*It takes a lot for perfidious Albion to feel revulsion over its centuries-old culture of surveillance, but hacking dead teen girls appears to have been the hot-button.
*I don't wanna rain on the parade of disdain for the suddenly-purged News of the World, but this activity has obviously been going on for years and has permeated every level of British society. To those outside Britain, it might seem a tad hypocritical to wave one bloody shirt. This isn't some outlier aberration, this is systemic.
*I mean, come on, who was buying those newspapers and enjoying all that privacy-invasion tittle-tattle all these years? Nobody held guns to the heads of the British population to get 'em to page through scandal tabloids.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/11/phone-hacking-charles-camilla
Police have warned Buckingham Palace that they have found evidence that the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall may have had their voicemail hacked by the News of the World.
The heir to the throne and his wife are among at least 10 members of the royal household who have now been warned they were targeted for hacking, according to police records obtained by the Guardian. Only five had previously been identified.
A palace source on Monday confirmed to the Guardian that the prince and the duchess had been approached by police recently to be warned that they had been identified as likely targets of the News of the World's specialist phone-hacker, Glenn Mulcaire.
The revelation comes as the BBC disclosed that the emails which News International handed to Scotland Yard in June include evidence that the paper had paid bribes to a royal protection officer in order to obtain private phone numbers for the royal household....
(((Nothing interests newspapers quite so much as watching other newspapers get exterminated.)))
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/newsoftheworld
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(...)
"Then there are the scandals. The exposure of Hugh Grant's "lewd conduct" with the Los Angeles hooker Divine Brown. Robin Cook's affair with his Commons secretary Gaynor Regan. James Hewitt's attempts to sell Diana's letters. Prince Harry calling Asian fellow soldiers "Paki" and "raghead". The "secret love child" of the tennis star Boris Becker conceived during "bonk in broom cupboard". The TV stars John Leslie and Kerry Katona, the boxing champion Ricky Hatton and innumerable others snorting cocaine. How David Beckham, Wayne Rooney, Peter Crouch, Ryan Giggs and other footballers "played away". Liz Hurley – the wronged party in the Grant story 15 years earlier – having "a steamy affair" with Shane Warne. And so on and on. Nothing, though, about the NoW's exposure of the sexual habits of the Formula One boss Max Mosley, who successfully sued for breach of privacy.
"We are not told how many of the NoW's favourite stories involved phone hacking or its old-technology predecessor, the bugged hotel room. But all were once part of the national conversation, the subject of gossip and jokes even around middle-class dinner tables and frequently of follow-ups in posher papers. Only a minority fretted about decency and taste or the methods used to obtain the stories...."
