a city wired for sound

Am I right in thinking that Andy Hayman’s testimony yesterday fingered Met press chief Dick Fedorcio? Hayman admitted he’d regularly had dinner with News International executives while he was meant to be investigating them. He mentioned that he had done this in the company of the head of communications of the Met, presumably with his approval, although Hayman was also acting in his capacity as ACPO media lead.

Fedorcio has had the same job since 1997. He was named by Nick Davies as having been present in the meeting where the Met demanded to know why Dave Cook was being followed by News International private detectives, and apparently intervened with senior police officers to get them to go easy on NI. Surely the guy in charge of police-press-political relations is a key figure in a scandal that’s all about relations between the press, the police, and politics?

Like the key News International men, Alex Marunchak and Greg Miskiw, there’s no sign of him. The Home Affairs committee, and indeed anyone else who wants the truth about this, must call Fedorcio without delay. Oh, and is Greg Miskiw in the UK?

Second point. Yesterday’s New York Times claims that Miskiw and others on the NOTW were able to locate mobile phones by paying £500 a shot to a corrupt police officer. That is to say, this policeman had access to the lawful intercept systems that are part of all GSM and UMTS cellular networks, or at least he could task people who did. ETSI Specification 01.33 defines this as a standard element of all GSM networks and the corresponding 3GPP TS 33.106 does so for UMTS ones.

If this is so, they could certainly also get pen-register information – lists of calls to and from given phone numbers – and even tap the calls themselves.

This is a massive violation of the UK’s critical national infrastructure security, of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, and of the Data Protection Act. News International, their police contact, and the police force responsible (not necessarily the Met) should all be prosecuted.

There is an urgent need to audit the lawful interception systems’ logs, among other things to find out if there are other unauthorised users out there. International standards foresee a detailed audit trail as part of these systems in order to preserve the legal chain-of-evidence. If the Interception Request message was submitted in proper form from the police to the telcos, the operators are legally in the clear, but if I was in charge of their network security I’d suspend processing the requests until such an audit was carried out as we now know that an unknown but significant percentage of them are illegal.

Thank fuck we didn’t build that giant national ID card database.

Third point. Not that anyone will answer this, but were any of the Prime Minister’s designated deputies for nuclear retaliation subject to illegal telecoms surveillance?

Fourth point. Circling back to the Defence Vetting Agency and Andy Coulson, the vetting procedure as described on the DVA Web site states that in some cases, the decision may be taken to issue a security clearance subject to risk management measures taken by the department involved. In these cases, the DVA will disclose information to the sponsoring department that it would usually keep confidential. Did they make such a recommendation to the Prime Minister’s office, and if so, what was the information?