March 28, 2024

Cameron Orders Two Inquiries Into Hacking Scandal as Former Aide Is Arrested

Struggling to contain the biggest scandal since he took office more than a year ago, Mr. Cameron announced two separate inquiries into the revelations, saying “no stone will be left unturned.”

In a statement, Scotland Yard said Andy Coulson, Mr. Cameron’s former director of communications, had been interviewed at a police station in south London and was “currently in custody.”

While his arrest had been expected, it brought a new dimension to the scandal, turning it from one of claim and counter-claim to a question of criminal charges.

A police statement said the former editor had been arrested “on suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications” and “on suspicion of corruption allegations.” It said he had been interviewed by officers investigating illegal payments to corrupt police officers and phone hacking.

The arrest came as Mr. Cameron scrambled desperately to contain the fallout from scandal and focus public attention on measures being taken to investigate it. But it was certain to draw renewed taunts by Mr. Cameron’s critics that he showed flawed judgment in hiring Mr. Coulson in 2007. In the past, the prime minister has always vouched for Mr. Coulson’s integrity and said he believed Mr. Coulson’s assurances that he had done nothing wrong.

The developments followed a decision by Rupert Murdoch’s family on Thursday to close The News of the World — the tabloid newspaper at the center of the scandal over illicit payments to corrupt police officers and the hacking of cellphones belonging to victims of crime and terrorism and possibly families of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The decision seemed to be a calculated move to help protect Mr. Murdoch’s proposed $12 billion takeover of the pay-television company British Sky Broadcasting. Mr. Murdoch already owns a controlling 39.1 percent stake in it; the deal would allow him to own it outright.

Members of the British public had until Friday to make their views known to the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, who is to rule on the takeover. The BBC said some 256,000 individuals had lodged objections, many in recent days, and it could take months to sift through them.

Before the phone-hacking crisis exploded this week, Mr. Hunt had been expected to approve the deal, possibly this week. But he indicated on Friday that a decision would take longer.

In a statement, his office said that “given the volume of responses,” it would “take some time” to make a ruling. Mr. Hunt “will also consider all relevant factors” including the impact of the closure of The News of the World, the statement said.

The repercussions from the crisis also seemed to be spreading to the question of media regulation.

At a hastily-convened news conference to unveil his plans for inquiries, Mr. Cameron also proposed an extraordinary tightening of regulations on the behavior of the free-wheeling British press, which prides itself on investigative prowess far beyond the tabloid titillation with which some of its titles are associated.

“I believe we need a new system entirely,” Mr. Cameron declared, saying the current self-regulation of the press by a body called the Press Complaints Commission has “failed.” The scandal has shaken the intertwined worlds of press and politics, laid bare the cozy ties between British leaders and Mr. Murdoch and raised questions about the future of two once high-flying newspaper executives — Mr. Coulson and Rebekah Brooks, the current chief executive of Mr. Murdoch’s newspaper operations in Britain who herself had been editor of The News of the World.

At his news conference, Mr. Cameron spoke with a rare candor about the darker practices that have been common in the British press, particularly tabloids like the News of the World, whose power to destroy reputations has spread widespread fear among politicians, celebrities and others in the public eye.

The prime minister said he would ask the inquiry he plans to appoint to make a sweeping review of “the culture, the practices and the ethics” of  the country’s newspapers. But he also acknowledged that politicians have traditionally failed to speak up about press abuses for fear of alienating press barons with the power to wreck their careers  or their parties’ electoral prospects.

John F. Burns reported from London and Alan Cowell from Paris. Reporting was contributed by Sarah Lyall, Jo Becker, Julia Werdigier and Ravi Somaiya from London, Jeremy Peters, Brian Stelter and Tim Arango from New York.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=4c7bd7038c55d181dbe8c3932ef13458

A Tenacious Rise to the Top in the Brutal Men’s World of Tabloids

Asked whether she had ever paid the police for information, Ms. Wade, a supremely confident and striking figure with her shock of wild red hair, looked unabashed and unperturbed. “We have paid the police for information in the past,” she declared.

She was, in fact, admitting to breaking the law, which was pointed out to her soon afterward. But Ms. Wade backtracked as fluently as she had come forward, declaring that she could not remember any examples and then proceeding, it seemed, to brush off the whole thing as another cheeky, walking-the-line incident in a career full of them.

Now 43 and known by her new married name, Rebekah Brooks, she has used a winning combination of charm, effrontery, audacity and tenacity to thrive in the brutal, male-dominated world of the British tabloids. She has risen to become chief executive of News International, Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper subsidiary.

Her closeness to Mr. Murdoch, who is said to regard her as a kind of favorite daughter (although he has four actual daughters), has protected her during the recent scandal engulfing the company, even as legislators called on her to resign.

The long-running saga exploded this week as the Murdochs announced they would close The News of the World in the face of public and parliamentary outrage over revelations that the phone of Milly Dowler, a 13-year-old girl murdered in 2002, was hacked by The News of the World after she disappeared but before her body was found, hampering the police investigation and adding to her parents’ distress.

Ms. Brooks was editor of The News of the World at the time; she has condemned the hacking and said she knew nothing about it. She declined a request to be interviewed for this article.

In extraordinary scenes in the House of Commons on Wednesday, legislator after legislator — most of them from the opposition Labour Party — rose and demanded that Ms. Brooks, one of the most powerful figures in the British news media and a woman many have feared until now, should go. Ms. Brooks should “take responsibility and stand down,” said Ed Miliband, the Labour leader.

But Mr. Murdoch issued a ringing endorsement of Ms. Brooks, saying that his company was committed to holding a full investigation of the recent allegations, under Ms. Brooks’s leadership.

Part of his approach is strategic, said the media analyst Clare Enders, founder of Enders Analysis. Ms. Enders suggested that Ms. Brooks functioned as something of a firewall for Mr. Murdoch — a buffer against the allegations. “If she resigns, that’s an admission of culpability,” she said.

And part is emotional. “Rupert Murdoch adores her — he’s just very, very attached to her,” said a person who knows them both socially. “To be frank, the most sensible thing that News Corp. could do would be to dump Rebekah Brooks, but he won’t.”

Ms. Brooks’s rise has been steady, and quick. She began her career in the Murdoch media stable as a secretary at The News of the World, rising to become editor of the paper just 11 years later. In 2003, she became editor of the tabloid Sun, Britain’s best-selling daily newspaper, before being promoted to her current job two years ago.

From early on, she was known for her creative flair in getting articles and her lack of compunction in how she got them. In 1994, she prepared for The News of the World’s interview with James Hewitt, a paramour of Princess Diana, by reserving a hotel suite and hiring a team to “kit it out with secret tape devices in various flowerpots and cupboards,” Piers Morgan, her former boss and now a CNN talk show host, writes in his memoir “The Insider.”

On another occasion in her early days, furious that the paper was about to be scooped by The Sunday Times’s serialization of a biography of Prince Charles, Ms. Brooks disguised herself as a Times cleaning woman and hid for two hours in a bathroom, according to Mr. Morgan. When the presses started rolling, she ran over, grabbed a newly printed copy of The Sunday Times, and brought it back to The News of the World — which proceeded to use the material, verbatim, in its own paper the next day.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=ac114ec67953a83eef1f5ca6fd0dc18d

Murdoch to Close Tabloid Amid Fury Over Hacking

The scandal had been taking a toll on the News Corporation, with stock prices falling, some advertisers fleeing The News of the World, and new doubts emerging about Mr. Murdoch’s proposed $12 billion takeover of the pay-television company British Sky Broadcasting, in which he already owns a large stake. Many legislators have now criticized the deal and any government decision appears unlikely to be made before the end of the summer.

The Times of London, itself a News Corporation newspaper, said five journalists and the newspaper executives suspected of involvement in the scandal were expected to be arrested within days.

The move to close The News of the World was also seen by media analysts as a potentially shrewd decision to jettison a newspaper in order to preserve the more lucrative broadcasting deal and possibly expand its other tabloid, The Sun, to publish seven days a week.

The announcement came from Mr. Murdoch’s son and likely heir apparent, James, in a broad and apologetic statement delivered so suddenly that The News of the World was still advertising a subscription deal on its Web site.

“Wrongdoers turned a good newsroom bad and this was not fully understood or adequately pursued,” he said, admitting that the paper and its British parent, News International, had “failed to get to the bottom of repeated wrongdoing that occurred without conscience or legitimate purpose,” despite a police investigation in 2006 that sent two men to jail.

As a result, he said, the paper and company “wrongly maintained that these issues were confined to one reporter. We have now voluntarily given evidence to the police that I believe will prove that this was untrue and those who acted wrongly will have to face the consequences.” The announcement raised immediate speculation that The Sun, another News International paper, might begin publishing on Sundays. Company executives had discussed earlier this year whether to merge some of the two papers’ operations as a way to save money, and the domain name thesunonsunday.co.uk was registered on Tuesday.

When asked about the possibility, a News International spokeswoman said, “There is no comment beyond the statement today which does not mention any future plans.” Other Murdoch holdings in Britain include The Sunday Times of London and SkyNews.

In an on-camera interview with the BBC, James Murdoch said the paper was being shut down because “we fundamentally breached a trust with our readers.” He defended News International’s embattled chief, Rebekah Brooks, saying he was convinced that her leadership was “the right thing” for the company and “absolutely crucial right now.”

On Wednesday, Rupert Murdoch made his first direct public comment on the phone hacking scandal, fiercely defending Ms. Brooks from accusations over serious phone hacking cases while she was editor at The News of the World and saying the company would continue cooperating with the police “under Rebekah Brooks’s leadership.”

The leader of the opposition Labour Party, Ed Miliband, told the BBC that the closing of the paper was a defensive move on the part of News International, “a concession to members of the public up and down the country who have been appalled by what has happened.” But he said that only Ms. Brooks’s resignation would show that the organization was taking responsibility for its actions.

“Some people are losing their jobs, but one person who is keeping her job is the person who was editor of The News of the World at the time of the Milly Dowler episode,” Mr. Miliband said, referring to the case of the 13-year-old murder victim. On Monday, lawyers for her family said the paper hacked her phone after she was abducted in 2002, deleting some messages to make room for more in a move that confused police investigators and created false hope that she might still be alive. Her killer remained at large for years, killing two more young women before being captured, and was convicted in all three deaths; the verdict in Ms. Dowler’s case came only last month.

Ms. Brooks was the paper’s editor during the Dowler case, and was promoted from there to The Sun before taking over News International.

On Wednesday, a member of Parliament also raised allegations that nine years ago, The News of the World had participated in efforts to disrupt a murder investigation, as the members collectively turned on Mr. Murdoch, and the tabloid culture he represents, using a debate about the widening phone hacking scandal to denounce reporting tactics by newspapers once seen as too politically influential to challenge.

Sarah Lyall reported from London, and Brian Stelter from New York. Reporting was contributed by Alan Cowell from Paris, Eric Pfanner and Ravi Somaiya from London, and Jeremy W. Peters from New York.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/08/world/europe/08britain.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Murdoch Facing Parliament’s Ire in Hacking Case

But though he joined in the chorus of outrage, Prime Minister David Cameron, whose Conservative Party benefits from Mr. Murdoch’s support, stopped short of calling for an immediate investigation into behavior by the Murdoch-owned News of the World and other tabloids. Such an inquiry would have to wait, he said, until the police had concluded their own criminal investigation.

From all sides of the House of Commons the disgust came thick and fast, as the legislators recited the most recent allegations against The News of the World: that its executives had paid police officers, lied to Parliament and hired investigators to intercept voice mail messages left on the cellphones of murdered children and terrorism victims. Legislators also attacked the news media in general for employing many of the same tactics.

The scandal posed new hurdles for Mr. Murdoch’s proposed $12 billion takeover of the pay-television company British Sky Broadcasting, as many legislators criticized the deal, and Britain’s media regulatory agency, Ofcom, said it was “closely monitoring the situation.”

“We have let one man have far too great a sway over our national life,” said Chris Bryant, a Labour member of Parliament. In addition to The News of the World, Mr. Murdoch’s media holdings include The Times of London; The Sun; and a large stake in BSkyB, as it is called, as well as several other international newspapers and television networks.

Meanwhile, John Whittingdale, the Conservative chairman of the House of Commons culture and media committee, rehearsed in tones of high indignation how executives from The News of the World and its parent company, News International, had thwarted legislators’ efforts to get to the bottom of the phone hacking affair by stonewalling, refusing to testify and even lying outright during parliamentary hearings.

Zac Goldsmith, another Conservative legislator, said that Mr. Murdoch was guilty of “systemic abuse of almost unprecedented power” and had run roughshod over Parliament.

“There is nothing noble in what these newspapers have been doing,” he said. “Rupert Murdoch is clearly a very, very talented businessman — he’s possibly even a genius — but his organization has grown too powerful and has abused that power. It has systematically corrupted the police and in my view has gelded this Parliament, to our shame.”

A number of legislators, including Nicholas Soames, a Conservative, said Wednesday that in light of the recent developments, the government should intervene to delay or even stop Mr. Murdoch’s plan to acquire all the shares of BSkyB.

“I urge the government to look at whether we should pause things given what has come to light,” said Anna Soubry, a Conservative member of Parliament.

Before this week, the deal had passed virtually every government hurdle. But Ofcom, the media regulator, said in a statement that it was watching developments in the case, “and in particular the investigations by the relevant authorities into the alleged unlawful activities.”

Many legislators also focused their outrage on Rebekah Brooks, a former News of the World editor who is now News International’s chief executive and a protégé of Mr. Murdoch. She is a close friend of Mr. Cameron’s — the two have country houses near each other and have often socialized — and has been a strong champion of his premiership.

Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, said flatly that Ms. Brooks should resign.

But Ms. Brooks said she would stay put, and on Wednesday her boss, Mr. Murdoch, took the unusual step of issuing a statement on the matter.

Calling the recent allegations involving phone hacking and paying off the police “deplorable and unacceptable,” Mr. Murdoch pledged that the company would “fully and proactively cooperate with the police in all investigations.” He added: “That is exactly what News International has been doing and will continue to do under Rebekah Brooks’s leadership.”

Alan Cowell and Eric Pfanner contributed reporting from Paris.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 6, 2011

A caption with an earlier version of this article misstated the day the photo was taken as Thursday.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 6, 2011

An earlier version of this article omitted the given name and title of Ed Miliband, the Labour Party leader.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/world/europe/07britain.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Scandal Grows Over Hacking of Girl’s Cell

Prominent politicians chastised the company and Ms. Brooks, and Ford Motor Company suspended advertising in The News of the World, the tabloid that has faced a long-running scandal over the widespread interception of voice mail messages of celebrities and other public figures.

Ed Miliband, leader of the opposition Labour Party, said Tuesday that Ms. Brooks should “consider her conscience and consider her position” after the disclosures.

“It wasn’t a rogue reporter,” Mr. Miliband said. “It wasn’t just one individual. This was a systematic series of things that happened, and what I want from executives at News International is people to start taking responsibility for this.” News International is the News Corporation’s British newspaper division, and Ms. Brooks is now its chief executive.

Prime Minister David Cameron took time out from a visit to British troops in Afghanistan to lament what he called a “truly dreadful situation.” The police, he added, “should investigate this without any fear, without any favor, without any worry about where the evidence should lead them.”

Adding to the pressure, Ford Motor Company said it was suspending advertising until the newspaper concluded its investigation into the episode. “We are awaiting an outcome from The News of the World investigation and expect a speedy and decisive response,” Ford said in a statement released to news agencies. Under an onslaught of Twitter messages demanding a boycott of the paper, several other companies said they were reviewing their advertising policies.

Late Tuesday, The Guardian reported that the police would review every highly publicized murder, kidnapping or assault involving a child since 2001 for evidence of phone hacking. That would include the notorious case of Madeleine McCann, the 3-year-old who disappeared while her family was on vacation in Portugal in 2007.

In another development, Channel 4 reported on Tuesday that Ms. Brooks met with the police in 2002 over accusations that the tabloid had placed a senior Metropolitan police detective under surveillance.

The detective was investigating the murder of a private investigator who had been found dead with an ax buried in the back of his head. The chief suspect at the time was the dead man’s business partner, a private investigator who earned a six-figure salary supplying The News of the World with confidential information. Nothing apparently came of the inquiry into The News of the World’s surveillance.

Scotland Yard detectives were also investigating whether the phones of some families of victims of the bombings of three London subway trains and a double-decker bus in July 2005 had also been hacked, The Telegraph reported.

In his remarks, Mr. Cameron did not mention Ms. Brooks, but his comments were notable because, like other British politicians, he has cultivated social connections with News Corporation executives like Ms. Brooks and Rupert Murdoch, the chief executive of the company. Mr. Cameron, along with Gordon Brown, the Labour prime minister at the time, was a guest at the reception following Ms. Brooks’s marriage to her second husband, Charlie Brooks, in 2009.

Ms. Brooks vowed to “pursue the facts with vigor and integrity,” saying she had no intention of quitting.

“I am aware of the speculation about my position,” she said in a memo to News International employees. “Therefore it is important you all know that as chief executive, I am determined to lead the company to ensure we do the right thing and resolve these serious issues.”

The allegations center on one of the most sensational Fleet Street stories of the last decade, the disappearance of Milly Dowler in 2002. The case was the subject of many tabloid front pages over the last decade, culminating last month in the conviction of Levi Bellfield, a former nightclub doorman, on charges of kidnapping and murder.

The allegation that investigators working for The News of the World may have had ordinary people like the Dowlers, not just celebrities, in their sights has raised the level of alarm in Britain over tabloid newspaper excesses.

Sarah Lyall reported from London, and Eric Pfanner from Paris.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/06/world/europe/06britain.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Executive Under Pressure Over Hacking Allegations

Prominent politicians chastised the company and Ms. Brooks, and Ford Motor Company suspended advertising in News of the World, the tabloid that has faced a long-running scandal over the widespread interception of voice mail messages of celebrities and other public figures.

Ed Miliband, leader of the opposition Labour Party, said Tuesday that Ms. Brooks should “consider her conscience and consider her position” after the disclosures.

“It wasn’t a rogue reporter,” Mr. Miliband said. “It wasn’t just one individual. This was a systematic series of things that happened and what I want from executives at News International is people to start taking responsibility for this.” News International is the News Corporation’s British newspaper division, and Ms. Brooks is now its chief executive.

Prime Minister David Cameron took time out from a visit to British troops in Afghanistan to lament what he called a “truly dreadful situation.” The police, he added, “should investigate this without any fear, without any favor, without any worry about where the evidence should lead them.”

Adding to the pressure, Ford Motor Company said it was suspending advertising until the newspaper concluded its investigation into the episode. “We are awaiting an outcome from the News of the World investigation and expect a speedy and decisive response,” Ford said in a statement released to news agencies. Under an onslaught of Twitter messages demanding a boycott of the paper, several other companies said they were reviewing their advertising policies.

Late Tuesday, the Guardian reported that the police would review every highly publicized murder, kidnapping or assault involving a child since 2001 for evidence of phone hacking. That would include the notorious case of Madeleine McCann, the 3-year-old who disappeared while her family was on vacation in Portugal in 2007.

In another development, Channel 4 reported on Tuesday that Ms. Brooks met with the police in 2002 over accusations that the tabloid had placed a senior Metropolitan police detective under surveillance.

The detective was investigating the murder of a private investigator who had been found dead with an axe buried in the back of his head. The chief suspect at the time was the dead man’s business partner, a private investigator who earned a six-figure salary supplying The News of the World with confidential information. Nothing apparently came of the inquiry into the News of the World’s surveillance.

In his remarks, Mr. Cameron did not mention Ms. Brooks, but his comments were notable because, like other British politicians, he has cultivated social connections with News Corporation executives like Ms. Brooks and Rupert Murdoch, the chief executive of the company. Mr. Cameron, along with Gordon Brown, the Labour prime minister at the time, was a guest at the reception following Ms. Brooks’s marriage to her second husband, Charlie Brooks, in 2009.

Ms. Brooks vowed to “pursue the facts with vigor and integrity,” saying she had no intention of quitting.

“I am aware of the speculation about my position,” she said in a memo to News International employees. “Therefore it is important you all know that as chief executive, I am determined to lead the company to ensure we do the right thing and resolve these serious issues.”

The allegations center on one of the most sensational Fleet Street stories of the last decade, the disappearance of Milly Dowler in 2002. The case was the subject of many tabloid front pages over the last decade, culminating last month in the conviction of Levi Bellfield, a former nightclub doorman, on charges of kidnapping and murder.

The allegation that investigators working for the News of the World may have had ordinary people like the Dowlers, not just celebrities, in their sights has raised the level of alarm in Britain over tabloid newspaper excesses.

“The Milly Dowler story has taken this from an issue for people who are concerned about media ethics to one that is of broader concern to the general public,” said Tim Luckhurst, a journalism professor at the University of Kent. “News Corporation thought they could put a lid on this, and this has blown the lid right off.”

Sarah Lyall reported from London and Eric Pfanner from Paris.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=9f42dcd0aa43b56547ae84872b99403f

British Public Figures Struggle to Protect Privacy

PARIS — For British celebrities and soccer stars who “play away,” as Fleet Street puts it, the hope of mounting a cover-up is fading fast.

The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg on Tuesday struck down a legal bid to strengthen the privacy protections offered public figures. At the same time, individuals have been turning to the Internet to circumvent British reporting restrictions that protect them, turning the blogging site Twitter into a sort of WikiLeaks for celebrity tell-alls.

In the Strasbourg decision, the European court rejected a bid by Max Mosley, former president of the governing body of Formula One auto racing, to require news organizations to notify the subjects of articles before publication. The court said such a requirement would have had a “chilling effect” on freedom of speech.

The lawsuit stemmed from a 2008 story in The News of the World, a racy British tabloid, that was headlined “F1 boss has sick Nazi orgy with 5 hookers” and was based on video footage secretly shot by one of the participants.

Mr. Mosley, a son of Oswald Mosley, former leader of the British Union of Fascists, sued The News of the World, complaining that the paper had not bothered to check the story with him before publishing. A British court agreed, calling the article a flagrant invasion of Mr. Mosley’s privacy and fining the paper £60,000, or nearly $100,000, saying there was no evidence of Nazi behavior in the sex session, and thus no justification for publication.

When confronted by tabloids with similar exposés, or simply with allegations of garden-variety extramarital affairs, many British celebrities have gone to court to secure injunctions against publication. In some cases, these injunctions even bar newspapers from acknowledging the existence of the court order.

Even before the European court ruling Tuesday, however, injunctions and superinjunctions were being undermined by a force that is arguably more powerful than British privacy law: the World Wide Web.

Since the weekend, Twitter has been abuzz with speculation about public figures who may have obtained such court orders. An unidentified user of the service posted six short messages in which he or she listed well-known soccer stars, actors and others who had supposedly received injunctions preventing the press from reporting on alleged affairs.

By Tuesday evening, the Twitter feed had attracted about 80,000 “followers.”

While most of the people named by the Twitter user kept their silence, one of them, the socialite Jemima Khan, used her own Twitter account to deny a tweet that she had obtained a superinjunction to prevent publication of a compromising photograph of herself and Jeremy Clarkson, star of the BBC series “Top Gear.”

“OMG — Rumour that I have a super injunction preventing publication of ‘intimate’ photos of me and Jeremy Clarkson. NOT TRUE!” she tweeted, adding: “I have no super injunction and I had dinner with Jeremy and his wife last night. Twitter, Stop!”

British newspapers have been lobbying against the use of superinjunctions, denouncing them as one of a number of perceived threats to freedom of speech in Britain, along with the country’s tough libel laws.

“Highlighting the perceived evils of British privacy and defamation law certainly seems to be paying off for Fleet Street,” said Amber Melville-Brown, a media specialist at the law firm Withers in London.

The government recently introduced legislation to overhaul the defamation laws. On Tuesday, officials said they were weighing changes to the privacy laws, too, in an effort to bring them into the digital age.

“We are in this crazy situation where information is available freely online that you are not able to print in newspapers,” Jeremy Hunt, the British culture secretary, said. “We are in a situation where technology, and Twitter in particular, is making a mockery of the privacy laws that we have, and we do need to think about the regulatory environment. It should be Parliament that decides where we draw the line on our privacy law.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/business/media/11privacy.html?partner=rss&emc=rss