Sun, Aug 20, 2006 page9

• UK tabloids go from scooping to snooping for celebrity news

  • By James Silver / THE GUARDIAN
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  The risks may be high, but the rewards are big. In a cut-throat tabloid market, with ever-shrinking circulations, hitting the jackpot with a genuine showbiz or royal scoop is viewed as a sure-fire way of boosting sales and, if secured by a freelancer, a megabucks payday.

  No wonder then, says one security consultant, that there is a thriving and secretive cottage industry, which applies the tricks and scams used in the security trade to celebrity muckraking.

  "We shouldn't be at all surprised that this sort of thing is happening in tabloid newspapers. In the corporate world, covert intelligence-gathering and bugging has been absolutely rife for years," he says.

  The charges against the UK Sunday tabloid newspaper News of the World's royal editor, Clive Goodman, and the soccer player-turned-private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, cast light on an area of journalism that tabloid bosses would far rather remained in the murky back-rooms: the use of private investigators to do much of the dirty -- and illegal -- grunt-work of celebrity scoop-getting.

  That includes the widespread practice of purchasing personal details via rogue car-clamping companies, who can access data via Britain's Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, and corrupt mobile phone company employees, as well as phone-tapping, hacking into text and voice messages, accessing phone records and bank statements, and compiling photographic evidence through surveillance.

  Crucially, according to one tabloid source, news executives -- and the well-known writers who may use the information in their copy -- maintain plausible deniability about the methods employed to gather it, especially when laws are broken, by keeping the commissioning process and contacts with investigators at arm's length. This is usually done by a designated reporter or third party.

  Several entertainment industry PRs have been crying foul over tabloid dirty tricks for years. James Herring of Taylor Herring PR, whose clients include singer Robbie Williams, says it started with newspapers accessing celebrities' mobile phone voicemail by using the default factory-setting security codes.

  "The first time we saw it really go up a gear, though, was when we were handling the John Leslie debacle [in which a TV presenter faced allegations of rape]. During that weekend where he was massively under siege, he found that he couldn't get into his mobile phone messages. What had happened was that a journalist had accessed his messages, discovered that he was still using the default pin code and reset it with a new pin number so that it froze him out of his own messages, which was eye-opening in terms of what we were up against," Herring said.

  Intriguingly, Herring claims things have taken another twist in the past month.

  "The latest trick is for someone to ring up a celebrity, posing as someone from their mobile phone network or whatever, saying they want to send some sim updates to their phone so that they can access the latest messaging technology. Then they ask for the person's pin code for verification. This is currently the source of a huge amount of tabloid stories," he said.

  Herring describes such tactics as "a digital form of rifling through people's bins."

  "Mobile phones have a lot to answer for, not just in terms of this pin-number hacking, but also in other respects. Photo-messaging and video-messaging have effectively equipped journalists -- and people providing them with material -- with a whole new set of tools which enables them to gather evidence on the hoof and on the spot," he says

  "It was allegedly a camera phone which caught model Kate Moss, while texts are one of the main parts of the kiss-and-tell story. But of course texts usually aren't enough on their own so what they need to do is obtain phone records from both ends of the conversation. That's how the News of the World managed to bust soccer star David Beckham's affair with Rebecca Loos," he says.

  But similar techniques, say some of those on the other side of the fence, have been used, often in the public interest, for years.

  Two decades ago, when crime splashes used to shift Sunday tabloids by the truckload, journalists such as the News of the World's Trevor Kempson -- whose investigations are said to have led to the jailing of more than 300 serious criminals -- were close to senior police officers, including Scotland Yard commanders. Police sources would pass sensitive information to them, while the favor would be returned when reporters would hand over evidence they had compiled, so long as they were tipped off when an arrest was about to be made.

  A sting by the News of the World famously snared Lord Lambton, a minister in the Edward Heath government in the early 1970s, with vice-girls and marijuana, by concealing a camera and microphone in a teddy-bear. According to one former detective superintendent who asked not to be named, in the days before the London's Metropolitan Police's 24-hour press bureau, officers would routinely drink with tabloid journalists and leak them stories.

  "Back then crime was seen as something that sold papers," he says, "so we needed each other."

  "Today relations are still close with some newspapers, but that kind of contact in the pub is frowned upon, as everything is supposed to be controlled through the press bureau," he says.

  Meanwhile, the former head of royal protection, Dai Davies, says that although press intrusion could be "a constant pain" and made his job difficult, relations between royal protection officers and tabloid royal correspondents were good too.

  "Although we once mounted an operation against one officer in Windsor who was leaking to the News of the World, the likes of [the Daily Mail's diarist and former royal correspondent] Richard Kay and [former Daily Mirror royal correspondent] James Whitaker didn't give me, at my level, any problems at all. They cultivated their own contacts among officers of lower ranks who undoubtedly got a good drink out of it at Christmas. But as far as I'm concerned, that's fair game," he says.

  However, two factors decisively changed the relationship between the police and the tabloids.

  First, as celebrities eclipsed crime as a driver of newspaper sales, resources were shifted away from costly investigative journalism, which has uncertain results, towards showbiz -- thus the public interest defense for employing nefarious information-gathering techniques no longer applied.

  Second, of course, was the advent of the mobile phone.

  "The early analogue mobile phones were easily scanned," explains one former tabloid executive familiar with the techniques used. "When phones went digital what's known as `screwing' or `shagging' a phone started, which is accessing voice messages via default pin-codes, which was how [former England soccer coach] Sven-Goran Eriksson and [television presenter] Ulrika Jonsson were caught," he says.

  "Mobiles can be bugged, but the technology is extremely expensive and governments don't license it to be sold. So you have to purchase the equipment abroad or you can hire it allowing you to `piggy-back' on someone else's call," he says.

  But despite its undoubted effectiveness, increased reliance on illegal information-gathering techniques is in danger of killing off old-fashioned journalistic skills, says the Mirror's James Whitaker.

  "I haven't been in frontline reporting for nine years but what I hear more and more is that, particularly on the Sunday tabloids, their exclusives aren't done by journalists any more, they seem to employ private eyes and security consultants to go and do the work for them. Journalists then turn it into copy," he says.

  "In my time, we would get our hands dirty and go out and do the work ourselves. It was a matter of cultivating contacts and getting information off them. I had contacts at all levels built up over the years, from the people who swept up the shit from the Queen's horses to astonishingly senior people who worked for the royal family," he says.

  "I never, ever paid my best contacts, you could never offer them money, although I sent them the occasional case of very good claret. But I paid some of my lower level contacts, always in cash, because they earned a pittance," he says.

  However, Whitaker does concede that covert techniques, including bugging and hacking into computers, were regularly used in his day too.

  "Of course that took place. Not by me, personally. If I was technologically more capable, perhaps I would have done it, but I could barely turn on a computer," he says.

  "I myself was bugged. I was having a quite indiscreet conversation about Major Ron Ferguson with a source at Buckingham Palace as I drove in my car about 15 years ago. Bugger me, the next day's Today newspaper had a verbatim account of my conversation!" Whitaker says.

  He would also use third parties to uncover the royal families' holiday arrangements.

  "How else would I find out where, for example, Diana, William and Harry were going in the Caribbean for New Year? I did get help with that. It was done by somebody else, although I instigated it. I could not only find out where they were going but what seat they were in. I'd never sit the row behind them, as that was just too hideous for all concerned, but I'd be four rows back," he says.

  "Is that fair game?" ponders Whitaker. "I really don't know. But if you do something shady you have to make bloody well sure you don't get caught."
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