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Phone hacking and a nagging sense of injustice

12/12/2015

0 Comments

 
Alison Saunders
DPP Alison Saunders said there was insufficient prospect of conviction to continue the hacking inquiry
And so it ends. After four and a half years, countless police hours and the expenditure of more than £40m, the curtain has been pulled down on the phone hacking saga.
This morning's leader columns were sanctimonious. To paraphrase: of course listening to people's private conversations was reprehensible, but the response was a waste of public money and an excuse for the Establishment to stamp on the free Press. Oh, and by the way, they're at it again with attempts to curb freedom of information. 
Hacked Off was disappointed - leading light Evan Harris described Alison Saunders's announcement as outrageous. Victims' lawyers are ducking under the curtain to try to regain the stage by seeking a review of her decision-making process. 
So far, so predictable.

And what of those of us who love our trade? We who have been watching in bewilderment and dismay as the drama has played out? Should we feel relief that it's all over, glad that no more journalists will be put on trial at the Old Bailey?
Probably. So why don't I? Why do I feel uncomfortable? 
Because justice has been the loser in this whole sorry story.
​
As people have been parroting from the moment Nick Davies lit the blue touch paper in July 2011, phone hacking is wrong. It is, and was, criminal. But the fact is, the public didn't (and still don't) care. They didn't care when Prince William's voicemail was intercepted and Glenn Mulcaire and Clive Goodman went to jail as a result. They didn't care when celebrities complained that their phone messages were being listened to. They only started to care when the Milly Dowler story broke - heartless bastard hacks targeting a murdered girl.
Milly Dowler
​Except, except. Of all the instances of phone hacking, wasn't that the most understandable, the least reprehensible? For wasn't the purpose to try to find her? It wasn't to get the dirt on whose nanny some celeb was sleeping with that week; it was to try to find a missing, not - as far as anyone knew - murdered, child.
OK, the desire was to get a scoop and the delays in sharing information (albeit inaccurate information) with the police were unforgivable. But if those journalists had found that girl alive, they would have been heroes. 
So yes, hacking was wrong. But the one case that aroused so much outrage and set this charabanc on the road actually caused far less damage than the Mirror's sustained invasion of the lives of Sadie Frost and Paul Gascoigne. But the public didn't give two figs about them - and now it seems the DPP doesn't either.

Stephen Glover wrote a Saturday essay for the Mail a while back in which he described Davies as the man who did for the British Press. It was a mean-spirited piece that suggested Davies's intention was to destroy tabloid journalism. Davies and the Guardian have never been great fans of Rupert Murdoch and they would probably shed few tears if they put him out of business, but I doubt they thought they had the clout to do so - let alone enough to bring down the whole popular Press. 
The Milly Dowler story would have touched a nerve and then subsided from the public consciousness, as previous hacking stories and assorted Commons select committee inquiries had done before, but for one thing: David Cameron's appointment of Andy Coulson as his director of communications.
Everything that has happened over the past four years stems from that mixture. The Dowler story was simply the catalyst that sparked the reaction.
Cameron panicked and set up Leveson; the Met panicked and set up all those investigations with the quirky names; Murdoch panicked and gave the police millions of documents, betraying sources and staff along the way - with the notable exception of one redhead at the top of the tree.

Once they had started uncovering evidence of wrongdoing,  where were the police supposed to stop?  Especially as they had all those News International emails.
​The phone hacking investigations that had been at the root of all this became small beer against the monster that was Elveden.  But as successive juries declined to convict journalists for paying sources - while other courts convicted and jailed those same sources for selling information - it finally dawned on the DPP that the whole enterprise was money down the drain.
Saunders retreated on Elveden in October. Andy Coulson was cleared of perjury in Scotland and the final News of the World hacking trial ended with one guilty plea and an acquittal (the Brooks-Coulson show trial having produced three acquittals, one conviction and five guilty pleas).

With police budgets stretched, no wonder Saunders lost her appetite for the fight.
Dan Evans
And yet, and yet. 
Much of the prosecution case in the Brooks-Coulson trial depended on evidence from Dan Evans (pictured), a News of the World journalist who admitted hacking and was given a suspended prison sentence. He joined the paper from the Sunday Mirror and told the court that he believed that he had been recruited for his hacking talents.
Evans was also the central figure in the civil case brought against the Mirror by Sadie Frost, Gascoigne, Alan Yentob and others. In a  judgment awarding record privacy damages totalling £1.2m , Mr Justice Mann called him the bedrock of the case and a clear witness whose evidence he accepted. Indeed, his evidence was mostly accepted without demur by Trinity Mirror before he went into the witness box.
Evans told the court that he had worked at the Sunday Mirror as a freelance for a couple of years before joining the staff in 2003. Soon after that he was called into a meeting with an executive who told him that a departing journalist had taken with him a valuable source of information - a database of telephone numbers that could be hacked.
Evans was shown how to access a voicemail message, with Yentob's number used as an example.  He was also shown how to listen to calls and taught the "double tap" method under which two calls were made to a target number in quick succession - the first to make sure the victim wasn't picking up. 
The executive at that meeting  and others who were aware and even instrumental in the hacking culture  were named in court, but redacted from Mr Justice Mann's judgment, which noted:
Picture
xxxx made it clear that Mr Evans' job for the forseeable future was to rebuild the departing journalist's database. For this purpose Mr Evans was given hundreds of mobile phone numbers and other details, such as dates of birth....
Picture
He was expected to check the phones most mornings (from his home) and then in the evenings as well. If he heard a call of interest he could get the incoming number from the voicemail system and he could then try to hack that phone as well....if the hack was successful he might, and often could, get information from messages left on that second number by his intended target. He called this process of acquiring groups of targets "farming"....
It is plain that his activities grew over time as he managed to crack more and more PINs. He himself managed to crack at least 100 PINs. At least one other journalist had a bigger database than he did.
​If he got useful or interesting information from listening to a message he would pass it up the chain of command, which meant to xxx and xxx and xxxxx and xxxx for consideration. Sometimes his exploitation of his phone hacking database took several hours a day.
Picture
Mr Evans collated his information on a Palm Pilot...synchronised to a desktop application. His Pilot was used to store names and numbers and some addresses but not PINS. Not every number on the Pilot was a successfully hacked number, but some were. 
Picture
In addition to that record, Mr Evans kept a “back pocket” list...of regular targets whose PIN numbers he had cracked and whose voicemail messages he could listen to easily.  At the height of his activities he said that he probably had 100 targets on his list, and he checked them daily.  Of the present claimants, all except Mr Gascoigne were on this list.  The effect of his evidence was that those targets would be checked twice a day (morning and evening), every day, as a minimum.  Doubtless if something interesting was thought to be happening they would be checked more frequently. The list was updated from time to time and he prepared copies for xxx and xxx.
It is clear from Mr Justice Mann's judgment that sophisticated systems for the hacking of phones were in place at Mirror papers and that Evans was acting on the bidding of more senior journalists. One who is named in the judgment was James Weatherup who, like Evans, moved on to the News of the World and was also given a suspended prison sentence after pleading guilty at the Brooks-Coulson trial.
Alison Saunders has concluded that it would be impossible to decide who made what phone call from the Mirror's offices, and also - apparently - that evidence from Evans and other former Mirror journalists would not be sufficient to secure the conviction of executives who say they knew nothing.

And so we have a repeat of the Elveden situation where foot soldiers were left to carry the can while the generals who called the shots went free.
Under Elveden, the only conviction for paying officials that still stands is that of Anthony France, who was described by his trial judge as the most junior Sun reporter and a basically decent man.
In the parallel investigations, one Mirror journalist - Graham Johnson - took himself off to the police, and was charged with hacking and given a two-month suspended prison sentence for his pains. Apart from Evans and Weatherup - who were charged in relation to their activities at the News of the World - he is the only Mirror journalist to have been punished by the courts. 

Ten Mirror group journalists, including half a dozen former editors, deputy editors and a current high-ranking executive, were "cleared" by the DPP yesterday.
Several of them swore under oath at Leveson that hacking never happened at their papers. Some may have done nothing wrong. Others may have orchestrated wholescale criminal activity. We may never know. And that isn't right. The innocent will forever be tainted, while the guilty go unpunished.

Their ultimate bosses at Trinity Mirror  also insisted at the Leveson inquiry and beyond that they were unaware of hacking at their papers. Finally, as Gascoigne and co prepared to go to court, they issued a grudging admission of culpability and a mealy-mouthed apology. They set aside £4m, then £12m, then £28m for compensation to victims they had for four years pretended hadn't existed.  The company, which has since taken over Local World to control almost two-thirds of our local newspapers, is now awaiting the result of its appeal against Mr Justice Mann's awards.
​
Meanwhile the CPS has also halted the process that might have led News UK to face corporate charges over phone hacking at the News of the World. Rebekah Brooks, having been cleared of everything for which she was put on trial, is back in her old job of chief executive, and the Murdoch empire - revamped in the wake of the scandal - is worth twice as much as it was in 2011. 
The end of the criminal investigations should clear the path for for the second half of the Leveson inquiry - looking into relations between the police and the Press - to go ahead. But with Cameron safely in No 10 for another five years with a proper majority, I wouldn't bet on that happening.
​
​So yes, I'm glad that no more public money is to be spent on this. But the abandonment of the Golding investigation gives ammunition to those who have argued all along that this was an anti-Murdoch witch-hunt. I can see no evidence anywhere - right down to the fact that Coulson served his entire sentence in the ultra-high security Belmarsh prison -  that justice has been done.
And I have an uneasy feeling that this unsatisfactory approach and outcome is being replicated in other areas of society and public life.
Perhaps the free Press could investigate.
Madelein McCann
Postscript: The cost of the Metropolitan Police investigations into alleged criminal activity by journalists has been put at about £40m. 
The force has spent £10.2m and is budgeted to spend a further £2m next year on the investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in Portugal in 2007 - an event outside the force's jurisdiction. 
The Met has an annual budget of about £3.5bn and has been making big cuts over the past four years. It had expected to have to save a further £1bn by 2020, but the Chancellor made a surprise announcement in his Autumn Statement that policing budgets would be protected in line with inflation.

Phone hacking: Some evidence from the Mirror and other cases
SubScribe commentary:
Are we too embarrassed to look in the Mirror?
​The hacking trial: 19 pages on the Brooks-Coulson case

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Time for Darcey to put his money where his mouth is

29/5/2015

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View image | gettyimages.com
When Anthony France was told last year that he would face trial for paying a policeman for stories, News UK's chief executive sent an email to Sun staff promising to support the reporter "in every way we can".
The memo from Mike Darcey (above) was a testament to France's popularity and professionalism: 
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Anthony is a hugely popular and highly respected member of The Sun team and has been an integral part of the newsroom since 2004....
He joined us after stints on the Mail on Sunday, Evening Standard and Sunday Mirror and almost immediately scored one of the biggest scoops of the year. At the height of concerns over security in The Houses of Parliament, Anthony revealed how lax security still was with the classic front page 'Sun 'Bomber' In Commons'....
Since then he has concentrated on covering crime issues and security, often asking difficult questions of Britain's police chiefs. He broke a string of big stories including the Sally Anne Bowman murder and the John Worboys serial rapist case. Despite being at the centre of a police inquiry, Anthony covered the Oscar Pistorius murder trial and Nelson Mandela's state funeral in South Africa...
We will continue to support Anthony in every way we can and our thoughts are with him during this incredibly tough time.
France was convicted last Friday and today given a suspended 18-month prison sentence and ordered to do 200 hours community service.
Judge Pontius was clearly equally impressed by the reporter, describing him as essentially a decent man of solid integrity, who had written stories of undoubted public interest.
In hissentencing remarks the judge acknowledged that paying people for stories was a well-known aspect of the way the Sun worked, that there was nothing wrong with this if it did not involve encouraging people to abuse a trusted public position, and that there was  a recognised procedure for payments: 
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The defendant was required...to present a request for payment to his editor. It follows, first, that payment of a fee, and determination of the appropriate sum, were matters for editorial discretion and not for the defendant and, secondly, there was no handing over of a grubby envelope produced from the defendant's pocket in a dark corner of a pub.
The defendant, holding a fairly junior post at the Sun, was therefore following an accepted procedure that doubtless had existed for some time, and doing so in relation to a source...he had inherited from a colleague and to whom payments had previously been made.
Rebekah Brooksfamously told MPs that journalists had paid police officers; Rupert Murdoch was caught on tape saying that they had been doing so forever; the Sun still carries a panel on page two offering money for stories - as the judge noted.
The Sun has also protested loud and long about Operation Elveden - most of whose evidence, remember, was handed over by News International's management and standards committee - and the persecution of journalists doing their job.
So how could it be that in mitigation before sentencing today Anthony Keeling QC told the judge that there was an overwhelming likelihood that France would lose his job and that News UK had indicated that it would not bear the costs of the prosecution?
In ordering France to bear those costs, the judge said he assumed that News UK would pick up the bill and that if it declined to do so, France should return to court to seek a review.
As Keeling said:
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 There is a sense it is Mr France, who held the most junior full-time position it was possible to hold at the Sun, who stands to be punished for the whole system.
News UK does not enjoy the best reputation in journalism. If it is not to be tarnished even further, it should announce tonight that France's job is still there - if he wants it - and that there is no question of the company leaving him to pick up the prosecution tab.
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Freedom of expression is under attack - and our response is to give our enemies more ammunition

2/5/2015

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Telegraph
The Times
Last autumn I was invited to contribute a chapter to the Committee to Protect Journalists' annual book about attacks on the Press. While Britain hardly suffers the sort of censorship seen in Eritrea, there was a lot going on to cause concern here at the time.
Press Gazette had just launched its Save Our Sources campaign after the disclosure that police had looked at Tom Newton Dunn's phone records to trace the source of the Plebgate story. The Operation Elveden trials were under way with more than 20 tabloid journalists preparing to face court for paying contacts for stories. There was disquiet about the long periods people were spending on police bail before learning whether they were to be prosecuted.
By the time the book was published on Monday, the landscape had changed. Press Gazette's campaign had succeeded in securing a statutory instrument that meant a judge must sign off on police applications to view journalists' communications records if the objective was to uncover sources.
Several journalists charged over payments to sources had been cleared by juries and the only two convictions were overturned. A wholesale review of Elveden cases led to most prosecutions being abandoned - although the contacts betrayed by News International's Managements and Standards Committee still face trial.
Theresa May had said that she wanted to reduce to 28 days the maximum time anyone had to spend on police bail.
Press Gazette
There is still much to worry about - particularly a growing determination among those in authority to keep the Press in the dark.
In spite of promises after the Mid Staffs scandal, whistle-blowers are still hunted down. Indeed, the first response of any organisation found wanting is often to set up an investigation to find out who leaked the story rather than to put its house in order.
Press Gazette has reported on armies of PR staff employed across government and by the police, at great expense to the public purse, with the apparent objective of keeping reporters away from ministers, councillors, policemen, doctors, soldiers - anyone with first-hand knowledge of any situation. Every piece of information has to be filtered through "official channels". 
When Tony Blair came to power, Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell set out to control the news agenda. They established a rebuttal unit and would be on the phone to protest the moment the first editions were up if a newspaper's report was not to their liking.
That infant control freak has grown into a monster, so that we have a general election campaign where Labour bars Tory newspapers from its events, where the Guardian is denied access to a school where Cameron is campaigning, where local journalists who are best placed to know about the issues in their constituencies  are refused permission to ask questions when the election charabanc rolls into their towns.
And, of course, the rise of social media since the last election means that politicians are bypassing any journalistic scrutiny by tweeting and emailing and Facebooking their campaign messages.
This situation is a real threat to the freedom of information and democracy. We cannot live in a society where only approved people may speak to reporters, where only the authorised message is allowed to get through.
Mail
So how are newspapers responding? By working harder to present a fair and balanced picture, to make sure their readers are given all the information they need to make their own decisions about society - and how to vote?
Not a bit of it.
Our whole industry was tainted by the phone-hacking scandal - and that includes the Mail and Express groups that have insisted they had no part in such activities and which have largely escaped the attention of the Met.
But there has been no sense of contrition or of reform.
Paul Dacre, who presides over the most complained against and censured news organisation in the country, also presides over the industry's code of ethics. You might think that when the Press Complaints Commission was disbanded - or, as Hacked Off would say, rebranded  - and replaced by Ipso, he might have felt it politic to step aside. But, no. There he is like some journalistic Sepp Blatter unable or unwilling to see that his organisation's credibility might improve if someone else were in his chair. 
What message does that send?
As successive Elveden cases have collapsed, we have heard tales of woe from journalists whose lives and whose families' lives had been disrupted for years on end. We have heard about dawn raids, terrified children, lost birthdays - as though this had never happened to anyone else subsequently cleared by a court of law. These men and women have legitimate grievances. They should not have been put through all that just for doing their jobs.
There are legitimate questions to be asked about the cost of Leveson, the police investigations and the subsequent trials, about the use of resources.
But where those journalists' experiences could have been used to campaign for improvements in the system to the benefit of thousands of innocent people, they were instead put forward as evidence of an Establishment witch-hunt, making the Press again seem self-absorbed and self-serving
And lost in all this were the sources who went to jail or are still facing trial because of that Management and Standards Committee.
How can we stand up and argue about our role in calling those in authority to account when reporting is so skewed?
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sun scotland
And never has it been more so than in this general election campaign.
The Labour manifesto includes a promise to implement the "full Leveson" and the Tory Press is running scared. 
Rupert Murdoch is reported to have complained that the Sun was not doing enough to prevent a Labour victory. Well, it's doing its damndest now - including Scottish and English front pages urging voters to back different parties. The official line is that the two papers have different editors, different audiences. Few believe, however, that the objective is anything other than to keep Ed Miliband out of Downing Street.
The Mail, in common with the Sun,  has attacked "Red Ed" at every opportunity and perpetuated the myth that he "stabbed his brother in the back" by running for the Labour leadership "against their mother's wishes". The venality has been breathtaking. Many people might believe that David Miliband would have been a better choice - but he had no divine right to succeed Gordon Brown. And remember,  Ralph Miliband, "the man who hated Britain" was his father too. There is every chance that that hatchet job would still have found its way into print had the elder Miliband become Labour leader.
The Telegraph has meanwhile given up any pretence of balanced reporting, surrendering its front page to Tory propaganda "Miliband's bad for business" letters twice last month.
Of last night's Question Time leaders' debate, it complained that Conservative supporters were outnumbered two-to-one among the audience, yet again proving the BBC's "leftwing bias". 
The configuration was 25% Labour, Liberal and Conservative supporters, 25% others. Since LibDems and Greens were more likely to be left-leaning, in the view of chief political correspondent Christopher Hope, that meant two-thirds of the audience would be against the Tories. For heaven's sake.
Sun
Star
Mail
How did the papers report the debate? For the Telegraph, Times and Sun, the main point was not Miliband's insistence that he would give up the premiership if the price was a deal with the SNP, but his spending "lies" - and the fact that he tripped as he left the platform. While for the Mirror, Miliband emerged the Mirror and "slippery Cam" was savaged by voters.
Earlier in the week Miliband was mocked for agreeing to that encounter with Russell Brand - and the Tory papers had negative reviews on their websites within moments of the interview ending. 
But who is to say he was wrong?  A million people watched and they will have made up their own minds about it without any guidance from the Telegraph, Star, Mail or Sun.
The politicians have decided that they need us any more. They are connecting directly with the voters.
And if the papers can't do better than clumsy photoshopping, character assassinations and propaganda, readers will soon decide that they don't need us either.
SubScribe: Attacks on the Press
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Commissioner is protecting sources, not journalists

5/2/2015

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Dominic Ponsford
.
Save Our Sources logo
Press Gazette and its editor Dominic Ponsford, above, have played an absolute blinder with their Save Our Sources campaign, which called for judicial oversight of police checks on journalists' phone and email records.
They now have the Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister, Home Secretary and Culture Secretary on side and the promise of action in response to the Interception of Communications Commissioner's report yesterday.
That report found that police chiefs signing off applications to look at journalists' data had not paid sufficient attention to Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which enshrines the right to freedom of expression and sets out the special circumstances in which that right might be curbed.

The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act - the only law under which police may look at these sorts of records - stipulates that for an application to be granted, it needs to show that access to the data is necessary and proportional. That means the prospective public benefit needs to be greater than the potential damage caused by the intrusion.
The commissioner's report states that in most of the cases involving journalists' records over the past three years, those criteria were not met. The report suggests that that may have been because neither Home Office nor  ACPO guidance on the subject addressed the question of Article 10. In other words, nobody thought about it properly.
That is unsatisfactory, troubling even, but there is no suggestion in the report that the police were abusing their powers under the Act. On the contrary, the report says: 

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Police forces are not randomly trawling communications data relating to journalists in order to identify their sources. The applications examined in the main related to investigations where public officials were suspected of criminal conduct or where a media organisation had voluntarily disclosed information to the police relating to what they believed to be criminal conduct for investigation.
The report lays heavy emphasis on the importance of freedom of speech and its various safeguards in domestic and international law. There is abundant recognition of the "chilling effect" that the disclosure of sources can have on people's willingness to speak out in the public interest, a recognition of the journalist's role, and an acknowledgement that data secured legitimately for other purposes might be used to uncover sources who should remain anonymous.
But this is no love letter to the Press. One of the grounds for seeking access to data is for the "prevention or detection of crime", and the report underscores the point: "The Act does not restrict the acquisition of communications data to serious crime which is defined at section 81(2) and (3) of the Act."
It continues:
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It is therefore unhelpful when the reports in the media misinform the public by stating the use of powers to acquire communications data for crimes, not deemed to be of a serious nature under the Act, are inappropriate. It is also wrong for the reports in the media to cite the Act as a terrorist law and infer that its use for non-terrorist related matters is inappropriate.
RIPA was passed by Tony Blair's Government in response to a perceived terrorist threat, so it is inevitable that it will be described as an anti-terror law. As to whether crimes need to be deemed serious, this is relevant with regard to journalists because while RIPA may not require that the crime under investigation is serious, CPS guidance in relation to Article 10 does. As the commissioner's report states:
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According to the CPS...in cases which rely on the disclosure of journalistic sources or on covert techniques which involve or amount to the revealing of a source's identity, the prosecution will have to satisfy the court that the admission of evidence that reveals the identity of a journalistic source is exceptionally required by a pressing social need and that it is proportionate in the circumstances of the case. This can be done... but the prosecution will have to rebut the presumption that it is always prima facie contrary to the public interest that press sources should be disclosed. Expressed another way, there is an underlying assumption that it is not in the public interest to identify a journalist’s source. 
The report goes on to quote the CPS guidelines:
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Very important factors will be required to outweigh the general right of a journalist to keep sources confidential. It is therefore important that offences are not investigated in ways which are contrary to Principle 6 [of Article 10], unless the circumstances are sufficiently serious and vital to warrant this. 
The commissioner's report regards this as an indication that "prosecution, or even a criminal investigation, should be seen as a last resort reserved for the most serious cases".
So how wrong it it of the media to talk about serious crime?

The key concern for the commissioner was clearly the protection of sources, not of journalists. It was also, presumably, the key issue for Press Gazette, since it labelled its campaign Save Our Sources.
There has been celebration today of the recommendation that a judge should approve applications relating to journalists - but most reports have omitted the caveat in the second half of the sentence from their intros. Here it is in full (my underscore):
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Judicial authorisation must be obtained in cases where communications data is sought to determine the source of journalistic information. 
Even under the commission's formula, journalists could still have their phone and email records examined by the police on the say-so of a senior officer for other purposes - for example, if they are victims or suspects of crime - although a second recommendation says that the officer considering the application should consider "collateral intrusion" and "unintended consequences"
Why shouldn't they? some might ask. No similar protection is proposed for lawyers, doctors, priests and their confidential dealings with clients, patients or parishioners. Perhaps their respective trade journals should kick up a fuss as Press Gazette did.

And how about all the other people whose personal data are scrutinised? About half a million applications are made by public authoirities every year for the right to access phone and email records. The commissioner learnt that 608 applications over the past three years (0.1% of the total authorised by the police) related to journalists' links with public officials - and not all of those involved looking at the journalists' data. In 24 of the 34 investigations, journalists' records were not examined. 
There is also the Wapping effect. Eighty per cent of the applications came from officers working on Operation Elveden, which looked into alleged illegal payment of public officials by journalists. And remember News International's Management and Standards Committee voluntarily handed over masses of material, so the cops would presumably in many cases have been asking permission to look at what they had in their hands.
Exclude Elveden and the total number of applications relating to journalists' data was equivalent to less than one per force per year. Put that way, as it is by the commissioner, it seems modest. Put another way, as it is by Ponsford in his Press Gazette blog, there were still 124 RIPA applications for telecoms records of journalists who were not suspected of any crime. 

That isn't right. And it is right for the trade magazine to highlight this. It is also right to ask the circumstances of these applications and, at the very least, for the targeted journalists to be informed.
Legitimate concerns have been raised about the use of RIPA to uncover the sources of the Plebgate and Chris Huhne stories. The CPS declined to prosecute the Plebgate whistleblowers, saying: "We have concluded that a jury is likely to decide that it was in the public interest for the events at the gate to be made public." In the Huhne case, a judge specifically ruled that the source should not be identified, yet the police continued their pursuit.
It is therefore in the public interest for the police to have to explain their actions in other non-Elveden cases. 
But this business of police looking at people's metadata without having to consult an outside authority is not a worry exclusive to journalists. We are a speck on this landscape. 
This morning's papers reported the proposed change in the law as a triumph for the freedom of the Press, proof that vindictive police had been abusing their powers:
Times
Guardian
Mail
This last is from the Mail, which also carried a leader on the subject. Its news story started:
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David Cameron has performed a U-turn over Press freedom after insisting a judge must sign off police snooping into journalists’ phone records. In a significant victory for the Press, he promised safeguards to prevent forces abusing anti-terror powers to expose potentially-embarrassing confidential sources who blow the whistle to reporters.

It is an important moment for our industry. But at a time when journalists are too often seen as self-serving and self-important, would it not have been good at least to avoid the very language criticised in the commission's report?
And even better to have paid some attention to the other one and a half million people whose privacy was invaded under this act over those three years?

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    Liz Gerard

    Liz Gerard

    New year, new face: it's time to come out from behind that Beryl Cook mask. 
    I'm Liz Gerard, and after four decades dedicated to hard news, I now live by the motto "Those who can do, those who can't write blogs". 
    These are my musings on our national newspapers. Some of them may have value.

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