This case has been dragging on for years
in the UK prosecutions of News International staff, “Private Investigators” and a couple of policemen that we’re phone tapping, breaching privacy to make the news stories out of thin air, as I worked with Naomi Campbell’s agents at the time she kept “getting unlucky” in all her secrets getting out, it all made sense when we found out the only security control administrators didn’t have control over, the leak, was her cell phone, I saw some very creative but failed social engineering and brute force efforts to breach her privacy at that time.
This story a couple of days ago caught my eye, and I was thinking of commenting directly on that, but now this latest news that the police have been sitting for 6 years on evidence that over 100 non-news related companies have also been criminally breaching people privacy using paid hackers as a part of normal business practice, and have not prosecuted them, is incredibly damning. 2 things come to mind, I think that at the very least they should be forced to report which of the 2 guidelines used to test a prosecution these cases failed on.
- Is it in the public interest to prosecute
- Is there reasonable chance of a successful prosecution (enough evidence)
My second thought is that the victims have a right to know if their privacy has been breached, I don’t even think these 2 abusers mentioned articles are connected, the scale of these breaches of privacy are really unknown.
Continually holes are being found our communications systems, only last week we learn one in eight Sim cards is easily hackable, of course we will find solutions, and the sooner we adopt end to end encrypted technologies that don’t offer backdoors to any agencies the better, Hemlis (secret in Swedish) is looking like a hopeful alternative.
I have consulted with a couple of model agencies recently about the implications of NSA & PRISM on the impact on any future IT infrastructure and they are feel it’s not a consideration, but 2 lawyers I work with are concerned and looking for answers, one though is resigned to the fact he has no privacy and can do little about it.