Now they've gone too far

John Burns and Jo Becker have an article in The New York Times about more Murdoch hacking:

The scandal that has enveloped Rupert Murdoc ’s media empire in Britain widened substantially with reports that two of his newspapers may have bribed police officers, or used other potentially illegal methods, to obtain information about Queen Elizabeth II and former Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Others on the police payroll have been bribed to use restricted cellphone-tracking technology to pinpoint the location of people sought by the papers in their restless pursuit of scoops, according to two former journalists for the tabloid, The News of the World.
As Murdoch assumed command of damage-control efforts at his London headquarters, the day brought a torrent of new revelations, including reports that newsroom malpractice extended to two other newspapers in his British stable: The Sunday Times, an up-market broadsheet, and The Sun, the country’s highest-selling daily tabloid.
Phone-hacking and other illegal or unethical methods have been common at many British newspapers that are not Murdoch-owned. But the focus for now is on News International and its parent company in the United States, the News Corporation, which confronted what many have called an existential threat to the Murdoch empire by revising its $12 billion takeover bid for Britain’s most lucrative satellite television company, British Sky Broadcasting, in ways that appeared to delay it for at least six months.
Many commentators in Britain said Murdoch appeared to be playing for time, in the hope that public and political anger over the current scandal will abate, making room for politicians and regulators to judge the takeover on its business merits, and not on the basis of retribution for the hacking scandal.
The revelations about the intrusive activities directed at the queen and Brown have seized the headlines, driving home the realization that nobody, not even the most powerful and protected people in the land, has been beyond the reach of news organizations caught up in a relentless battle for lurid headlines and mass circulations.
A wide segment of British society, from celebrities to ordinary families wrestling with personal tragedies, has been shown to be potentially vulnerable to the newspapers’ use of cellphone-hacking, identity theft, tracking technology, and police bribery, and perhaps even clandestine property break-ins, if some reports circulating in recent days are true.
The BBC and The Guardian, in recent reports, cited internal emails from a News of the World archive in which requests were made for about $1,600 to pay a royal protection officer— one of several hundred Scotland Yard officers eligible to serve in the palace security detail— for classified information about the queen, Prince Charles, and other senior members of the royal family in what a Scotland Yard official described as a major security breach. The Guardian article said two officers on the royal detail were involved, and that the emails from an archive assembled by The News of the World were exchanged by a senior executive and a reporter, neither of whom it identified.
The accounts said the money was used to obtain a copy of a contact book used by the royal protection service— a volume known as the Green Book, according to the BBC— that contained information about the queen, Prince Charles, other senior royals, and their friends and contacts. A report in The Evening Standard newspaper said the information included “phone numbers, and tips about the movements and activities” of the queen and her husband, Prince Philip. A Guardian report said the police had informed the palace that the cellphones of Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, may have also been hacked.
Prime Minister David Cameron said he was outraged, describing the alleged police involvement in the palace intrusion as “a dereliction of duty” and adding, “We need to get to the bottom of that if it is true.”
Brown said on his website that he was also a target. A person close to Brown said in an interview that the former prime minister believed that people working for News International, Murdoch’s British subsidiary, tried to hack into his personal voice mail and obtained other personal information, including financial accounts, tax records, and the medical details of his son Fraser, now five, who suffers from cystic fibrosis. The person close to Brown said that Brown asked Scotland Yard last year whether his personal details were among the eleven thousand pages of notes seized from Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator working for The News of the World who was jailed in 2007 for hacking the phones of the royal household. Scotland Yard confirmed that, the source said.
The Guardian reported that Brown’s bank, Abbey National, alerted him that someone acting for The Sunday Times had posed using his name— a practice commonly referred to as identity theft, or blagging— to obtain details of his account six times in 2000, when he was chancellor of the Exchequer. The BBC said that the effort was made as part of an inquiry by the paper into allegations that Brown had bought a property in his native Scotland at below-market value, something Brown has strongly denied. But the most damaging aspect of the affair involved Brown’s son. The person close to Brown said he believed that The Sun gained access to his son’s medical records for an article about his cystic fibrosis that ran in November of 2006, four months after the boy’s birth. The BBC, quoting its sources, said the information about the boy’s condition had been obtained first by The Sunday Times, and passed to The Sun. It said that Rebekah Brooks, then The Sun’s editor and now News International’s chief executive, called Brown and his wife to tell them that the paper knew of the boy’s condition, which they had believed was something known only to themselves and medical professionals who were caring for their son.
Separately, an inquiry by The New York Times, which included interviews with two former journalists at The News of the World, has revealed the workings of the illicit cellphone-tracking, which the former tabloid staffers said was known in the newsroom as pinging. Under British law, the technology involved is restricted to law enforcement and security officials, requires case-by-case authorization, and is used mainly for high-profile criminal cases and terrorism investigations, according to a former senior Scotland Yard official who requested anonymity so as to be able to speak candidly.
According to Oliver Crofton, a cybersecurity specialist who works to protect high-profile clients from such invasive tactics, cellphones are constantly pinging off relay towers as they search for a network, enabling an individual’s location to be located within yards by checking the strength of the signal at three different towers. But the former Scotland Yard official who discussed the matter said that any officer who agreed to use the technique to assist a newspaper would be crossing a red line. “That would be a massive breach,” he said.
Sean Hoare, a former show-business reporter for The News of the World who was fired in 2005, said that, when he worked there, pinging cost the paper nearly five hundred dollars on each occasion. He first found out how the practice worked, he said, when he was scrambling to find someone and was told that one of the news desk editors, Greg Miskiw, could help. Miskiw asked for the person’s cellphone number, and returned later with information showing the person’s precise location in Scotland, Hoare said. Miskiw, who faces questioning by police on a separate matter, did not return calls for comment.A former Scotland Yard officer said the individual who provided the information could have been one of a small group entitled to authorize pinging requests, or a lower-level officer who duped his superiors into thinking that the request was related to a criminal case. Hoare said the fact that it was a police officer was clear from his exchange with Miskiw. “I thought it was remarkable and asked him how he did it, and he said, ‘It’s the Old Bill, isn’t it?’ ” he recalled; the term is common slang in Britain for the police. “At that point, you don’t ask questions,” he said.
A second former editor at the paper backed Hoare’s account. “I knew it could be done and that it was done,” he said. Speaking on condition that his name be withheld, he said that another way of tracking people was to hack into their credit card details and determine where the last charge was made. He said this tactic yielded at least one major scoop, when The News of the World tracked down James Hewitt, a former army officer and lover of Princess Diana, who had fled to Spain amid the media firestorm that followed the publication of his book about the affair.

Rico says he wonders if 'a person close to Brown' is a red person or an orange person...