Media mogul hits out as allegations of hacking corporate rivals in Europe and Australia pile up

RUPERT MURDOCH has come out fighting after a subsidiary of his global media company News Corp was accused of corporate sabotage in Europe and Australia. The media mogul took to Twitter to hit out at "old toffs and right wingers" and accuse his rivals of "piling on with lies and libels".

Murdoch's outburst followed yesterday's allegations in the Australian newspaper the Financial Review that NDS, a subsidiary of News Corp, had arranged a hacking operation to undermine the profitability of subscription TV rivals to his Australian broadcaster Foxtel by pirating their smart cards.

As the scope of the hacking scandal widens, a former senior police commander employed by Rupert Murdoch is coming under increased scrutiny, and his colorful past is a walk down memory lane in some of the most memorable British crimes of the last few decades.

For six years, Ray Adams, a neat, bespectacled, and intense-looking man, headed a secretive unit of Murdoch’s media empire, engaged with “operational security.” But according to a BBC documentary this week and a cache of emails allegedly obtained during a four-year investigation and publicized by The Australian Financial Review on Tuesday, the 69-year-old Adams may well have been engaged in something else: namely sabotaging News Corp. competitors in  satellite TV.

British police confirmed Tuesday that they are in contact with federal agents in Australia examining the charges of pay TV hacking. Curiously, early Thursday in Australia, government officials denied the British reports that it is investigating the News Corp. pay-TV operations in the U.K. Adams did not respond to requests for comment.

It is not the first time that Adams’ name has surfaced in connection with scandal.

In 1987, he was subject of an internal corruption investigation, Operation Russell, soon after he took over the Met’s Criminal Intelligence branch at the age of 45, the second youngest officer in Scotland Yard to be appointed commander. The allegations related to his time as a detective in South London and his connections with an infamous gangster, Kenneth Noye, who had killed an officer investigating the famous Brinks Mat gold-bullion robbery. Adams’s colleague, DC Alan Holmes, was found dead with gunshot wounds the day after he was interviewed by investigators about Adams and Noye. The inquiry concluded Adams’s behavior was “highly questionable and unprofessional,” though it failed to level any charges.

However, it was the notorious Stephen Lawrence murder six years later that brought his name to the wider public. In 1993, Lawrence was stabbed to death in Eltham, a British National Party stronghold in South East London, by a gang of young men yelling racial taunts.

The police investigation, however, paid little heed to the question of a racial motive. Officers responding apparently failed to give Stephen proper medical attention, and treated his friend Dwayne Brooks as a suspect rather than a witness. Police also failed to take proper forensic evidence or interview several well-known figures in the area, although they were named by eyewitnesses as having been involved in the stabbing.

The Stephen Lawrence case eventually developed into a cause celebre, leading to a public inquiry that found that there was a problem of “institutional racism” within the Met. Lawyers for the Lawrence family, however, suggested that police corruption had played a part: Clifford Norris, the father of one of the suspects and a well-known criminal, was also a police informant, and claimed to be a friend of Noye.

BBC journalists interviewed several witnesses who claimed that Adams distributed the hacks of rival companies to encourage piracy against News Corp.’s competitors.

During the murder investigation, Adams contacted the family of the victim through their lawyers offering to act as a liaison. The Lawrence family claimed that Adams’s connections to Noye and thereby to Clifford Norris, the father of one of the prime suspects, was a “channel of influence.”

It took 19 years to finally convict David Norris for Stephen Lawrence’s murder. He was sentenced this January.

Adams, who denied all allegations of interference with the original murder investigation, was questioned during the public inquiry, and although his testimony was accepted, the inquiry found that Adams’s involvement in the case, which was nothing to do with Criminal Intelligence, had “strange features.” Earlier this month, the mother of Stephen Lawrence, Doreen Lawrence, demanded that a public enquiry should be re-opened to look at these allegations.

In 1993, the year of the Stephen Lawrence murder, Adams was also the target of another internal anti-corruption investigation, Operation Othona, a secret four-year investigation into corruption in the Metropolitan police, which again failed to come up with any criminal charges. Adams retired soon after, citing a back problem.

Now his private sector career began. Adams was soon recruited by National Datacom Services, a News Corp. company, which provided encryption for smart-card and set-top boxes in the burgeoning world of pay-TV and satellite, and he rapidly became an expert on the problems of hacking in the industry. And from 1996, he headed Operational Intelligence in Europe, a unit which reported directly to the chairman—Murdoch.

The BBC investigative journalists interviewed Adams about his NDS work, especially regarding his approach to various computer hackers who had compromised pay-TV encryption keys and pirated the access cards. Adams claimed he used these hackers to test and improve the company’s own security. The BBC journalists, however, interviewed several witnesses who claimed that Adams distributed the hacks of rival companies to encourage piracy against News Corp.’s competitors. (In 2002, the year he left NDS, Adams was cited by plaintiffs in a billion-dollar piracy lawsuit launched by Canal Plus in California, which was eventually dropped when the company was acquired by News Corp.)

Today, Adams is retired and living in a large three-story house opposite a golf course in Windsor, the wealthy suburban town near the royal family’s historic castle and country retreat.

Murdoch's Shadowy Cop Under Fire

from Crikey …..

'Just another crazy': Rupert Murdoch's week of horrors

David Salter, veteran journalist and former Media Watch executive producer, writes:

NEWS CORP, NEWS CORP PHONE HACKING SCANDAL, RUPERT MURDOCH, TWITTER

It’s been a bad week to be a Murdoch. Even ever-smiling Sarah, who married into the clan via Lachlan, seemed so paralysed by the revelations over the past five days that she confessed to Nine News that she couldn’t make up her mind which infant to vote for as a judge of the Australia’s Loveliest Baby competition. That it has come to this …

News Corporation suffered three hefty hammer blows in the space of as many days. First, the BBC current affairs flagship Panorama revealed the bones of what looks to have been a secret worldwide strategy to sabotage their competitors in the pay-TV market. The following day, The Australian Financial Review put some meat on those bones with exhaustive detail. On Wednesday, The Independent (UK) published a strong news feature that tracked how similar hacking/piracy techniques had been employed in Italy, where News International also has a major interest in pay TV. The Independent described its revelations as another chapter in the "uncomfortable scrutiny of the Murdoch empire".

There’s a delicious irony here. Just weeks ago Murdoch was protesting to the world how his competitors were all helping themselves to content on the internet sites of his major titles. It was outright and unconscionable "theft", declared Rupert. Now it looks very much as if businesses either owned by, or associated with, News have been encouraging code hackers to steal access to the pay-TV services of their competitors, thereby robbing them of income and making them vulnerable to takeover -- often by News.

Like the wounded bull elephant he now resembles, Murdoch spat back venom on Twitter: "Enemies many different agendas, but worst old toffs and right wingers who still want last century’s status quo with their monopolies." Murdoch complaining about right-wingers and monopoly power is a tad piquant to say the least, but there was more: "Seems every competitor and enemy piling on with lies and libels." Anyone who’s been done over by a Murdoch tabloid, or been the target of The Australian’s long, vengeful attack campaigns will find the hypocrisy of Rupert’s bleat breathtaking.

After a day or two struck dumb by shock (or maybe waiting for their riding instructions), News outlets in Australia have circled the wagons. Page two of today’s Australian is a classic of confected outrage. The common theme is that NDS, the News-owned company accused of running the hacking/piracy operations, had done nothing "illegal". That may well be so, but it’s hardly the point. Nixon kept declaring "I am not a crook", but he still had to go.

What’s important here is that the stench of underhand, possibly illegal News Corporation business practices is no longer just confined to the News of the World phone-hacking outrages. Indeed, the stink now emanating from Murdoch’s TV and associated electronic media ventures may soon overpower the original bad smells from Wapping and New Scotland Yard.

Curiously, these new revelations have so far attracted a tiny fraction of the coverage of the NotW scandal. Why? Because newspaper reporters and editors still tend to think of media power in terms of traditional print. Any story about Murdoch’s tabloid shenanigans gets huge coverage in the broadsheets because it reinforces old assumptions about the Dirty Digger and his dreadful deeds. The lazy, under-resourced electronic media then follow print’s lead and amplify the story beyond sensible proportions.

Yet what’s really happened following the News of The World scandal? A few showy parliamentary inquiries, a few non-custodial arrests without charge, a few sackings and resignations. One of Rupert’s London red-tops closes to be replaced a few months later by another. In hindsight, all the hyperventilating coverage of Murdoch’s UK phone-hacking embarrassments has been disproportionate.

What we’re getting now, with the Panorama/Fin Review/Independent investigations, is far more significant for the long-term health of News and the Murdoch family. It hits them hard where they now make most of their money. What truly matters to them are the new rivers of media gold - pay-TV subscriptions in high-population markets.

At last count, print represents about 20% of News revenues, and probably even less of its net profits. Sure, Rupert loves to wield power and influence through his newspapers -- they’re what get him in the back door of No.10 and front gate of Kirribilli House -- but the profits from one mega hit Fox movie swamp anything his newspapers can deliver. Another indicator of this relative scale is the pending sale of NSD, essentially a software company, to Cisco for $5 billion. You could probably buy most, if not all, of Rupert’s print mastheads around the world for less than that.

The real story here (and the one that’s likely to do significant long-term damage to News) is that we now have evidence of an apparently widespread culture of Watergate-style "dirty tricks". This is a corporation that apparently finds it difficult to see any distinction between robust competitive business behaviour and sabotage.

Rupert’s fight for survival won’t be waged in the UK or Italy but in the US, where the business establishment has always seen him as an uncouth interloper. They’re patient men, quite happy to let the British and Australian media make the running until their quarry is weakened. Eventually, one of the myriad American agencies with a stake in local media regulation will pluck up the courage to assemble all the evidence and put Murdoch to the "fit and proper person" test. Which is where the real fun will start.

Meanwhile, the sudden departure of John Hartigan as boss of News Limited in Australia might now make more sense. Either he knew there was some very unpleasant stuff barrelling down the chute towards him, or the international Murdoch heavies realised they needed a fresh cleanskin in the CEO chair so he could run the "it-all-happened-before-my-time" defence.

meanwhile ….

“The cost of the Metropolitan police investigations into phone hacking and other alleged illegal activity by journalists is set to rise to 40m and tie up 200 police officers – about seven times the number investigating paedophiles in London, the Leveson inquiry has heard."

The Guardian