http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009...h-papers-phone -hacking

Rupert Murdoch's News Group News*papers has paid out more than £1m to settle legal cases that threatened to reveal evidence of his journalists' repeated involvement in the use of criminal methods to get stories.

The payments secured secrecy over out-of-court settlements in three cases that threatened to expose evidence of Murdoch journalists using private investigators who illegally hacked into the mobile phone messages of numerous public *figures to gain unlawful access to confidential personal data, including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemised phone bills. Cabinet ministers, MPs, actors and sports stars were all targets of the private investigators.



http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009...h-newspapers-p hone-hacking

Among those whose privacy apparently was illegally violated when British Telecom was conned into handing over their addresses and/or ex-directory numbers are Nigella Lawson (four times); Patsy Kensit; Jude Law and Sadie Frost; Lisa Snowdon (three times); Anne Robinson and her former partner; Carol Caplin; Lenny Henry; Vanessa Feltz; Lord Mountbatten's grandson; and witnesses to the murder of Jill Dando, thus potentially interfering with the course of a live police inquiry.


When the actress Charlotte Coleman died after an asthma attack, the News of the World paid for BT to be conned into handing over the itemised Friends and Family list from her bereaved parents' phone bill. When the TV presenter Linda Barker moved house, they hired Whittamore to get her new home address from the supposedly confidential social security database.

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