Leveson asked to publish secret files


by Newswire    
8:30 am - March 12th 2012

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The Hacked Off campaign is today calling on Lord Justice Leveson to publish the Motorman files.

These files – which have been seen by the Leveson Inquiry, by lawyers for national newspapers and by the newspapers themselves – remain secret from the British public and the victims.

The secret files are known to contain:
• Proof that several national newspapers used private investigators and ‘blaggers’ to acquire private information on an industrial scale
• Details of some 17,500 transactions, many classified by the Information Commissioner as illegal
• Evidence of payments to corrupt police officers for information from the Police National Computer
• Records of criminal records checks, DVLA checks, confidential ‘friends & family’ phone records – all bought and paid for by newspapers

These practices were often, in the words of the former Information Commissioner, ‘at least as serious as phone hacking, and may be even more serious’.

Though the public can be told about the files, it seems we must not see what is in them. Unlike the case of MPs’ expenses, no newspaper has been prepared to publish the full picture.

The files can answer many questions, such as:

Who were the 305 journalists involved and which newspapers were they working for?
How many of them now occupy senior positions at national papers?
How much did papers pay?
What kinds of people were targeted?
What methods were used?
What kind of information was stolen?
Where confidential information was stolen, was it for stories that served the public interest?

They say:

If the files are not published now, this scandal will be buried forever. They must be redacted to protect victims while revealing the kinds of people targeted (‘an actor’, ‘a victim of crime’ etc) and the kinds of information sought (‘criminal record’, ‘friends & family numbers’ etc).

Otherwise they should be published in their entirety. Hacked Off calls upon Lord Justice Leveson to ensure that this is done as soon as possible. At the same time the long-overdue process of informing the victims of these intrusions should begin.

The campaign urges all those who support this aim to write to the inquiry at and copy to the Information Commissioner’s Office:

—
From a press release

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Reader comments


1. JC

Sounds like a good idea to me. Then we can see all the media organisations involved. At the moment, most commentators are pushing the line that it was only News International. This may be why they don’t want this evidence published.


Reactions: Twitter, blogs
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