Constant Touch
Page 11
‘Why aren’t YOU on the phone?’, issued by the telephone development association, c. 1905 – evidence that fear of crime has been used to sell telephones since the early days. Thank heavens that ‘obliging constables’ would save us from ‘marauding humanity’! (BT Archives)
Chapter 20
Phone hacking: a very British scandal
The full extent of phone hacking in Britain only became apparent in 2011 when a full-blown controversy over illegal practices broke out. What was revealed was a queasy and disturbing set of relationships between newspapers, celebrities, politicians and police. It started, as with the earlier case of Princess Diana’s ‘Squidgy’ tapes, with royalty. In November 2005, the News of the World, a Sunday tabloid which was part of Rupert Murdoch’s News International empire, the biggest-selling newspaper in the country and jocularly known as News of the Screws for its coverage of salacious gossip, published a story on Prince William’s injured knee. Buckingham Palace suspected phone hacking as the source of the story and called in the police. In 2006 the newspaper’s royal editor, Clive Goodman, and its private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, suspected of doing the dirty work, were arrested and charged. For many months the newspaper held the line that this was a limited case of rogue reporting. A perfunctory police investigation seemed to confirm this account. In the meantime Andy Coulson, the then editor of the News of the World was appointed as the new prime minister David Cameron’s director of communications and planning.
However, by 2010 it was clear that many celebrities, national figures and others had had their phones hacked in the early- to mid-2000s. In the analogue days of the Squidgy tapes this would have been done by simply eavesdropping using radio scanners. In the second-generation, digital era of mobile phones the hacking was typically achieved by targeting voicemail, exploiting the fact that many people did not change the factory settings of PINs (‘1234’, for example). A complementary technique was known as ‘double whacking’, in which one person engaged a phone number while another person rang in; the second caller would be directed to the voicemail account, which could then be hacked. Mulcaire specialised in the use of another method: he called phone service providers using a unique retrieval number and then used a new PIN.
A small industry of private investigators grew up from the late 1990s, hacking voicemails and selling the information on to willing journalists. One journalist, James Hipwell, who worked the City Desk, located next to the showbiz journalists, on the Daily Mirror, described phone hacking as a ‘bog-standard journalistic tool for gathering information’. Dominic Mohan, showbusiness editor of the Sun, even jokily thanked Vodafone’s ‘lack of security’ during a speech to other members of the press. Nevertheless this was insider knowledge that stood in stark contrast to public denial that the practice was widespread, or anything more than a ‘rogue reporter’. Despite repeated attempts to bury the story, in mid-2011, parliamentary questioning – led by Labour MP Tom Watson and investigative journalism by the Guardian and the New York Times – uncovered the shocking extent of the misdeeds. Hacking was one of a number of so-called ‘black arts’, that also extended to such practices as ‘blagging’ (the impersonation of others in order to secure personal information), bribery and harassment. The suspicions hinted at collusion at high levels between senior News International executives, journalists and editors, private investigators and senior police officers. The tipping point came in July 2011 when it was claimed that the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler’s phone had been hacked – and, it seemed, voicemails deleted, offering cruel and false hope to her parents. Coulson and Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International and former editor of the News of the World, were forced to resign. The News of the World, with advertisers deserting, folded. The last edition, on 7 July 2011, confessed in an editorial ‘Quite simply, we lost our way … Phones were hacked, and for that this newspaper is truly sorry.’
The phone-hacking scandal prompted a wide-ranging inquiry into press ethics, chaired by Lord Leveson, which began in November 2011. A host of witnesses were brought forward and their testimony recorded and probed. The public heard ‘how the details of private lives, known only to the witnesses testifying (in other words, the targets of voicemail hacking) and their most trusted confidants and friends, became the subject of articles in the press’, while through the technique of voicemail hacking ‘journalists and press photographers were able to record moments that were intensely private, such as relationship breakdown, or family grief’. Sienna Miller, star of Layer Cake and Factory Girl,
explained [to the Leveson Inquiry] how she was the subject of many articles either speculating on or reporting the state of her relationship with the actor Jude Law. In many cases, the information that had formed the basis of these articles had been known only to Ms Miller, Mr Law and a very small number of confidants who had not shared the information further. Ms Miller gave a graphic description of the fall-out from the voicemail hacking which News International has, of course, admitted took place. This included the corrosive loss of trust in aspects of family life, in relationships and in friendships, Ms Miller assuming, understandably, that her inner circle was the source of stories in the press. She described herself as ‘torn between feeling completely paranoid that either someone close to [her] (a trusted family member or friend) was selling this information to the media or that someone was somehow hacking [her] telephone.’
These expressions of feelings of violation, anxiety and intrusion were echoed in other testimony, not only from celebrities:
Although the targets included a large number of celebrities, sports stars and people in positions of responsibility, they also included many other ordinary individuals who happened to know a celebrity or sports star, or happened to be employed by them. Other victims had no association with anyone in the public eye at all, but were, like the Dowlers, in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Leveson finally reported his findings and recommendations in November 2012. Even then Leveson’s weighty tome – a full 1,987 pages – drew back from full disclosure of many of the cases of alleged phone interception in order not to prejudice ongoing criminal proceedings. While Leveson noted that ‘it is still not clear just how widespread the practice of phone hacking was, or the extent to which it may have extended beyond one title; and, in the light of the limitations which necessarily impact on this aspect of the Inquiry because of the ongoing investigation and impending prosecutions, it is simply not possible to be definitive’, nevertheless the evidence presented ‘points to phone hacking being a common and known practice at the NoTW and elsewhere’. On the specific case of the Milly Dowler phone the facts remained murky. The phone had certainly been hacked and presumably voicemails listened to. But the deletions, which raised false hopes and were the direct cause of the spike in public revulsion of the practice of phone hacking, may have been caused by something as simple as a technical system update. Nevertheless, on the behaviour of the News of the World, Leveson spoke brutally:
In truth, at no stage did anybody drill down into the facts to answer the myriad of questions that could have been asked and which could be encompassed by the all-embracing question ‘What the hell was going on?’ These questions included what Mr Mulcaire had been doing for such rewards and for whom; what oversight had been exercised in relation to the use of his services; why had Mr Goodman felt it justifiable to involve himself in phone hacking; why had he argued that he should be able to return to employment and why was he being (or why had [he] been) paid off. On any showing, these questions were there to be asked and simple denials should not have been considered sufficient. This suggests a cover-up by somebody and at more than one level. Although this conclusion might be parsimonious, it is more than sufficient to throw clear light on the culture, practices and ethics existing and operating at the News of the World at the material time.
Throughout the same period and, as far as is known, entirely unconnected with the ph
one-hacking scandal, the surveillance of mobile phone records by the British secret state had increased; this took place legally and, one hopes, under ultimate political control. Occasional glimpses can be made of this shadowy world. For example, in 2008 it was revealed that the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ, the United Kingdom’s electronic intelligence agency) recorded mobile phone exchanges between the Omagh bombers, responsible for a devastating explosion in a Northern Irish town, in 1998. In the 2000s there existed a voluntary agreement that mobile companies would store details of times, dates, duration and location of calls, as well as websites visited and email addresses used, for twelve months. The data were made available to police and security services. Indeed the then Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, claimed that ‘data about calls … is used as important evidence in 95 per cent of serious crime cases and almost all security service operations since 2004’. From 2008 there have been attempts to push legislation through Parliament that would make such surveillance compulsory and extend its reach.
Of course, if the bulk of the British population – celebs as well as civilians – had not been in the habit of keeping in constant touch then surveillance, either by opportunistic crooks or by authorised guardians of collective security, would not be worthwhile. The ubiquity of mobile phones was the first condition that made the phone-hacking scandal possible. But a second point relates to our intimate relationship with this personal technology. We use cellphones as if in a private bubble, even when in public. It is a double shock when our calls, made in private spaces, are eavesdropped. ‘While phone hacking itself is a “silent crime” inasmuch as the victim will usually be unaware of, or not even suspect, the covert assault on his or her privacy’, noted Leveson, ‘its consequences – both direct and indirect – have often been serious and wide-ranging’. The force of this assault is directly in proportion to our mistaken sense of privacy.
Chapter 21
Phones on film
Our sense of danger is powerfully shaped by mediated representations of life. Hitch-hiking is now rare in the West not because hitch-hikers are a danger to drivers, or vice versa, but because on film a hitch-hiker tends to be a homicidal maniac. Paedophiles are a menace, but a youngster is far more likely to be run over by someone driving their kids to school – which they do because ‘the streets are dangerous’ – than to be abducted. Again a major cause of the school run is our calculation of risk, in this case to children, based on what we read and see, rather than on what statistics might show.
So how we use one technology of mobility – the car – depends on how it has been portrayed on TV, in film or in print. What, then, does the mobile in the media show us? In one straightforward way, the mobile has been a great boon to scriptwriters. A good plot depends on interaction between characters. Communication technologies allow characters who are not in the same room as each other to interact, thereby literally expanding the dramatic range. With a landline telephone, a character is rooted to the spot. But with first cordless phones (which I haven’t discussed here) and then mobile phones, characters were set free. The scriptwriters of soaps and sitcoms were perhaps one of the greatest beneficiaries, since soaps and sitcoms depend more than any other televisual genre on conversation and gossip. So an episode of The Simpsons or One Foot in the Grave, to take just two examples from the United States and the United Kingdom respectively, can even be dominated by characters on mobile phones.
Film both created and exploited mobile phones as iconic markers of status. So Gordon Gekko, the feral corporate raider played by Michael Douglas in the sharp satire of 1980s excess Wall Street (1987), barked orders down the brick-like cellphone while walking on an Atlantic beach. In Gekko’s individualistic, greed-driven world, money never slept – and never stopped moving. Gekko would have no ‘dead time’. Wall Street repeatedly drew a contrast between this new atomised anti-society and the older traditional society where personal integrity was based on good character, and a firm’s worth lay in real products, not junk finance. The cellphone was the icon of the new. And fiction in turn shaped fact. Across the ocean, the city workers in London who ostentatiously waved mobile phones modelled themselves on Gekko, their hero.
So phones on film could symbolise connection between characters, advertise social status or even stand for the absence of society. In the Nollywood flick Phone Swap (2012) the reliance on, and new ubiquity of, mobile phones, in this case in Nigeria, is the source of gentle social satire (as well as a promotion of BlackBerry, one of the funders of the film). Phones can also be, simply, triggers. In The Hurt Locker (2008), Kathryn Bigelow’s film set among US Army bomb disposal teams in Iraq, they are used to detonate explosives, as they were in real life. But a more intriguing use of the mobile exploited the contradictions – and horror – of being in constant touch. In David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) a creepy atmosphere had already been built up with the delivery of video tapes made by an intruder into the house of characters played by Patricia Arquette and Bill Pullman. Video tapes are information technologies that shift time: the footage merely showed that the intruder had been in the house some time in the past. But creepiness turns to full horror at a party, where the uncomfortable Pullman is approached by a white-faced man with more than a whiff of sulphur about him. The white-faced man insists that they have met. What’s more, he insists that he is in Pullman’s home at the same instant as he is there at the party. The proof is a mobile phone call. The mobile is an information technology of instantaneous time – the horror comes from the sudden realisation that the white-faced man is in two places at once, so something is seriously wrong.
There are two ways in which mobiles feature in stories of the uncanny, and both reflect contradictory aspects of mobile culture. In series such as The X-Files, mobile phones are part of the armoury of good – in this case the FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully – against evil. The cellphone here provides horizontal communication between the heroes (Mulder, Scully) who are working outside – and often against – the centralised hierarchical organisation (the FBI).
The same analysis fits The Matrix (1999), in which Keanu Reeves and allies discover that the world is a simulation created by an authoritarian mechanical regime. They can act in both worlds only because they possess state-of-the-art mobiles. And as the entertainment and communications industries converged in the late 1990s, The Matrix acted as an advert for the particular phone used, the Nokia 8110i. So, ironically, the mechanical simulation-creating regime won:
Nokia’s mobile phones create the vital link between the dream world and the reality in The Matrix. The heroes of the movie could not do their job and save the world without the seamless connectivity provided by Nokia’s mobile phones. Even though our everyday tasks and duties may be less important than those of the heroes of The Matrix, today we can all appreciate the new dimension of life enabled by mobile telephony. As the leading brand in mobile communications, Nokia is proud to see that the makers of The Matrix have chosen Nokia’s mobile phones to be used in their film.
So said Heikki Norta, General Manager, Marketing Services, Nokia Mobile Phones, Europe and Africa, on the day of the film’s launch in 1999.
In the second way, the creepiness of instantaneous remote communication is exploited. In the Scream movies, which knowingly cherry-picked the whole horror genre, the killer was anonymous, remote but also scarily present as soon as the call was made. In Lost Highway the uncanniness stemmed from the impossibility of being in two places at the same time – a short-circuiting of spatial logic. How can someone be both present and not present? Mobile phones give us a powerful sense of co-presence that can be shockingly undermined. I was once chatting to a friend who was walking down the Hackney Road in London. There was a scuffle and then silence. While it was clear what had happened – the phone had been snatched – the shock (for me) lay in sudden helplessness: the realisation that someone who seemed near is in fact far. Constant touch is illusory.
The mobile phone on film can counter and cause the uncanny. These two modes are part of longer traditions in storytelling. The use of the latest communication technologies to counter ancient evil is nowhere better illustrated than in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), in which otherwise utterly ordinary modern Europeans can defeat the Count because they possess Dictaphones, telegraphs and an efficient postal service. (Recall that Stoker’s novel, for good reason, is in epistolary form.) The Blair Witch Project (1999) was deliberately set a few years in the past, after cheap video cameras (on which the film’s beguiling realism depends) but before mobile phones. There was no escape for this second team of ordinary humans.
Jeffrey Sconce, in Haunted Media, has traced how communications technologies have persistently been associated with the uncanny, from the ‘spiritual telegraph’ of the 1840s to oppressive other-worlds of fictional cyberspaces in the late 20th century. So with early radio, catching distant voices by accident across the ether (‘distant signal’ or ‘DX fishing’) suggested to many authors a metaphor for the fragile bonds between individuals and the potential for traumatic disconnection. ‘Stage and screen at the beginning of the century’, notes Sconce, ‘saw a number of productions that featured distraught husbands listening helplessly on the phone as intruders in the home attacked their families.’ Later, episodes of The Twilight Zone featured uncanny communication from the dead by phone: in ‘A Long Distance Call’ (1961) a recently deceased grandmother called her grandson on a toy telephone, and in ‘Night Call’ (1964) a long-dead man contacts his fiancée via a telephone wire that has fallen on his grave. Horror stems from interrupted mobility: whether it be from confinement to a grave or, traumatically outside fiction, from mobile phones in the twisted wreckage of train crashes, or the last conversations on the hijacked airliners of 11 September 2001.