Peter Hain Gets Warning Computer Was Hacked – Suspects Form Queue Here: Irish, Welsh & National Security Dilemmas – Or Not
PETER Hain the once fiery – even thought at one stage to be bordering on anarchist – Young Liberal turned one-time Labour’s Northern Ireland supremo has been told by Police his computers may have been hacked.
The temptation is to ask if this is a bad thing for the Minister once charged and before The Beak for allegedly robbing a branch of Barclay’s bank. He was not guilty.
Apart from a few (later said to be totally unfounded) suspicions over Party Leadership election expenses contributions, Hain has kept a firm grip on the greasy pole to the Houses of Parliament front benches. There have been a few slips and pole descents but the unctuous Hain still slithers up the pole.
All this from the once 13-year-old boy who read the eulogy at the cremation of a man executed for murdering an old dear in an infamous Johannesburg Station bombing. The bomber had hidden behind a column to watch his bomb explode. Hain’s parents could not read it because at the time they were “Banned Persons” silenced by the Nationalist and Openly Racist Regime in power in South Africa. There are still long memories around Peter m’boy.
On April 9, 1976 the now living in the UK and then president of the Young Liberals was acquitted on a charge of stealing £490 from a branch of Barclays Bank. It was held to be a case of mistaken identity. There were rumours of the successors to South African Bureau of State Security (BOSS) involvement in an alleged set up. Labour Leader Harold Wilson had just resigned as Prime Minister and Jim Callaghan (Sunny Jim) took over for the next four years.
Lord Patrick Devlin, later Chairman of the Press Complaints Council, had held a 1974 Public Inquiry into mistaken identity, As far as any journalist is aware the Inquiry Report did not prevent police, press or spooks making similar mistakes while, for example, armed with gun, camera and/or Security D Notices and eventually chasing a young Brazilian electrician into London Underground carriage and then shooting him dead. (Police that is, not the Hacks)
Hain was always a subject of great interest to British security services and the files will not have grown thinner over the years.
Police have now told the ever-smiling Hain his personal computers may have been cracked and given the once over.
The Guardian has the Hain police warning story here:
Peter Hain warned computer may have been hacked by private detectives
One interesting section is:
“The suggestion that the minister’s computers, containing sensitive intelligence material, may have been compromised is the most serious sign yet that newspaper malpractice extended far beyond the hacking of mobile phone voicemail, into the realm of other electronic data.
“The investigation into computer hacking is being carried out by detectives from Scotland Yard’s specialist crime directorate. It is separate, but related to the phone hacking investigation.”
This confirms what Anorak has said all along during its coverage of the alleged hacking affair.
Who trained the Private Eyes? Phone hacking was always considered to be a pretty tame technological level for some of the apparent leaks of information and Anorak also suspected the story ran deeper, such as direct land line tapping and cyber theft…the preserve of Government Spooks at places like the massively staffed Cheltenham GCHG the UK cyber spy web centre. The proud header on its web site is:
“GCHQ provides intelligence, protects information and informs relevant UK policy to keep our society safe and successful in the Internet age”
Even spies crave celeb status.
What ever is uncovered at the various hacking and press intrusion inquiries…
However many celebs trail to the Leveson inquiry and complain about a self-perceived imbalance in their willingly entered into Faustian contracts as part of the fame game, selling their public persona souls for the “right kind” of coverage with the devilish media giants…now whining the fame they sought made them unfair targets of a voracious media pack…
However many political engineered and tightly constrained Public Inquiries produce honest, fair and totally non-transparent, non-satisfactory results …because the original constraints made the result inevitable…
Whatever is presented to the great unwashed British public will still appear to be a total whitewash…
There will be no successful attempt to reign in the undoubted excesses of the various media groups because politicians and celebs alike can not survive without the white hot breath of exposure (the right kind of course).
If any politico or grey minded and faced Whitehall mandarin believes they are qualified to gauge what makes a good news story or a suitable pair of tits to grace Page Three then they have lost the plot as much as the rapidly shrinking News International printed page empire.
Some doubt Murdoch, Senior & Junior, want to hang on to their newspaper titles at all. The print side of the media empire is beginning to drain the corporation coffers and will never be the milch cows they once were.
The same is happening in the once great Trinity-Mirror Group. The printed page is dying. Once great and powerful regional evening newspapers are shedding staff and where six afternoon editions were the norm a single desultory edition limps out from presses far removed from the newspaper offices (sometimes not even in the same city).
Newspapers are dead and don’t know it. Bosses talk proudly of not losing as many editions as the rival paper in the next town.
Internet sites and 24 news broadcasting is stuffing the credibility of the printed page but at the end of it all when hacking inquiries and Leveson Inquiries make their solemn and profound Inquiry results known answer just one question:
If there is no basic training ground left to provide the rapacious broadcast media with qualified and savvy journalists…who will be left to point out just exactly what the spooks may be doing?
Not in your name. Spooks can never operate in your name. They work for the grey-minds which set the parameters and criteria for Public Inquiries.
The ultimate poser which Inquiries should be asking remains unphrased …who is training the hacks and the private detectives in the ways of the real Spooks world.
There is only one answer.
… and the thought occurs, Peter Hain, the man who was once also the Secretary of State for Wales, is one of those who actually knows the answer and look what has and is happening now….
Posted: 29th, November 2011 | In: Key Posts, Reviews Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
