, Lab being too scared not to.

I can imagine that's broadly true, but actually the any party-politicklng here is vastly less important than the fact that Murdoch was able to create a situation where a government of a sovereign state cannot say no to him.

So if he is so shocked and disturbed now that he has realised the criminal underworld were involved in this who did he think it was back then? They are all as bad as each other. He ended up turfed out anyway so in a way got what he deserved

yy to boulevard and TIANC.

crackfox I don't give a shit about RB's job. Do you really think this is what the outrage is about? I want the whole corrupt, rotten institution buried and the police and anyone else who BROKE THE LAW to go down with NI. It's easy to blame victims, but that always plays right into the hands of bullies and criminals. As far as I know neither GB nor anyone else who was targetted broke the law. They may not have been heroic but that's surely understandable in the context of the huge power NI had.

Imagine if GB had complained. Do you seriously think NI would have backed off rather than targetting his family even more? Perhaps he was in fact tyring to protect his family in the only way he could in the rotten circumstances in which he found himself.

It is the downright threats that make me FURIOUS. I don't give a damn what political party you support or detest....I cannot believe OUR elected representatives have been systematically threatened and blackmailed by ANYONE. I am horrified too that the police were too scared of this organisation.What sort of tin pot country are we? I want the people responsible to do time and no I don't just mean the low criminal types that carried out the actions....I want the people who paid for it, organised it and profited by it to be arrested. I don't care who they are or how powerful they are.

oh yes, justa, totally, me too. it's exciting, i think, to see these people exposed. i guess i just want ALL of them exposed.

For the benefit of those laying into GB for his "inaction", from Marina Hyde via twitter:

Are you insufficiently repulsed by the Sun's mysteriously-obtained exclusive on Brown's son's cystic fibrosis? Don't worry - like everything about the hacking scandal, there are always more details to emerge to compound the horror. I've been speaking to a source close to Gordon Brown at the time of the story, who recalls that it was served up with a chaser of threat:

?Gordon insisted - despite a heavy brow-beating from Rebekah - that he was not willing to let his son's medical condition be the stuff of a Sun exclusive,? recalls this source. ?So he put out a statement on PA to spike their scoop and make clear that despite his condition, Fraser was fit and healthy. The Sun were utterly furious, and Brown's communications team were told that if Gordon wanted to get into No 10, he needed to learn that was not how things were done.?

Yes, how DARE the then-chancellor refuse to accept that his child's health was not technically a commercial Murdoch property?

But surely GB should have sacrificed his position to expose this criminal activity. In what way could they have targeted hi further if he had nothing to hide. His sons medical records were accessed illegally and he knew but he still knew that the power of NI could get him into No 10 and so he didn't challenge it. It is ok for him to come out now and appear shocked.

(i think what strikes me about the Mail figures is that there were 50-something journalists using PIs, it wasn't even a clandestine practice.)

hear hear bkgirl!

Aitch yup I saw that table the other day and was not suprised to find the Mail at the top of the list.

And yet.... Does the PM of whatever ilk jump to attention when Paul Dacre says so? I think not. Yes the DM will be outed but it's likely to be a slightly different debate. They may be more open to negotiation/working with their hackees, as it were, rather than telling the hackee exactly what they are going to do, with no comeback, like RB. And there may also be a slight difference in the type of person hacked.
We are hearing truly terrible stories and my heart goes out to the innocent people who have suffered as a result of NI hacking operations. But in a way those stories are a conduit through which the British public are starting to see the enormity of how out of control NI had become - and that is an even bigger story, with even wider repercussions.

Also there is a difference between turning a blind eye and just accepting the power of NI and actively engaging with them and arranging parties and the like in the wake of the information about his son. Could any decent person really socialise with someone with RBs morals and invite them into their home. I am more shocked by that than the hacking tbh God knows what is going to come out next!