Were the police hacking phones too?

“As an American who spent many years in this underground industry, I can tell you that the British phone hacking scandal has exposed only a tiny part of a vast criminal network.” So Frank Ahearn wrote in The Spectator a few weeks ago: he spent his life as a “skip-tracer” (as they’re called in America), dealing in the black market for information. There are many clients, he says, and journalists are just one part of it. The people he worked for included husbands investigating wives, insurance companies trying to expose dodgy claims and – yes – even the police, using “skip-tracers” to solve cases.

Finally, this aspect of the British hacking industry is beginning to be made public. A legal campaign group called Justice has today claimed that, in Britain, illegal phone hacking may well have been carried out by police officers too. Its report “Freedom from Suspicion” includes a section discussing the police’s response to the News of the World scandal:

“In September 2009, however, Assistant Commissioner John Yates gave evidence to the House of Commons Committee on Culture, Media and Sport in which he stated with some confidence that the Metropolitan Police did not regard the activity of hacking into another person’s voicemail as a criminal offence if the voicemail had already been listened to by its intended recipient.”