From the NY Times:
LONDON — Britain’s hacking scandal was reported on Tuesday to have broadened significantly into areas of national security with police investigating whether private detectives working for the Murdoch media empire hacked into the computer of a government minister responsible for Northern Ireland.
...
The report said police had warned Peter Hain, the Northern Ireland secretary from 2005 to 2007, that his computer and those of senior civil servants and intelligence agents responsible for the British province may have been hacked by private detectives working for News International.
News International — whose chairman is James Murdoch, the 38-year-old son of the octogenarian mogul Rupert Murdoch — is a British subsidiary of News Corp., the Murdoch-owned global media empire.
The British outpost has been at the center of a controversy convulsing public life here over the use of private detectives to hack into the voice mail of celebrities and less well-known people thrust into the spotlight of the news by personal tragedy.
But the latest reports suggest that the scandal may be widening if it is established that classified material was also hacked from computers. British news reports on Tuesday said Mr. Hain’s computer may have contained information about informers within Northern Ireland’s factions.
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The hacking scandal has spurred the government of Prime Minister David Cameron to set up a full-blown inquiry into the practices and ethics of the British and its relationship with the police and politicians.
In recent days, the inquiry has heard testimony from a procession of celebrities ranging from the actor Hugh Grant to J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books, chronicling episodes of intrusion into their private lives by reporters. While the scandal revolved initially around phone hacking, it has since broadened into the realm of interference with computers by people using so-called Trojan Horse viruses for remote access to their target’s computers.
What is the Rupert Murdoch-owned NY Post covering these days as the criminal activity of its parent company, News Corporation, becomes more and more evident over in Britain?
Why how Comptroller John Liu, mired in a campaign fund-raising scandal, is a criminal who isn't fit for office.
Never mind that at least 16 News Corp. employees have been arrested in the phone hacking scandal, the criminal activity that News Corp. employees have been alleged to have engaged in ranges from phone and computer hacking to bribing the police to blackmailing lawyers with damaging (and false) material in the newspapers to conspiracy to cover up crimes and now government espionage.
The details of some of this are really sordid.
The Guardian is reporting that Charlotte Church was threatened by News Corp. employees to sing at Rupert Murdoch's wedding to Wendi Deng in 1999, waive the 100,000 pound fee News Corp. was offering for the event, and receive "favourable" press from the Murdoch papers.
If she refused to sing or refused to waive the fee, the Murdoch papers would print unfavorable stories about her.
Church was 13 at the time of the blackmailing.
Church acquiesced, but in the end, News Corp. reneged on the deal anyway and ran damaging material on her, including one story entitled
"Church's three in a bed cocaine shock". The report said: "Superstar Charlotte Church's mum tried to kill herself because her husband is a love rat hooked on cocaine and three in a bed orgies."
Now as bad as the Charlotte Church and other celebrity hacking/extortion/blackmail allegations are, the espionage allegation against the Murdoch papers is really beyond the pale.
If it is found the be true, Rupert Murdoch needs to be forcefully extracted from his News Corp. empire.
And yet, there is nary a word from the NY Post about any of this.
Or any word.
Just editorials about the evils of John Liu and the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Never mind that so much of the evil in this world actually exists inside Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation empire.
Much of it seems to reside right in the center of Rupert Murdoch's newspapers.
And the locus seems to be right in the heart of the Murdoch family.
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