HACKING

It goes without saying that with the advance of technology now being so fast, today's developments often being rendered obsolete by tomorrow or certainly within the week, there travels alongside it the ever present temptation to misuse that technology.

A decade ago I would not have been paying too much attention to the News of the World, or News International because at that time I had no contact with the media industry in any form. So what reporters and journalists got up to didn't interest me too much.

Now it is different.

A friend told me how two weeks ago a young person's facebook account was left on, friends entered the barracks room in his absence and made adjustments, and then posted them on to the wall. I am well acquainted with the military, suffice to say that had that ever happened in my command, there would have been instant dismissals. Now what is left is the smoking gun.

Two years ago, I too found to my horror that my own emails had been read for a whole year by one of my own employees who was in an extremely privileged position. That person had set up the firm's computer network and when he mentioned one day that he had set filters to intercept inappropriate emails, it did not occur to me that he was filtering mine too. No wonder he seemed always to be totally in tune with matters of company policy, discussions at board level and so on. Long after the company had closed, this came to light when friends asked me why it was that they were receiving 'on holiday away from office' emails from this person in relation to emails I was sending them, 4 months after the end of his employment.

I shall never forget the sinking feeling. Nor the sense of total betrayal. Professional correspondence, family correspondence, the lot! And something like that takes a long, long time to get over. Fortunately, I am able to write and so decided to just get it out of my system by writing the poems The Blackmailer and Blagger

We have some of the finest Journalists in the world. We see their reports daily whether at home or from the front line in Afghanistan or Libya or the Ivory Coast or Japan or New Zealand.

It is therefore essential that the police properly conduct their investigation and seriously consider presenting their findings to the Crown Prosecution Service for a decision on whether to proceed to trial to protect privacy but also to protect the reputation of good Journalism.

I wonder what would happen if the general public decided on Sunday morning that it had had enough of this misbehaviour and decided that from next Sunday on, it would not buy a single copy of the News of the World?

An interesting point to ponder.

Ian Marshall
LIVERPOOL
9 April 2011