The Hacking Scandale!
It is not pretty! England’s coming to grips with the hacking scandal perpetrated by Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers is beginning to look like one of those English comedies that show up from time to time on PBS (Fawlty Towers, Benny Hill).
Mr. Paul McMullan former editor, one-time journalist, and current pub owner testified to the merits of hacking (and hewing) before the investigating committee; it is, he claims, an effective means of arriving at the truth. McMullan also waxed philosophical: “Journalists in Britain have traditionally justified shady practices by arguing that they are in ‘the public interest.’ Asked by an inquiry lawyer how he would define that, Mr. McMullan said that the public interest is what the public is interested in.”
Full account in Tuesday’s NY Times (NB: PG13).
I loved this: ” — in his “Brad the teenage rent boy” guise, sprinting through a convent dressed only in underpants to escape the pedophile priest he had successfully entrapped.”
Evidently nothing was beyond doing for a story – even getting down to his skivvies, but in a CONVENT?
Eavesdropping and worse are hardly limited to Rupert Murdoch and his colleagues among the English tabloids. Governments brag that they do it. It’s illegal – and, I suppose, reprehensible – only if you don’t have a badge.
Well, as McMullan said, why should M15 and M16 be the only ones allowed to hack. To say nothing of the CIA and NSA and FBI and who knows who else.
How about a serious discusion on privacy rights?
What the government does or does not is not germane to the ugliness of the Murdoch crew.
Hmmmm. I think government over-reaching is germane; it makes the technology more accessible; it lowers the threshold for what is tolerable; it blurs the justifications for invading anyone’s privacy.
Glenn Greenwalt regularly explodes on this issue and, in this case, I think he’s right.
In the name of fighting terrorism, the NSA for example scarfs up all sorts of communications through its satellites without warrants etc.