Sorry mate, but Libel Act 1843 is still on the statute books. S. 4 makes it criminal with max of two years.

NOTW paid compensation because they used illegally obtained information as a story source. And no doubt the stories were damaging or embarrassing to the subjects. Thus financial damages were paid for injury to reputation AND (in conjunction with) illegal access to private data.

NOTW may have illegally accessed private information belonging to other people, without finding anything worth a story. That illegal intrusion deserves nominal compensation and an apology; but it isn’t much of a legal case and not worthy of £100,000 damages. But you might be able to sue the data holder for breach of trust if they didn’t tell you about illegal access. The argument would be that you were shocked that somebody had listened to private information and that you were not informed at the time of the leak; thus you might claim a more than nominal amount for emotional damage.

I think we can reasonably say try McKinnon here or let him off, and investigate Coulson & co for prima facie offences.

Read before exploding.

Hello? The NOTW paid a massive amount to settle out of court and gag hacking victims. Why did they do that if there was “not much of a legal case”?
Hello? Over a similar case (the only one that came out ‘properly’, two years ago), someone, Clive Goodman from the NOTW was JAILED.
Hello? Did you read what Andrew Neil said?

From those servants of the servants of the servants of the servants not a word against this vomit-inducing type of “journalism”.

Most of that is true, but it doesn’t justify a possible offence just to get a story, unless there is a hell of a public interest defence – as there was for the Telegraph in the Expenses story.

Claude>Tim Worstall, I take it you think women wearing mini-skirts when they walk back from nightclubs at 3am are also being dumb?

That depends where they walk. If I walk somewhere where I am more likely to be attacked, I’m being dumb too. Leaving your car keys where a thief can get them through the letter box is dumb, as is setting your password to “password”. The statement doesn’t become controversial until you start to justify a crime from it. A dumb victim is still a victim.

The points that interest me particularly:

I’m astonished by Yates of the Yard. His declaring that no evidence could be found is just asking to be embarrassed by people who go and find it.

That people who had been targeted were not informed by the police. Is that professional?

The Gary McKinnon comparison. I think this “fools who left passwords unset” “hacking” is not dissimlar to the weak security in place on US computers accessed by McKinnon. The difference in attitude is startling, but can we say “let McKinnon off” if we are demanding that Coulson – IF guilty – be flogged.

If so, it might be in the interests of The Man to let this go, no?

This would be the same Cameron who jumps on any thing done by the his political opponents and with the help of his army of hypocritical bloggers like Ian (I have no credibility) Dale, and his media mates makes it into a huge crises.

So lets get this right. According to the hypercritical New Tory party Alan Sugar must give up his programme The Apprentice because Sugar has expressed support for Gordon Brown. But Cameron’s media guy can stay in his job even though he was working for a newspaper that was hacking into peoples phone mail and paying millions of compensation to keep the victims quiet. Conservative justice, straight from out of the Met.

As I have said before I really do laugh at all these idiot Liberals who are going to vote for this reptile because they think he has changed the Tory party. Boy are they in for a shock.

And as for the PCC. Everybody know that the PCC stands for the Prince Charles Complaints Commission. They only act when Royals are being looked into.

Other allegations against NOTW are that they employed investigators to access the Police National Computer and DVLA databases. Trust Gordon: the information stored in the national ID database will be secure.

Employing an investigator implies that some distancing is sought by the requester and provider. It would be fair to assume that the requester used an intermediary to avoid direct bribery of a civil servant. The requester understood the legal consequences of their action and attempted to mitigate against them.

In the USA, those who suffer data abuse are able to pursue the data holder (in this case, mobile phone companies). If you are relying on the default PIN, you probably don’t have much of a legal case. You may have a case if the data holder did not inform you that information has been accessed illegally.

No new enquiry.

Nonsense. If it hadn’t been for the civil court case between News International and Taylor, none of these documents would have been disclosed into court. Since the case has been settled between the parties, without recourse to trial, there is no reason at all why they should be released. They aren’t public documents. If, as I said, the police think they might be evidence of criminal conduct, they should apply to a magistrate for a warrant, which a) I suspect they are doing, and b) I suspect they would get.

An interesting point, and one which you are not alone in raising. In fact, quite a few people have asked the question in context: 1) since the law were aware, having jailed two NotW operatives for a small subset of the crimes committed, that NotW were systematic criminals and 2) since the legal system were aware that there were in existence hundreds of pages of evidence that News International had committed upwards of a thousand crimes, then 3) why the hell did the police not open criminal investigations into the editorial staff at both the Sun and the News of the Screws? And, ideally, the entire board of NI, since the Dirty Digger is unlikely to have funded an illegal espionage operation spanning four years and thousands of criminal acts without knowing he was doing it.

One might, in fact, argue that this is central to the entire scandal. It’s not just that NI bought the law, not once but several times: it’s not just that they lied in front of Parliament, that they disclaimed all knowledge when two of their investigators were jailed for getting caught, and that the editor in charge of the debacle now works for our probable future prime minister. It’s that the police, who are not covering themselves with rigorously objective and principled glory in recent months, seem to have sat on the knowledge that they could prove a vast number of crimes were committed, for at least two years and not done anything about it.

One might, indeed, ask precisely why they didn’t.

Ha ha! You’re right, we’ll never know. Soz about the tenner, though. My pockets aren’t quite as deep as Murdoch’s.

Of course we don’t know, but as I say it doesn’t scream one-sided to me. I’ll shut up now if you give me a tenner.

Wrong answer. It isn’t acceptable. It wasn’t acceptable then, and it isn’t acceptable now, and you wouldn’t think this was acceptable if Labour were involved.

Nonsense. If it hadn’t been for the civil court case between News International and Taylor, none of these documents would have been disclosed into court. Since the case has been settled between the parties, without recourse to trial, there is no reason at all why they should be released. They aren’t public documents. If, as I said, the police think they might be evidence of criminal conduct, they should apply to a magistrate for a warrant, which a) I suspect they are doing, and b) I suspect they would get.

And for heaven’s sake. I wouldn’t dream of denying that I’m a conservative – as you say the name of the blog’s a bit of a hint that way. But in commenting on a legal case between News International and Gordon Taylor, which has been reported on by the Guardian, my conservatism is neither here nor there. So I’m afraid the fact that you think I’m daft to deny being partisan only makes you more of a moron.

Happy to discuss where this leaves the Tories if you’d like, and on that I might well be partisan, though I generally try to write with at least a little detachment.

My feeling is that NewsCorp offered Taylor the choice of

A) Take a lot of money and shut up
B) Don’t take a lot of money and we’ll drag this through the courts forever. If you lose, you’re ruined. How confident are you?

I’d take A, and I wouldn’t feel that was because I had all the power in that relationship.

I don’t have a high opinion of Tory voters, but the level of mass delusion and serious denial this morning was still astonishing.

This is bad, Tory people. Bad for Mr Coulson, bad for Murdoch, bad for the PCC and best of all, bad for Cameron himself.

It took the Tory tabs three to five years of Labour in government to really get their claws into Mr Blar. It’s not even taken an election before Dave has severely damaged himself.

Wrong answer. It isn’t acceptable. It wasn’t acceptable then, and it isn’t acceptable now, and you wouldn’t think this was acceptable if Labour were involved.

Oh, and your name links to your non-partisan ‘Conservative Party Reptile’ blog. Just a word of advice. Even a moron like me thinks that makes you a bit daft.

Acceptable? Of course it is. Legal settlements, as I said, routinely include conditions that documents disclosed into court should remain confidential. If the police have reason to believe that evidence of a crime has been so classified, they can ask for a warrant for its disclosure. Which I suspect they are in the process of doing.

The journos are just unhappy that, because this didn’t go to full trial, they missed out on lots of juicy gossip. I don’t see that as an existential threat to the nation. Nor am I being especially partisan, as I don’t see this really as impacting on the Tories particularly.

Let’s try another quote from Nick Davies, who I expect is crying over his Journalist of the Year award over being called a ‘moron’ by a Tory partisan,

“By persuading the high court to seal the file and by paying [Gordon] Taylor more than £400,000 damages in exchange for his silence, News Group prevented the public from knowing anything about the hundreds of pages of evidence which had been disclosed in Taylor’s case, revealing potentially criminal behaviour by journalists on its payroll.”

So, Tim, is this acceptable?

Certainly. I don’t think they deserve to get raped, I don’t wish such upon them and I don’t think that their doing so mitigates the crime against them if committed.

But yes, I think it’s dumb, certainly.

Wandering around where pickpockets prevail with a visible wallet in your back pocket is also dumb: doesn’t mean the pickpocketer is any less of a crimnal simply because the pickpocketee is being dumb.