Posted on 12/01/2011 8:44:16 AM PST by Retro Llama
He admitted he and his colleagues hacked into people's phones and paid police officers for tips. He confessed to lurking in unmarked vans outside people's houses, stealing confidential documents, rifling through celebrity garbage and pretending he was not a journalist pursuing a story but "Brad the teenage rent boy," propositioning a priest.
After Paul McMullan, a former deputy features editor at Rupert Murdoch's now-defunct News of the World tabloid, had finished testifying at a judicial inquiry Tuesday, it was hard to think of any dubious newsgathering technique he had not confessed to.
Nor were the practices he described limited to a select few, McMullan told the Leveson Inquiry, appointed by Prime Minister David Cameron to investigate media ethics in Britain. On the contrary, he said, News of the World's underlings were encouraged by their circulation-obsessed bosses to use any means necessary to get material....
(Excerpt) Read more at seattletimes.nwsource.com ...
Aren’t there several other companies guilty of this practice? I thought I heard about several others.
Did they set Murdoch up?
He doesnt seem like the kind of guy who would buy this rag if they were up to stuff like this.
Or did he just now know?
I find it highly unlikely that he bought this company and then ORDERED them to do all this stuff, which would be his fault.
More likely he bought it just because it was a 100 year old going concern... and then got blindsided by the libtard reporters who worked for it and were unhappy that he bought it.
I hope they like being out of work more.
From The Register – 11/30/11:
Secret app on millions of phones logs key taps.
An Android app developer published what he says is conclusive proof millions of smartphones are secretly monitoring the key presses, geographic locations, and received messages of its users. In a YouTube video posted November 28, the developer showed how software from a company known as Carrier IQ recorded in real time the keys he pressed into a stock EVO handset, which he reset to factory settings just prior to the demonstration.
Using a packet sniffer while his device was in airplane mode, he demonstrated how each numeric tap and every received text message is logged by the software. The developer then connected the device to a Wi-Fi network and pointed his browser at Google. Even though he denied the search company’s request that he share his physical location, the Carrier IQ software recorded it. The secret app then recorded the precise input of his search query, even though he typed it into a page that uses the SSL protocol to encrypt data sent between the device and the servers.
In an interview the week of November 21, Carrier IQ’s VP of marketing rejected claims the software posed a privacy threat because it never captured key presses. He said Carrier IQ was a diagnostic tool designed to give network carriers and device manufacturers detailed information about the causes of dropped calls and other performance issues. The app developer said he chose the HTC phone purely for demonstration purposes. Blackberrys, other Android-powered handsets, and smartphones from Nokia contain the same snooping software, he claims.
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/30/smartphone_spying_app/
http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/30/2601875/carrier-iq-references-discovered-apple-ios-iphone
To date, the user tracking controversy surrounding Carrier IQ has focused primarily on Android, but today details are surfacing that the company also may have hooks into Apple's iOS. Well-known iPhone hacker Chpwn tweeted today that versions at least as recent as iPhone OS 3.1.3 contained references to Carrier IQ and later confirmed it's in all versions of iOS, including iOS 5...
...However, the good news is that it does not appear to actually send any information so long as a setting called DiagnosticsAllowed is set to off, which is the default. Finally, the local logs on iOS seem to store much less information than what has been seen on Android, limited to some call activity and location (if enabled), but not any text from the web browser, SMS, or anywhere else.
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