METROPOLITAN Police Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, has ordered a senior officer to ‘establish the facts’ – concerning the knowledge that the police had – that the News of the World, part of the Murdoch empire, was tapping the mobile phones of over 3000 people, from senior cabinet politicians to film stars.
The fact that the police did not tip off the people whose mobile phones were being hacked into, and did not take out criminal prosecutions against the hackers, are two of the issues that are allegedly being looked at.
The details obtained by the Guardian newspaper allegedly emerged during a court case involving Professional Footballers’ Association head, Gordon Taylor, and the News of the World.
Taylor received £700,000 in damages and court costs last year, but on condition that details of the case were not made public.
The Information Commissioner’s office said it had passed on evidence in 2008 to Taylor’s lawyers that 31 journalists working for the News of the World and the Sun had acquired people’s personal information by underhand means or ‘blagging’.
There were also a number of out-of-court settlements of other similar cases.
Almost all are agreed that there are questions that need answering.
Among them are: were the police being paid to look the other way, or being told by organisations such as MI5 that the material being uncovered was useful to the state?
Were police officers or police employees themselves selling information from the police security computer, which contains the fruits of routine capitalist state mobile phone surveillance of all important capitalist state officials, as well as celebrities, plus those thought to be security risks?
Is it the case that the judiciary, as well as the police, were told not to disclose what was happening, in case it brought the whole situation surrounding capitalist state surveillance in the UK out into the open?
There are now demands being made for a public inquiry into the spying and the sale of information, especially in relation to how extensive these practices were and what other newspapers or media outlets, if any, were involved in the practice.
The Guardian is already alleging that the details of the News of the World operations were suppressed by the police and by the High Court.
MPs on the House of Commons Culture and Media Committee have also pledged to reopen their investigation into phone hacking.
The former Labour Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott said yesterday that ‘many, many’ other questions also needed to be answered.
He said: ‘First of all, those of us that had our phones tapped and the police were aware of it – why were we not told? Why was the News of the World not prosecuted?
‘Why was a separate deal done in the court and then put away, and not made available to us? To the legal authorities.’
The fact of the matter is that capitalist Britain has the most spied-on people on the planet. There are millions of CCTV cameras and every conceivable form of eavesdropping is the rule. Any state inquiry into this is bound to be a cover-up.
Just as in Russia where the state secrets of the Okhrana were only made public after the Russian revolution, the contents of the police and secret service computers and their actual operations will only be revealed after the British socialist revolution.
