Rebekah Brooks: I did not know hacking was illegal
Source: The Guardian
Rebekah Brooks on Tuesday told an Old Bailey jury she had not been involved in the hacking of Milly Dowler's voicemail and, as editor of the News of the World, had not been told that some of her staff believed they had found the missing girl alive and well three weeks after she disappeared.
On her fourth day in the witness box, Brooks also said that during her editorship of the News of the World, she had not realised it was illegal to intercept voicemail. She had never sanctioned it, she said. "I can't see that it would have been a particularly useful thing to do," she added.
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Brooks said she had not seen the early editions of the News of the World on Sunday 14 April, which quoted several voicemail messages from the missing girl's phone. She said she had seen only a later edition, in which the story had been cut down. During the following week, she said, she had not been aware that her managing editor, Stuart Kuttner, sent an email to Surrey police in which, the court has heard, he challenged them to confirm that Milly Dowler had been offered a job in Telford and quoted a voicemail from her phone.Earlier, Brooks told the jury that in the late 1990s she had heard that it was possible to access other people's voicemail. "There was certainly some publicity about it, about the flaw in the system." Looking back, she could not see how it would have helped the News of the World on any of the big campaigns or stories they had run under her editorship, she said, although it might have helped other departments with "celebrity tittle tattle."
"No one – no desk head, no journalist – ever came to me and said 'We are working on such and such story but we need to access voicemail; or asked for me to sanction it.'" She said she had not realised that it would have been a breach of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. She was pretty sure, she added, that she had not even heard of the act. She added: "Even though I didn't know it was illegal, I still would have felt it was absolutely in the category of a serious breach of privacy."
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/feb/25/rebekah-brooks-hacking-dowler-illegal
= new reply since forum marked as read
LEAVE HER BE!
Sounds like another case of Chris Christie Syndrome...
rocktivity
Maybe??!!!!!
I cannot believe her.
