Plug in and play

“Space extends and has no middle
Time flows on, it’s never too soon
Nothing brings back the cat with the fiddle
Or the cow who leaps right over the moon”
Aria from Bheeda Pereeda
by Bachchoo

The cry of the Conservative used to be “is nothing sacred?” to which we, the fretful generation, must add “is nothing secure?” Britain today faces a crisis in its ethics of journalistic practice.

Perhaps that’s too elitist a way of putting it. The crisis is really one of decency prompted by the behaviour of a newspaper in the Rupert Murdoch stable.
News of the World, the Sunday weekly in question, had a big-wig, an editor-in-chief called Andy Coulson. His paper, moving with the current of the Murdoch press, backed the Conservatives at the last UK election. The Conservatives didn’t quite win. They were forced into a coalition with the third most popular party, the Liberal Democrats. British Prime Minister David Cameron formed his government and appointed the selfsame Mr Coulson, the editor of what is no more than a scandal sheet known universally as “The News of the Screws”, as his special adviser in Downing Street, presumably to advise on the spin that ought to be put on policy when handling the press. Nothing wrong with that. A Prime Minister needs more friends than the Downing Street cat.
But then Mr Coulson, the watering can to nurture the press, sprung a leak. It was alleged and later proved that while he was editing News of the World his journalists and other freelance “investigators” who were hired by his newspaper were hacking into the phones and computers of royalty, of footballers, movie and television actors, pop-stars and the like. The public were marginally appalled but continued to buy the newspaper which, presumably, was printing the trivia it obtained about celebrity lives through this process. Nevertheless, hacking is not legal and Scotland Yard launched an investigation into the criminality. Two people, one journalist and one freelance “investigator”, were detained, tried and convicted for the offence.
It seemed to end there. Though Opposition politicians and some of the Opposition press asked how Mr Cameron could retain Mr Coulson who was in-charge of the paper when it resorted to this crime, Mr Coulson stayed on. He said he was totally unaware that this was going on and Downing Street gave him the benefit of doubt.
More revelations emerged. Some of them through the confessions of the convicted men who alleged that the practice of hacking was not restricted to targeting the royal family, footballers and stars but was also used on the phones of politicians. The scandal grew and Mr Coulson was discreetly, if not a moment too soon, dropped from being at the heart of the UK government.
Then came the most disgraceful revelation of all. In 2008, a teenager called Millie Dowler was abducted, raped and murdered. Her body was discovered several days after she went missing from home. Last week her abductor and murderer was convicted and jailed for life. It then emerged that News of the World’s journalists had hacked into Millie Dowler’s mobile phone soon after she was abducted and intercepted the messages that her family and friends were frantically sending her, hoping against hope that she was alive and would pick them up.
As anyone who uses mobile phones outside India knows, the phone, when not answered, prompts the caller to leave a message which it records in a voicemail vault. The messages are stored there till the vault is full at which point the prompt tells the caller that no more messages can be left. To accommodate more messages, one has to listen to the ones already there and delete them.
This is what the hacking journalists did, leaving the parents and friends of Millie, who desperately tried to call her, under the impression that if the vault had suddenly acquired space, she was clearing her messages and therefore was still alive. It was a cruel deception.
The revelation has changed the perception of phone hacking once and for all. People didn’t much care if a footballer was caught calling his mistress or if a star was detected conversing with prostitutes. The private lives of the publicity junkies were presumed fair game. The argument about free speech and the public interest being served by knowing that their heroes had basic impulses and behaved badly were also trundled out.
The hacking of Millie’s phone is obscene and subjected the parents of this murdered child to what can be called mental torture. What did the newspaper hope to gain by it? Why did they want to listen to the voicemail of the victim? The exposure has caused MPs in Parliament to call for the resignation of the current editor-in-chief of all the Murdoch newspapers, one Rebecca Brooks. It has also uncovered the fact that Scotland Yard’s policemen were being paid by the newspapers to pass on information. Though Mr Coulson no longer works for Mr Cameron, it is widely known that Ms Brooks is a personal friend of the Prime Minister and Mrs Cameron. There will no doubt be a few cancelled dinner invitations and holiday plans.
The Murdoch chain, apart from having to face a public enquiry into hacking, is being drained of its principal advertisers who have withdrawn ads from the disgraced tabloid.
This hacking of phones for journalistic gossip is the least of the problems which beset our communicative world. All of us who use computers and email have been sent begging letters, supposedly from our friends asking for money to be sent to accounts in Lagos because they are there stranded without cash, cards or a passport. I am ungenerous and have never fallen for the hackers’ ruse, leaving my friend stranded in Lagos or Timbuktu.
But these are the fleas and flies of hacking nuisances. There are elephants in the room.
China has embarked on a universal project to hack into the intellectual property of Western governments and companies. This world-dominating economy realises that its present and rising power is dependent on cheap and disciplined labour. When this changes and Chinese workers begin to make more and more demands, the Chinese manufacturing economy will have to generate its own intellectual property or steal the stuff it relies on today. It has begun the stealing process and that reduces the hackers of celebrity phones to mere immoral social nuisances.