[HN Gopher] Prince Harry wins phone hacking case against British...
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Prince Harry wins phone hacking case against British tabloid
Author : rntn
Score : 42 points
Date : 2023-12-15 19:32 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.npr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org)
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| A little surprising that a member of the royal family had no
| trustworthy advisor or technology aide to warn against 1990s
| cellphone message boxes. It's not like nobody knew. Likely
| someone did, but to no avail. Same for politicians with their
| definitely-not-quite-end-to-end calling and messaging. More than
| ever security has to be for everyone because now prominent and
| key people are just like everyone. Well, we always knew the
| royals are just like us, gawd blessem!
| midtake wrote:
| Not all that surprising if you've worked with powerful people.
| For most of them, technical suggestions don't matter much and
| are ultimately weighed on a rubric of "whether someone else
| (who is also important) is doing the same".
| zactato wrote:
| Often times I think lawsuit culture in the US is ridiculous, but
| maybe its justified in some cases. I'm astounded that he only got
| $180k from these lawsuits. I would expect a conviction like this
| to result in sums that would bankrupt the news paper. Even if
| dozens of other celebrities got the similar amounts it would be
| low. Also this article doesn't discuss the felony aspects of
| phone hacking. Was it not illgeal in the UK in the 90s?
| hollerith wrote:
| You mean "judgment", not "conviction".
| labster wrote:
| Yes it's important to state that the tabloids don't have any
| convictions, just some highly questionable judgements.
| whynotkeithberg wrote:
| I might have missed it, but I don't recall seeing anywhere that
| they identified a specific person who was doing the hacking so
| I'm not sure who they would criminally charge. I believe it was
| definitely illegal as they had a computer misuse act in 1990.
| gbuk2013 wrote:
| The BBC article on the subject mentioned somewhere around
| PS100M of legal fees that were incurred in this case, so the
| damages are just the tip of the iceberg of what the newspaper
| company is on the hook for.
|
| The UK legal system damage calculation actually requires some
| justification of the damages sustained by the claimant.
| tzm wrote:
| > "Vendetta journalism"
|
| Fast forward to today, it seems journalists are increasingly
| engaged in activism.
| D-Coder wrote:
| This has been a thing for many, many years (my guess is, since
| 5 minutes after journalism was invented). See "yellow
| journalism" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_propaganda_
| of_the_Spa...).
| stonogo wrote:
| Look up "scandal sheets" for examples over a hundred years
| before that!
| ejb999 wrote:
| more like activists are increasingly engaged as journalists.
| stonogo wrote:
| "Fast forward" from a statement last week to this week doesn't
| seem like much time for anything to have changed.
|
| I'm also not sure anyone really expects high journalistic
| standards from tabloids. This kind of junk 'reporting' has been
| in Britain since the 1700s.
| jfengel wrote:
| This is the Daily Mirror, who has been doing exactly this for
| decades. This kind of "activist" behavior is called "tabloid
| journalism" because of the tabloid format in which the Daily
| Mirror is printed.
|
| (Along with a few others. I don't know why the half-broadsheet
| format seems especially popular with such disreputably tactics.
| But regardless, this is absolutely nothing new for the Daily
| Mirror and its ilk.)
| tycho-newman wrote:
| Journalist as activist is the whole point of a free press and
| the Fourth Estate. Just ask Emile Zola.
| runlevel1 wrote:
| How did they hack their phones?
|
| I vaguely recall it being possible at one point for an attacker
| to get into someone's voice mail by spoofing the target's caller
| ID and calling their carrier's voice mail access number. Was it
| something trivial to pull off like that? (Not to trivialize how
| violating that would be.)
| 4rt wrote:
| That was the main way.
|
| Another was some networks had a voicemail number you could dial
| into from abroad and then enter the phone number and pin of the
| voicemail box you wanted to access. Before this scandal nobody
| has ever changed that pin, or known about it, in the entire
| history of british telephony.
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| Yeah this was a big one. You'd get a mobile phone with
| voicemail enabled, and you could call 123 from your phone to
| collect your voicemails without a PIN.
|
| You could also call something like 07700007123 and then it
| would ask you to type your phone number and remote access
| PIN. Almost nobody knew that you could do that, and so almost
| nobody changed their remote access PIN from the default 1111
| or 1234 or 0000.
| sdflhasjd wrote:
| Yes, it was a combo of either calling from any number and
| guessing the PIN (which was also likely to be still the
| default) or number spoofing to bypass the PIN altogether.
| stonogo wrote:
| British tabloids have a long history of hiring people who have
| access to law enforcement tools in order to intercept private
| communications:
| https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/sep/21/privacy2
|
| One 150-year-old newspaper, News of the World, shut down in
| 2011 when it came out that they'd hacked the voicemail of a
| murder victim and, prior to that, several British military
| personnel who were killed in action. It wasn't publicized as to
| whether this was done via spoofing or via access to law
| enforcement tools.
| OliveMate wrote:
| A lot of people overseas have the idea that British newspapers
| are prestigious titans of journalism due to how old and
| widespread they are, and I could scream from the heavens about
| how wrong that is. The tabloids are a dire stain on our society.
|
| This wasn't just Prince Harry or celebrities who were victims of
| phone hacking, it was ordinary people who weren't prepared for
| such an industrial violation of privacy and sheer decency from
| multiple newspapers. And it went on for decades[1]. In one case
| the mother of a dead teenager thought her daughter was alive
| because her phone's voicemail was being accessed. It turns out
| that The News of the World was doing it, it was such a widespread
| thing. And I'll never forgive the Conservatives for gutting the
| Leveson Inquiry[2] which went neck-deep in exploring how much of
| a mess the industry was.
|
| ---
|
| The sad thing about the court finding that Piers Morgan knew of
| the phone hacking is that it'll do nothing to him. The man is
| mired in decades of scandal and certain connections he made
| allowed him to bounce back every time. That, and the tabloid
| industry has an incentive not to act against their own lest all
| their dirty secrets get out there.
|
| I could talk about Morgan all day, but I'm still in awe at how we
| let him recover his career after 2004. He put British soldiers at
| risk when he published faked photos of British soldiers torturing
| Iraqis, and when they were found as fake, he outright refused to
| apologise for it and got fired. That ought to be a career-ending
| move, but having connections with Murdoch lets you get away with
| anything.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_of_news_media_phone_h...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveson_Inquiry
| tycho-newman wrote:
| Where's Jeremy Clarkson? Its been a minute and perhaps he'd
| like to punch Piers Morgan again.
| brnt wrote:
| > A lot of people overseas
|
| Maybe it depends on which sea you mean, but in my primary
| school, decades ago, British 'press' was held up as an example
| of what happens when a nation doesn't take newspapers
| seriously.
| labster wrote:
| What does "taking newspapers seriously" mean? Does it mean
| limiting free press to "serious" news, or does it mean
| convincing people that celebrity gossip is boring and they
| should read investment news instead?
| cf1241290841 wrote:
| British tabloids do this a lot
|
| https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/news-world-phone-hacki...
|
| >In the latest revelations, people linked to missing Madeleine
| McCann and murdered schoolgirl Danielle Jones are said to have
| had their mobile messages broken into by the Sunday tabloid's
| journalists.
|
| >Police have also contacted families of victims of the July 7
| bombings to warn them their phones may have been accessed in the
| days following the 2005 terrorist attacks.
|
| ...
|
| >The News of the World has been accused of hacking on an
| "industrial scale".
|
| >Notebooks seized from former employee Glenn Mulcaire - the
| private investigator at the centre of the scandal who was jailed
| in 2007 - revealed 11,000 pages of documents and several thousand
| names of targets.
|
| >Police are now examining every high-profile case involving the
| murder and abduction of children since 2001.
| jm4 wrote:
| That's disgusting. It's not right to call them journalists.
| They are no different than the scum who goes around doxxing
| people.
| cf1241290841 wrote:
| Its tabloids. I dont think many people call them journalists.
| Teever wrote:
| But not enough people call them criminals, or more
| specifically, the kind of people who can put them in jail.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Linking to a Mirror article about the issue seems kinda shitty.
| I wouldn't be surprised if they had also hacked the phones of
| every one of the people mentioned in that story.
| cf1241290841 wrote:
| I do agree, but it took a bit to find even that one.
| bandyaboot wrote:
| Had to do a double take skimming through the headlines. "Woah,
| did Prince Harry win a Pwn2Own competition or something? That's
| badass! Oh...yeah. That makes more sense."
| borbtactics wrote:
| Or, he won a phone case that hacked his phone
| manicennui wrote:
| Why aren't people in jail for this?
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(page generated 2023-12-15 23:01 UTC)