The Official Newscorp/UK end of season finale/Rebekah Brooks did 9/11 thread

How many times has George Osborne met your mother?

My mother will be publishing that information soon enough, she assures me she has nothing to hide

When did George Osbourne stop meeting your wife?

Tom you really should visit your mother more :)

Labour leader Ed Miliband had 14 meetings or social contacts with News International executives over the same period, while PM David Cameron had 11.

oops - there goes Ed's ammo.

Murdoch merch isn’t moving very well over at gag retailer Zazzle.com, either, which is currently selling an apron that reads “I’m Grilling the Murdochs” and a “News Corp. Hacked My Phone” shirt. “The items appeared fast and furious,” said vp of marketing Jason Kang. “However, Rupert Murdoch isn’t something that translates well into being a hot consumer item.” Why not? “When bin Laden got taken care of, people felt enormous pride,” Kang explained. “The Murdoch thing is funny, but doesn’t engender the same emotional response.”

Passed this on the bus today

lol piers morgan

http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/news-out-to-ruin-me-nixon-20110727-1i0ek.html

Murdoch's papers destroyed the last two Victorial Police chiefs. One of them has finally found the guts to speak out about it.

uh oh

tom_watson tom_watson
The hacking scandal is about nosedive to a whole new low. How could these people do what they did?
12 minutes ago Favorite Retweet Reply

still conflicted that i'm enjoying this more than i'm appropriately outraged/depressed &c, but i await the revive anxiously

I'm not sure how much lower it could get but hey.

No need to be ashamed about enjoying the skewering of scumbags (xp)

byameliahill Amelia Hill
ABOUT TO BREAK: You thought the phone hacking scandal couldn't get any more heinous? Think again... @bynickdavies and @byameliahill

the suspense is killing me!

Never accept gifts from red-headed NI employees
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/28/phone-hacking-sarah-payne

slightly slept on tweet:

Here's the Prime Minister's letter confirming records indicate Neil Wallis did meet Andy Coulson at Downing St: http://twitpic.com/5x24ce

we'll see huh, re: how low it goes- i still think the hacking a sitting prime minister thing is the craziest shit

woooah

gonna bring out the word 'dastardly' here

Think the Payne story was trailed as a rumour in Private Eye a while ago. Might have been somewhere online instead. Interesting it's broken now.

The cynicism of allegedly giving her a phone just so they could hack it is amazing.

i suppose it is significant that brooks gave it to sara payne personally, puts her closer to the scene of the crime.

yeah i think i'd heard it somewhere before. curious to see how brooks can possibly explicate the logic behind 'oh here have a phone?' beyond 'i guess it helps to have a phone?'

Ohhhh shit.

i still don't totally understand the logic behind endemic, automatic phonehacking, btw, outside of like, what-will-sienna-miller's-voicemail-reveal. like i can't think of examples of what they would be able to publish that was attained that way.

i feel a bit bad that i already assumed this had happened :/

SURELY brooks can't continue to deny her knowledge now

"I never knew the phone would be hacked" will be the line presumably, whether she can maintain that line is the question.

i think it's transparently not believable, though - she's basically relying on it being perceived as a coincidence; how about that?, i happened to give her something that would facilitate phone-hacking, right amid the period at which without my knowledge my newspaper was practicing such a thing

Did Sara Payne just not have a mobile at that time? I suppose it's possible.

thought this was in popbitch a few weeks ago, and so it proves, from july 8th:

>> Screwed <<
Noose tightens at News Int

With all the blagging, cash payments
and subterfuge involved, some of the
stories coming out at the moment make
phone hacking sound like it would be a
very complicated and expensive operation.
Well, imagine if NOTW execs were bright
enough to have found a simpler solution.

As the self-appointed scourge of paedos
and the promoters of Sarah's law, it was
only natural that the News Of The World
would be on hand to comfort the victims'
families in many of the most horrific
crimes of the last decade. And such was
their apparent determination to rid the
country of child sex offenders, it wouldn't
have seemed too weird if a senior NOTW
figure sympathetically handed over a
mobile phone at no expense to the victim -
so that they could all keep in touch. And
then, of course, there would be no problem
monitoring those phones, would there?
If the rumours going around News
International about who the person
handing out the phone was are anything
more substantial than chatter from
understandably bitter ex-employees then
we might see some action on this website
before too long: http://www.hasrebekahbrooksbeensackedyet.com/

yeah someone on twitter just pointed that out. phew, thought i was imagining things when my first reaction was "b-b-but i already know that"

i still don't totally understand the logic behind endemic, automatic phonehacking, btw, outside of like, what-will-sienna-miller's-voicemail-reveal. like i can't think of examples of what they would be able to publish that was attained that way.

remember this was the early 00s, before email communication was as much the default as it is now. (when is the email hacking stuff gonna emerge?)

Did Sara Payne just not have a mobile at that time? I suppose it's possible.

eh maybe so, but that the NOTW were the benevolent donors of one?, coincidental w/their phone hacking activities

remember this was the early 00s, before email communication was as much the default as it is now. (when is the email hacking stuff gonna emerge?)

yeah, the timescale throws me off slightly. but even still, i just - like i know the 9/11 thing is still alleged, but with that, for example: what are they getting that they can use? like in that circumstance it almost seems that it's a lazier alternative to reporting, rather than a more intrusive one – one that might give them some general colour & an idea of what’s going on. but wouldn't going any further and writing a story on it have been hugely risky?

oh absolutely it's something that seems driven by laziness, so much is

Guess they would also want to know which papers were in touch with her and how much they would offer for story.

The thing that's surprised me is that The Sun hasn't been dragged into this yet.

Was it Private Eye who mentioned there being a hack at the NOTW who got all of his stories by phone hacking from the office, and was thus dubbed "The Olympic Flame" because he never went out?

xpost: I thought some an0nym0us haXX0rz were going to post like truckloads of Sun emails a couple of weeks ago?

jonsnowC4 Jon Snow
There's another hacking bombshell alleadgedly involvingt the Mirror breaking any minute..
1 minute ago Favorite Retweet Reply

Wau.

My guess is that this was Piers-related and involves the build-up to Iraq in some way.

what "shocking and awful" revelations will these be?

The Mirror deleted Al-Zawahiri's "just kidding about that planes and towers thing by the way" text message to Bin Laden to make room for more?

The Mirror hacked Saddam's phone and they know The Guardian bought Saddam's WMD's?

xpost: I thought some an0nym0us haXX0rz were going to post like truckloads of Sun emails a couple of weeks ago?

This got very muddy very quickly, and I haven't kept up - but there were postponements, then tweets claiming they didn't want to jeopardize a court case, and that they were working with media outlets to prepare the mails for publication.

But at this point I'm assuming that they claimed to have the mails for lulz.

One of the lulzsec guys that was tweeting about the hacked emails got arrested yesterday too in Shetland.

Via the Telegraph:

17.17 The murmurs are that Chris Bryant MP, a scourge of News International, is going to have something big to say on phone hacking in the next little bit.

did anyone see the program on ch4 last night ?
i never knew that re anne diamond and her meeting rupert and giving him an earful, only to end up on his (s)hitlist.

Oh and apparently Brooks is muttering something now about being shocked by all this etc.

Rumour now is that Piers Morgan has been suspended by CNN?

Can't find any hard confirmation anywhere though.

Hahah here's hoping.