Hackergate

By tomtom

As the world turns and the postmortem proceeds

Can this ever be anything more than the kind of witch-hunt we witnessed in our Westminster Parliament recently, fuelled by mass hysteria and other more obscure covert reasoning by politicians in mortal danger of being dumped, either by the electorate or their peers?

  In a multi-billion dollar publishing and broadcasting empire, can the men or women at the top, the managers ever have really have known anything about what went down on the street, as the hungry wolf-pack sought the inside track to their next big story?

  Unless these managers were down there on the street, in amongst the men or women, who made all this happen, it’s highly unlikely. Such matters were most probably concealed from them and they probably only became aware of it when revelations of what had been going-on, became public knowledge. In which case, they could do little more than react to events.

  Events, claimed Harold Macmillan our PM in the late fifties and early sixties, were the thing he feared most of all when in office. Why? Because everybody and his dog expected the man in charge to know the ins and outs in detail, of things that had already occurred. That he should just by virtue of his position have known all about it.

  These are things, which unless you were there on the spot when they happened, are probably the most difficult to know with any certainty, for the very reason, that you could not have been there at the point of delivery and had to rely on hearsay. So it’s only after the event when people, look at every tiny scrap of evidence in detail, that it soon becomes apparent that to know what really went on is highly improbable.

  So there’s little more you can expect them to say, other than they did not know anything till it all began to emerge. That’s about the top and bottom of it and in all probability was the perfect truth. Of course they have the facility to quiz the people who should have known, but probably didn’t get very far with that one, for a reporter’s sources have always been held to be sacrosanct.

   So if wrong doing was afoot the management can always claim immunity from this point of view. What goes round comes round and it is highly unlikely that even a judge led enquiry can uncover what really went down on the street, for as Piers Morgan revealed in his recent book, it needed only a four letter code and open sesame, hey presto. The world of instant communication is your oyster.

  This apart, if you have a phone which can accessed remotely, it is relatively easy to protect it from this practice of hacking, though most people do not bother to do this. All it takes, even if you do not use this remote facility, is a password which will prevent unauthorised access.

  So as all and sundry scramble onto the compensation bandwagon, a question needs to be posed as to how and why this practice of hacking escalated to become so widespread as appears to be the case.

 Mainly of course it all it boils down to a few simple facts:-

1.  If it can so easily be done, there people out there, who will seek to do it for personal gain.
2. Can the picture emerging, ever be the true actuality?
3. Has hacking really been achieved on the massive scale claimed?
4. Will we never know the true back story?
5. Can the people who authorised the hacking be made to confess?
6. Are the people who actually achieved it, prepared to spill the beans?

  Without these simple truths coming to light, it will remain a long dark tunnel and people will realise they could have been a little more circumspect, for with hindsight they could have easily protected themselves from this practice. 

    

Watch this space I’ll be back!

Tom.