Hackgate - The John Boyall Files

The latest piece from my regular contributor.

You win some, you lose some.

Following a four-day hearing last week, the large group of phone-hacking civil claimants won the right to see 9 key Glenn Mulcaire emails. On the downside, Justice Vos said they have enough disclosure material for the current cases so they lost on one issue -

The phone-hacking claimants were seeking further disclosure in relation to Mulcaire's activities before 2001 in an effort to establish whether voicemail interception had taken place earlier than admitted by News International during the course of the civil litigation proceedings

So, restricting the disclosure window  to post-2001? Narrowing the parameters? Isn't that one of the strategies that drew criticism to Operation Caryatid - the original phone hacking 2006 investigation? Has nothing been learnt?

It is to be hoped that an arbitrary 2001 date in the civil cases is not taken as a precedent for ongoing and future police investigations or Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) charging decisions into journalist/private investigator 'dark arts'.  Clearly, the phone hacking victims are not the only ones needing to know the genesis and extent of the 'dark arts' - it is in the wider public interest.

Irrespective of Mulcaire having or not having a direct contract with News International pre-2001, it is in the public domain that he was undertaking investigative work for them.

All through the late 1990s, the paper had been hiring an investigator called John Boyall, who, among other services, specialised in acquiring information from confidential databases. He had a wiry young man working as his assistant, named Glenn Mulcaire. In the autumn of 2001, John Boyall fell out with the News of the World's assistant editor, Greg Miskiw, who had been responsible for handling him. Miskiw replaced him by poaching Glenn Mulcaire and giving him a full-time contract.

John Boyall - at the time that he was employing Mulcaire - came to police attention.  Devon and Cornwall Constabulary scoped intelligence that a nationwide network of private investigators was illegally obtaining information from the Police National Computer (PNC).  That scoping led to an investigation called Operation Reproof.  In turn, Operation Reproof led to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) investigation Operation Motorman into data offences, and a Metropolitan Police (MET) investigation - Operation Glade.  For more information, see 'Revisiting Operation Reproof and Other Police Operations'

Devon and Cornwall police organised a raid of business premises outside London associated with Boyall.  ICO investigators were invited to accompany, to deal with suspected Data Protection breaches. Material was seized which indicated corrupt DVLA sources, plus a wealth of other incriminating documentation including commissions from Steve Whittamore (see Alex Owens' evidence to Leveson).

What is less clear is what happened to the wealth of evidentiary material.seized in the Boyall raid.  This of course begs questions - what time period do the 'Boyall Files' cover? Do they include material that may shed light on Boyall and Mulcaire's pre-2001 'dark arts' activities for journalists? Were their specialist corruption and blagging skills commissioned and deployed for other private investigators? Is there material relevant to other contemporaneous police investigations, for example, Operation Nigeria?

Given the MET's past record of effective searches of 'unused material' and their vague, hazy explanation of how long they keep it safe after convictions (five, six, seven years..?) one could be pessimistic. If it weren't for Nick Davies' reports in the Guardian, the Mulcaire material in bin bags may well have found their way into a MET incinerator.  But the best place to start may be via Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to the Information Commissioner's Office itself.  As the entity responsible for ensuring FOI compliance, doubtless they would welcome the opportunity to answer a few questions - in the public interest:

Where are the Boyall Files and unused material?

Were the Boyall Files passed on or copied to the MET for use in Operation Glade?

Did Devon and Cornwall Constabulary retain the Boyall Files and unused material for use in the abortive Operation Reproof prosecutions?

Were the Boyall Files incorporated into the spreadsheets of the more-famous Motorman Files?

Where is the unused material from Operation Motorman, given that the earliest data relate to 1996?

Were copies of the Boyall Files and unused material provided to the MET for use in Operation Caryatid?

Have the ICO been asked, or given, permission for the destruction of any or all of the Boyall Files and/or related material?

At least two allegations of pre-2001 phone hacking were given in evidence to Lord Justice Leveson:

• James Hipwell's evidence asserted phone hacking at The Mirror 1998-2000
• Dominic Mohan described how newspapers, in 1998, hacked into the mobile phones of members of the Irish Government to expose lax security.

Therefore there seems to be an argument for locating and preserving pre-2001 material - especially relating to Mulcaire - before it is lost, destroyed or compromised.  The clock is ticking to get it preserved fast.

Related Articles
One Rogue Email And The Indestructible Archive 

John Yates And Neil Wallis - A Mutual Understanding
Alex Marunchak - Presumed Innocent
News Corp - Diplomatic Immunity?
The Cook-Hames Surveillance : A Watched Kettle...
Alastair Morgan On The Latest Hackgate Revelations

You can contact the author on Twitter @brown_moses or by email at brownmoses@gmail.com

The Milly Dowler Hacking - Part 2: Discrepancies And Delays

Part 1 provided contexts up until just after Milly Dowler's disappearance.  Part 2 looks at when evidence and suspicions of NotW hackings could - perhaps should - have been unearthed.

May 02  Seven weeks after her disappearance, Bob and Sally Dowler were stalked by NotW whilst they quietly re-traced missing Milly's last known steps. Their 'grief walk' became a major story in NotW, with surveillance photo.  Sally told her police Family Liaison Officer that NotW could only have found out their plans from their phone conversation or a police source.

SURREY Police therefore had an opportunity to connect their knowledge of NotW phone hacking and suspicions that it was still continuing, with Milly's parents as targeted victims.  Adjoining force, Sussex Police, were requested to start a review of the SURREY Dowler enquiry. It is not known if SURREY's knowledge of NotW hacking was disclosed to Sussex officers.  Another missed opportunity.

16th July 02  A major discrepancy here.  According to a SURREY Police statement in 2012 (page 13), this date was when NotW met with SURREY Police detectives Craig DENHOLM and Stuart GIBSON of the Miller Dowler investigation team.  This contradicts The Independent's report  (also cited in Part 1) that two face-to-face meetings had taken place weeks before, in April. The July 16th timing is debatable however as Stuart GIBSON had already been replaced on the Dowler investigation in late June.

Aug 02  The Soham murders, Cambridgeshire.  In 2011, the victims' parents were informed by police that their phone numbers had been found in Glenn MULCAIRE's notebooks.

Sept 02  Milly Dowler's body found.

Nov 02  Devon and Cornwall Police's Operation REPROOF planned with ICO their first raid on suspect premises.  As per good practice REPROOF informed, liaised with and secured necessary support from the relevant geographical constabulary - SURREY Police.  REPROOF and ICO then raided the business premises (Guildford, SURREY) and home (Caterham, SURREY) of John BOYALL. As a result of material seized, ICO commenced OPERATION MOTORMAN, their investigation into widespread data offences.

Mar 03  Raid on Steve WHITTAMORE's Hampshire home and the business premises of 'JJ Services' , registered address Sutton, SURREY - on the SURREY/MET border. Evidence was found of illegal access to the Police National Computer (PNC) and two other suspects were investigated - one was a civilian worker at a MET police station. The other, retired MET officer Alan King, had his private investigator premises in London searched and his home in Coulsdon, SURREY.

Apr 03  OPERATION MOTORMAN investigators briefed MET officers on their evidence that PNC information had been accessed by WHITTAMORE associates.  The MET then started preliminary investigations, prior to establishing their own formal Operation GLADE.  Also in April 03, Bob QUICK left the MET for his new appointment as Deputy Chief Constable of SURREY Police.

May 03  ICO investigators gave the MET further detailed update presentations on OPERATION MOTORMAN and evidence uncovered for use in Operation GLADE. The unsorted MOTORMAN Files continued to be organised and compiled into an electronic database.

Aug 03  OPERATION GLADE officially commenced - this MET investigation was restricted to only some of the PNC offences uncovered by MOTORMAN.

2003 - 04 Controversially, OPERATION MOTORMAN refrained from interviewing any journalists.  OPERATION GLADE interviewed only seven journalists; none were prosecuted.  More missed opportunities.

Oct 04  Bob QUICK promoted to Chief Constable, SURREY Police.

Apr 05 OPERATION GLADE investigation concluded in convictions of John BOYALL, Steve WHITTAMORE, ex-MET officer Alan King and MET civilian worker Paul Marshall after guilty pleas.  Via prosecutions preparations, copies of the MOTORMAN Files remained in the possession of the MET and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). The ICO retained their own MOTORMAN database and the original hard copy evidence.

Just a few weeks later, members of the royal household began to suspect their phone messages were being intercepted by NotW.  Their suspicions were raised with MET Counter-Terrorism/Royalty Protection - the command headed by Andy HAYMAN. Dec 05 the resultant covert investigation started - OPERATION CARYATID.

Apparently, the MET failed to make any connection between CARYATID and the MOTORMAN or GLADE investigations, despite NotW featuring so largely in all three operations.

8 Aug 06  OPERATION CARYATID raided the London home and attempted to raid the NotW Wapping office of royal correspondent Clive GOODMAN. Simultaneously, Glenn MULCAIRE was also arrested and a large quantitiy of material seized from his London home and from business premises in Sutton, SURREY.

CARYATID established extremely narrow parameters solely to inform 4 priority categories of people named in MULCAIRE's notebooks and defined as victims - royal, politicians, police and national security.  Even so not all were informed, including Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott.  MULCAIRE's information gathered about the Dowler family was undiscovered in his notebooks, and stored by the MET in bin bags.  Yet another opportunity missed.

Nov 06  GOODMAN and MULCAIRE convicted.

2007  Gordon Taylor negotiations on his settlement with NotW.  His lawyer, Mark Lewis, gained a crucial court decision ordering diclosure of all relevant material held by:
MET (from MULCAIRE and OPERATION CARYATID)
CPS Crown Prosecution Service (limited material from OPERATION CARYATID)
ICO (from OPERATION MOTORMAN)

It seems that all evidence of the Dowler hackings was still left overlooked in this disclosure search process.

Mar 08  Bob QUICK left SURREY Police for new post at the MET as Assistant Commissioner Specialist Operations (Counter-Terrorism, Cabinet and Royal Protection).  It is not apparent if he was briefed on OPERATION CARYATID and its implications for royal, national security and senior politicians' protection. And if not, why not.

Apr 08  Craig DENHOLM left SURREY Police for his new post as MET Commander working directly with Assistant Commissioner John YATES.

June 09  Craig DENHOLM left MET and returned to SURREY Police for promotion to Deputy Chief Constable.

July 09  John YATES did his one-day assessment to decide that re-examining OPERATION CARYATID unused evidence was unnecessary.  Questions are still unanswered as to whether or not DENHOLM informed YATES what he knew, and his '02 meetings with NotW when they had admitted Milly Dowler's mobile phone was hacked.  And if not, why not.

Also in July, the CPS undertook its short, parallel consideration of its limited CARYATID material and supportively agreed with YATES that no re-investigation was justified.

The Dowler evidence in bin bags of MULCAIRE material continued to be overlooked.

Aug 09  YATES instructed CARYATID material to be collated and (for the first time) entered into a searchable database.  This work took months

2010  Civil litigations, Select Committee evidence and other revelations increasingly rendered NotW's 'one rogue reporter' defence untenable.

Jan 2011 MET announced the start of the OPERATION WEETING investigation into phone-hacking.

Apr 2011  Sally and Bob Dowler are finally informed by OPERATION WEETING that their (and their murdered daughter's) phone mesages had been intercepted. 

Apr 2012  The Culture, Media & Sports Select Committee reported that John YATES "told us that the eventual number of additional victims who were contacted as a result of the supposedly more vigorous investigation in 2009 was just eight." (para 259)

Inexplicably - and unforgivably - this was more than nine years after SURREY Police knew of the Milly Dowler phone hacking.

There may yet be legal repercussions for SURREY.  They are mentioned twice in court rulings of the 'Mobile Telephone Voicemail Interception Litigation'.  The Generic Particulars of Claim (the agreed basis for all current and future litigation) states that NotW journalists  "had admitted to Surrey Police in April 2002 that the First Defendant (News Group Newspapers) had unlawfully accessed Milly Dowler's voicemail messages."

Plus, Mr Justice Vos has adressed another ruling to the MET on processes for disclosures to claimants.  Vos ordered the Met to disclose to claimants relevant documents, computer data and other material - including that of

the Respondent (The Commissioner of the Police of the Metropolis), the First Defendant (News Group Newspapers),  Clive Goodman and the Surrey Police.

Grouped together in this way, they look a motley crew...

Related Posts
The Milly Dowler Hacking - Part 1: Questions Still Unanswered
The Milly Dowler Hacking - Part 3: A Short Postscript
Hackgate for Beginners
Surrey Police and the Hacking of Milly Dowler's Phone
Bloggerheads - News of the World: 110% certainty, the remainder fact

You can contact the author on Twitter @brown_moses or by email at brownmoses@gmail.com

Hackgate for Beginners - Past Police Operations

This is part of a series of posts intended to help newcomers to the Hackgate scandal to understand the many different elements that make up the scandal.  With so much of the focus being on the Leveson Inquiry it’s easy to lose sight of some of the other aspects of the scandal, something this series of posts will hopefully correct.

In this first article I will be covering a number of past police operations that are relevant to the current hacking scandal.

Previous Operations

There have been a number of previous police operations relating to the current Hackgate scandal that met with varying levels of success, for a variety of reasons.

The most significant investigations were Operation Motorman and Operation Glade in 2003.  These Operations were the result of the ICO discovering the scale of the problem when documents were found on the premises of Surrey private investigator John Boyall that revealed the misuse of data from the Police National Computer, and this led to the two operations.

As an interesting side note, until the autumn of 2001 the News of the World was a regular client of John Boyall, but when News of the World's assistant editor, Greg Miskiw fell out with Boyall, Miskiw poached Boyall's assistant Glenn Mulcaire, who would go on to hack the voicemail messages of public figures at the behest of the News of the World.

Operation Motorman

A  2003 investigation by the Information Commissioner's Office into allegations of offences under the Data Protection Act by the British press led by ICO Senior Investigator Alec Owens triggered by discoveries at the premises of Surrey private investigator John Boyall.

The discoveries at John Boyall’s premises led to the search of the Hampshire offices of the private detective Steve Whittamore, where a huge cache of documents were revealed.  These documents revealed, in precise detail, a network of police and public employees illegally selling personal information obtained from government computer systems, which were passed onto over 300 journalists working for various British newspapers, including nearly every national newspaper.

In 2006 the Information Commissioner’s Office released a report, What Price Privacy, which closely examined Operation Motorman and which was followed in the following year by What Price Privacy Now, which including a table detailing transactions with Steve Whittamore by the number of requests per paper, and number of journalists requesting jobs per paper.  The top five included the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, Sunday People, Daily Mirror, and News of the World.  However, it’s impossible to know if the jobs requested by the papers were illegal as Steven Whittamore did a mixture of legal and illegal jobs, so it’s possible that certain papers were more prone to requesting illegal jobs than others.

Therefore it’s believed by some that the release of the Operation Motorman files could uncover a scandal much larger on scale than the current News of the World focused scandal, involving many news organisations, and in March 2012 the Hacked Off website started to a campaign to have the Operation Motorman files published by the Leveson Inquiry and in April 2012 blogger Paul Staines of the Guido Fawkes blog published a redacted version of data taken from the document known as the Blue Book, containing jobs requested by staff at News International titles, including jobs requests by Rebekah Brooks (then Wade).  The ICO strongly condemned the release, and Paul Staines was summoned to appear before the ICO. 

Since then unredacted versions of the Blue Book have appeared online for brief periods of time, and an eventual leak of the unredacted files seems inevitable.

For further reading I’d recommend this article by Nick Davies of the Guardian, Operation Motorman: the full story revealed.

Operation Glade

An operation that ran alongside Operation Motorman, and investigated the way in which the information from the Police National Computer was being obtained.  Glade discovered that Whittamore's ultimate source was a civilian worker at Wandsworth police station, south London, Paul Marshall, who was logging phoney 999 calls in order to justify accessing the computer records of public figures that were of interest to newspapers. Marshall was passing the information to a former police officer, Alan King, who passed it to a private investigator, John Boyall, who supplied it to Whittamore.

In April 2005 Whittamore, Boyall Alan King, Paul Marshall appeared at Blackfriars crown court and pleaded guilty to procuring confidential police data to sell to newspapers, with all four receiving a suspended sentence.  The News of the World was named as one of their buyers, and the judge at the trial questioned why no-one from Fleet Street titles had been prosecuted, a question that appears to have remained unanswered. 

DCI Brendan Gilmour, who worked on Operation Glade, appeared at the Leveson Inquiry on May 9^th 2012, and stated that seven journalists were interviewed under caution in 2004 after evidence suggested they had been commissioning private investigators to obtain information illegally, and said they were unable to establish if the journalists were aware of the methods used to gather the information requested were illegal.  Robert Jay QC, inquiry counsel, pointed out the journalists were sent written invitations to attend places to be interviewed under caution, and had legal advice, meaning answers could have been orchestrated in advance.

Operation Varec

A September 2010 police operation that investigated claims made in a New York Times article by former News of the World journalist Sean Hoare that Andy Coulson, the then editor of the News of the World, had encouraged him to hack phones.  It also looked into claims by Kelly Hoppen that News of the World journalist Dan Evan had hacked her phone.  Sean Hoare was interviewed but according to the police report provided no information, and no actionable evidence was found in the Kelly Hoppen case either, so it was decided no further action would be taken.  A more detailed examination of the case can be read here.

Sean Hoare died in 2011.

Operation Millipede 

A 2008 Serious Organised Crime Agency led investigation into the practice of blagging which resulted in the prosecution and jailing of Daniel Summers, Philip Campbell Smith, Graham Freeman, and Adam John Spears. 

Philip Campbell Smith was later investigated by Operation Kalmyk, part of Operation Tuleta, into accusations that he hacked the computer of the former army intelligence officer Ian Hurst aka Martin Ingram, who was involved with the alleged spy Stakeknife.  Philip Campbell Smith was accused of hacking the computer in an attempt to get information on the alleged spy for the News of the World.

Operation Caryatid

A 2006 police operation overseen by Peter Clarke that investigated the interception of phone messages from the official residence of The Prince of Wales, The Duchess of Cornwall and Prince Harry Clarence House after two entries in Clive Goodman’s column for the News of the World raised suspicion with Royal Household staff that Goodman had access to the Royal Family's voicemails.

Clive Goodman was imprisoned for four months in January 2007 along with his co-conspirator Glenn Mulcaire.  Clive Goodman was sacked by the News of the World that same month, but would later receive a £240000 settlement from News International as according to News International his dismissal was unfair as they had failed to "follow statutory procedures" in sacking Goodman.

Andy Coulson, who was News of the World editor at the time, resigned as a result of the court case, and both Andy Coulson and Clive Goodman were arrested in on July 8th and released on police bail in connection with new phone hacking related charges.

The narrowness of the investigation has been questioned, especially with the recent revelations about hacking at the News of the World, and The former commissioner of the Metropolitan Sir Paul Stephenson was asked at the Leveson Inquiry why phone hacking was not investigated further in 2009 when Assistant Commissioner John Yates was asked to review Operation Caryatid, ruling that there was no fresh material that could lead to convictions.  Sir Paul Stephenson said there had been a “flawed assumption” that the original investigation had been sufficient, and the force felt it couldn’t expand its resources without further evidence, especially at a time when the priority was investigating terrorism.

Operation Reproof

A 2002 to 2004 Devon and Cornwall Police operation examining how confidential information was being leaked and obtained by various individuals and groups. 

It discovered a network of individuals being passed on by current and retired police officers to a number of individuals.

A more detailed examination of Operation Reproof and related operations can be found here.

Operation Nigeria

The police surveillance of Jonathan Rees run private investigation company South Investigations between May and September 1999.  The operation was run by the Metropolitan police's anti-corruption squad CIB3, and ended when evidence was uncovered that Jonathan Rees was involved with a plot to plant drugs on a woman so her husband could win a custody battle.  This resulted in Rees and a serving detective, Austin Warnes being jailed.

Transcripts from the operation recorded reports from a variety of newspapers, including the News of the World, Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror, requesting jobs and revealed collusion between private investigators and corrupt police officers.

This post contains more information about links between Operation Nigeria and other police operations, particularly the links between the News of the World and Southern Investigations.

Operation Russia

A 1987 investigation led by John Yates into police corruption in South East London by a number of officers, including Ray Adams, who went on to work for the News Corp owned NDS UK Ltd.  It’s believed there’s a number of links between the officers involved with the police corruption and the Stephen Lawrence inquiry and the murder of the private investigator Daniel Morgan, which has also been linked to News International.  A more detailed examination of the case can be read here.

In the next part of Hackgate for Beginners I'll be looking at the current police operations into various aspects of the hacking scandal.


[Forward to Current Police Operation]
[Index]

You can contact the author on Twitter @brown_moses or by email at brownmoses@gmail.com

Revisiting Operation Reproof and Other Police Operations

Following on from their earlier Milly Dowler related contribution one of my readers has contributed another piece, this time relating to the various police Operations surrounding various hacking accusations.  Well worth a read in light of tomorrow's appearances at the Leveson Inquiry:

REVISITING OPERATION REPROOF

Two police officers were scheduled to have their written witness statements 'read in' (though not to appear) at the Leveson Inquiry on April 2nd, 2012. In his opening housekeeping remarks that morning, Lord Leveson made a brief reference to these two officers:

"I am giving further considerations to the status of those witnesses, therefore they will not be put into the record of the Inquiry this afternoon."

No explanation was given as to who might have raised objections to their status, or evidence, or why.

Whatever considerations he gave to the 'status' of the two police officers - and to their written submissions, they seem to have galvanised Leveson into thinking their submissions should not simply be 'read in' - they have now both been required to give evidence in person. The two police officers concerned are Temporary Assistant Chief Constable of Devon and Cornwall Police, Russell Middleton (OPERATION REPROOF) and Detective Chief Constable, Metropolitan Police Service, Brendan Gilmour (OPERATION GLADE). They are both called to give evidence on 9th May 2012.

The number and complexity of named 'Operations' in the evolution of press 'dark arts' is often confusing. The following is an attempt to consider that there may be one continuous narrative that can be discerned from several, spuriously separate, 'Operations'. That narrative contains a strikingly repetitive cast of characters too.

OPERATION REPROOF was a two year Devon and Cornwall Police investigation into corruption of police and public officials, started in 2002.  It seemed that 'private investigators' may have been using bribery to obtain information illegally.
"In all, Devon and Cornwall detectives investigated 37 people, with the final evidential file focused on 100 alleged breaches of data related to 93 individual "victims", including then chancellor Gordon Brown and Labour MPs Martin Salter and Nick Brown." "...But the case collapsed after nearly two years in the courts, with Judge Paul Darlow commenting it was "not a proportionate use of valuable resources to prosecute these matters".
One of the 5 defendants was a private investigator called Christopher DEWSE.

Among the 32 suspects investigated but not charged was Paul "Taff" JONES, he was a highly skilled blagger, ex-soldier and biker.
Another, investigated but not prosecuted, was John BOYALL. Devon and Cornwall Police organised a raid on Boyall's business, Data Research Ltd, accompanied by Alex Owens of the Information Commissioner's Office. This was the genesis of the ICO investigation, OPERATION MOTORMAN, with DEWSE, JONES and BOYALL directly linked with Operation REPROOF.

The illegally obtained data found by Alex Owens led to a subsequent raid on JJ Services, the business of Steve Whittamore. The ICO pursued evidence on breaches of data protection and 'harvesting' of mobile numbers, whilst a simultaneous investigation into police corruption was launched by the Metropolitan Police - OPERATION GLADE. The Motorman Files 'blue book' (controversially released and partially redacted by Guido Fawkes) reveal the names of other information 'getters' in addition to Whittamore himself -
Christopher DEWSE, 'Taff' JONES and a John GUNNING. One of those commissioning information gathering from Whittamore was the News of the World's Greg Miskiw. OPERATION GLADE led to the convictions of four men, including Whittamore and BOYALL.

John GUNNING and John BOYALL were names already known to Scotland Yard.  Both were implicated in the earlier OPERATION NIGERIA, the covert bugging of Jonathan REES  and Sid FILLERY 's Southern Investigations in connection with the Daniel Morgan murder.  BOYALL's assistant at the time was Glenn MULCAIRE.

News of the World's Alex Marunchak and Greg Miskiw had close links to Jonathan REES. When David Cook of the Met was re-investigating Daniel Morgan's murder, Marunchak and Miskiw apparently organised surveillance of Cook and his family. " It is now known that at that time, the News of the World's investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, succeeded in obtaining Cook's home address, his internal payroll number at the Metropolitan police, his date of birth and figures for the amount that he and his wife were paying for their mortgage. All of this appears to have been blagged by Mulcaire from confidential databases, apparently including the Met's own records."

It's worth summarising that
Operation NIGERIA - resulted in no specifically 'dark arts' prosecutions
Operation REPROOF - the judge stopped the trial
Operation MOTORMAN - all prosecutions were dropped
Operation GLADE - four convictions all resulted in conditional discharge

This begs the question - did Scotland Yard fail to notice the recurring same names cropping up again and again in OPERATION NIGERIA, OPERATION REPROOF, OPERATION GLADE and the Information Commissioner's OPERATION MOTORMAN?  And all this prior to the Goodman/ Mulcaire scandal which led to the Met investigation OPERATION CARYATID?

When OPERATION CARYATID led to the arrests of Goodman and Mulcaire, Alex Owens later made the connection with OPERATION MOTORMAN. The reason for the sheer quantity of mobile phone numbers 'harvested' by Whittamore et al became apparent to him:

"...my personal feeling was that Steve Whittamore was gathering the numbers - he wasn't hacking... we found no evidence of that.  But he was then passing them to the papers and possibly those numbers were being passed to people who hacked. I mean the names of people like Milly Dowler, the numbers,... of the names that have now come out in the hacking Inquiry."

In 2008, the Serious Organised Crime Agency produced a confidential report, submitted to the Home Office, entitled "Private Investigators: The Rogue Element of the Private Investigation Industry and Others Unlawfully Trading in Personal Data".  It reviewed ('Project Riverside') five un-named 'dark arts' investigative operations, up to September 2007. They included evidence of corrupt police officers deleting criminal intelligence reports from the Police National Computer and "rogue private investigators "providing organised crime groups with counter-surveillance techniques" and attempting to discover the identities of informants and witnesses under police protection."

This SOCA report has been given to Lord Leveson, and may shed some light on the peculiar prevarication around the appearances of Russell Middleton and Brendan Gilmour as witnesses.

Is it possible 'Project Riverside' - in reviewing 5 operations - might have noticed investigative failures in not connecting the same names and usual suspects in OPERATION NIGERIA, OPERATION REPROOF, OPERATION MOTORMAN, OPERATION GLADE, and OPERATION CARYATID?

Somebody, somewhere needs a Reproof.

You can contact the author on Twitter @brown_moses or by email at brownmoses@gmail.com

Leveson Module 3 Directions

Today at the Leveson Inquiry, after Lucy Panton gave evidence, the inquiry discussed the directions for Module 3 - The relationship between press and politicians.  Here's a summary of what was said:

• Lord Leveson invited newspapers to submit their five best public interest stories.
• Lord Leveson confirmed press reports on the inquiry will be made part of the record.
• The full Milly Dowler story will be heard on the week commencing May 8th.
• Victims must reapply for core participant status.
• Newspapers will automatically receive core participant status unless they decide to drop out.
• The Metropolitan Police Service will remain as core participants.
• The Metropolitan Police Authority and the London Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime will not remain as core participants.
• Lawyer to the victims David Sherborne QC said only a limited number of victims wished to remain core participants.
• David Sherborne said politicians from Module 1 and 2 plus others wished to apply to be core participants, this includes Chris Bryant, Simon Hughes, Denis MacShane, John Prescott, Claire Ward, Tessa Jowell, Tom Watson and Evan Harris.
• David Sherborne went on to add that Tom Watson was put under surveillance to influence what the Select Committee was doing from 2009 onwards.
• David Sherborne said the second group of witnesses apply for core participant status in Module 3 were three individuals who were not politicians, and emphasised the unified voice of core participant victims.
• Elaine Decoulos took the witnesses stand and claimed the Met had failed to investigate claims she had made about David Sherborne's clients in previous evidence, and that she felt she was being frozen out of the inquiry.
• Michael Ward also appeared applying for core participant status.
• Stephen Parkinson, acting for Rebekah Brooks, confirmed that Rebekah Brooks will give written and oral evidence in module 3, and applied for core participant status, saying it would enable Brooks to have advance notice of evidence given by other participants.
• Lord Leveson added he would seek read-only statements from political commentators, and that lines of questioning would need to be received from counsel 7 days in advance, not the same morning as the questioning as it is now.
• Lord Leveson said there would be little evidence in Module 4 - Recommendations for a more effective policy and regulation that supports the integrity and freedom of the press while encouraging the highest ethical standards.
• A rough timetable of events for the following weeks was given:
• Week commencing April 23rd - Propriators and media owners will give evidence (maybe the Murdoch's?)
• Week commencing May 8th - The conclusion of the Milly Dowler story and a review of Operation Reproof and Operation Glade 
• The formal part of the inquiry would end in July with Module 3 end in June. 

You can contact the author on Twitter @brown_moses or by email at brownmoses@gmail.com