Hacking/Murder Scandal: It's Getting Silly.

One of the latest revelations in the News of the World (NotW) phone hacking scandal is that the NotW hacked into the voicemail messages of the relatives of the victims of 2005's 7/7 terrorist bombings. I hate to be the one to break the bad news but anyone that closely involved in the 7/7 attacks would have had every aspect of their lives, including their phone calls, gone over with a fine tooth comb by the British police, MI5 and every major intelligence agency along with Al Qaeda themselves. Under those circumstances having a British newspaper listening to their phone messages would be the least of their problems and probably helped keep all those other players honest.

Another revelation is that the NotW hacked into the messages of British soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. You may remember that many of those deaths lead to a NotW driven campaign that ended with the setting up of charities such as Help for Heroes and the Ministry of Defence (MOD) saving the lives of other British soldiers by improving the quality of equipment provided to them. Considering how the MOD normally behaves you would think the soldiers families would be grateful that had plausible deniability in those arguments.

A third revelation is that the NotW put a Metropolitan Police officer who'd appeared on the "Crimewatch" TV program under surveillance. At the time DCS David Cook was investigating the murder of Daniel Morgan. If you're unfamiliar with the case Daniel Morgan was a private detective investigating a wide network of corrupt police officers involved in large scale drug dealing and the violence that goes along with it. In March 1987 he was found dead in a pub car park in south east London. Appropriately he'd been hacked to death with an axe. Despite 24 years and five investigations by two British police forces no-one has been brought to justice over the crime and the case remains unsolved. The most recent attempt to seek justice ended in March 2011 when a trial collapsed. This forced the assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Tim Goodwin to apologise to the Morgan family and admit that the case would probably never be solved due to widespread police corruption although no police officer has ever been disciplined or imprisoned over the case.