March 28, 2024

Trial Begins for April Casburn, Scotland Yard Officer, in Phone-Hacking Scandal

The case against the officer, Detective Chief Inspector April Casburn, 53, stemmed from a telephone call in September 2010 in which, prosecutors say, she gave a reporter for The News of the World details of a newly reopened investigation into accusations of voice mail hacking by the tabloid. At the time of the call, Ms. Casburn was a senior officer in Scotland Yard’s top-secret counterterrorism unit, code-named SO15.

With at least six separate inquiries into different aspects of the scandal, and a total of 180 police officers and officials assigned to the work, the overall police operation has been described by senior police officials as the most extensive — and expensive — criminal investigation in Scotland Yard’s history. Altogether, more than 90 people have been arrested, though fewer than a dozen have been charged. Prosecutors have said that charges against others are likely to follow.

Investigations that have turned up evidence of police wrongdoing, in the form of alleged payments and other benefits given by the tabloids to serving officers in return for confidential information, have been a factor in a battery of high-level resignations. Police commanders say progress in the investigations, and successful prosecutions, will be an important test for Scotland Yard, formally known as the Metropolitan Police Service, whose reputation has been badly battered by the scandal.

In addition to corrupt payments to police and other public officials, the charges laid out so far by prosecutors include conspiracy to intercept cellphone messages, the touchstone of the investigations, involving hundreds of celebrities, politicians, sports stars and crime victims; and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice by destroying or hiding evidence, including e-mails and other documents.

Others facing trial this year include Andy Coulson, a News of the World editor who went on to become Prime Minister David Cameron’s communications director at 10 Downing Street; Rebekah Brooks, a former editor of two Murdoch tabloids, The News of the World and The Sun, who resigned as the chief executive of News International, the Murdoch newspaper subsidiary in Britain, as the scandal unfolded in 2011; and Charlie Brooks, Ms. Brooks’s husband, who is a prominent racehorse trainer and Eton College contemporary — and friend — of Mr. Cameron.

The focus of the trial that began Monday was a nine-minute phone call that the defendant, Ms. Casburn, made to The News of the World when she was responsible for a Scotland Yard unit that tracked terrorist financing, an assignment she won partly because of her background in investment finance in the City of London.

The prosecution says the call was prompted by a renewed investigation into the paper’s involvement in phone hacking that had begun the previous day. The court was told that the new inquiry, by John Yates, one of Scotland Yard’s top officers, had been ordered because of a magazine article detailing phone hacking by The News of the World that The New York Times had published 10 days earlier.

The prosecutor, Mark Bryant-Heron, said Ms. Casburn had told one of the tabloid’s reporters that Mr. Yates, then in charge of the Scotland Yard counterterrorism effort, was “looking at six people” as a result of the article. The two she named, the prosecutor said, were Mr. Coulson, the paper’s former editor, and Sean Hoare, a former reporter who was named in the Times article as confirming that phone hacking was rife at the paper when he worked there. Mr. Hoare died in 2011.

According to the prosecution’s account, Ms. Casburn explained her motive for the call by telling the reporter, Tim Wood, that she objected to the diversion of Scotland Yard’s counterterrorism resources to the phone-hacking inquiry and to the political pressure being brought to bear on Mr. Yates by John Prescott, a former deputy prime minister whose cellphone had been hacked.

The court was told that the tabloid did not publish an article on the basis of Ms. Casburn’s call and that no payment was made to her. In an e-mail to his editors cited in court, Mr. Wood said Ms. Casburn had asked to be paid, but the court was told that she had denied this in police interviews. On the stand, Mr. Wood seemed uncertain. While his “recollection” was “not great,” he said, Ms. Casburn “must have said she wanted to be paid” for him to have suggested that she had.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/08/world/europe/trial-begins-for-april-casburn-scotland-yard-officer-in-phone-hacking-scandal.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Britain Picks a Canadian to Lead Bank of England

The appointment ended months of jockeying by some of Britain’s most prominent public officials. As a result of changes to take effect next year, the job will come with sharply enhanced powers.

The odds had been seen as heavily favoring the Bank of England’s deputy governor, Paul Tucker. The decision to select a foreigner to lead the bank, Britain’s most storied financial institution and the equivalent of the Federal Reserve in the United States, came as a shock when George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, broke the news during a session of Parliament.

The appointment was arguably the most significant in the bank’s 318-year history. Mr. Carney will not only be the first foreigner to lead the bank, but will also take responsibility for the health of the British financial system.

Besides doing the traditional job of setting interest rates, the central bank will directly regulate and oversee the country’s banks and other financial institutions. Until now, such regulation and oversight has been primarily the job of the Financial Services Authority, which will be scrapped.

“I see this as a challenge and I’m going to where the challenge is the greatest,” Mr. Carney said at a news conference in Ottawa.

Mr. Carney will assume the governor’s post in July, and the pressures facing him will be immense. Not only must he decide whether to continue Britain’s aggressive money-printing program aimed at stimulating the economy, he must also ensure that the central bank’s independence and reputation are not sullied by an investigation into the manipulation of key interest rates by commercial banks.

Indeed, the decision to pick Mr. Carney seems to have been heavily influenced by the taint of the interest-rate scandal that, although it has largely subsided, remains attached to Mr. Tucker.

As the scandal was erupting this year, the disclosure of e-mail exchanges dating to 2008 between Mr. Tucker and Robert E. Diamond Jr., the chief executive of Barclays at the time, suggested that Mr. Tucker might have supported the idea of keeping rates artificially low.

Mr. Carney, a former Goldman Sachs executive, is widely admired for the steady job he has done in preserving financial stability in Canada in the face of pressures that have shaken other countries.

The Bank of England’s new heft represents a stark shift from the era of light regulation that held sway before the financial crisis, in which its ability to issue warnings and intervene in banking excesses were constrained.

“This is a new job,” said Simon Hayes, an economist at Barclays. “Previously, the focus was mainly on monetary policy. Now, it is about financial stability, monetary policy and macro-prudential policy. The key is to get the right mix of policy and making sure there is proper coordination” with the Exchequer, or British Treasury.

Mr. King, who will remain as central bank governor until next summer, has emerged as Britain’s most vociferous critic of irresponsible bank behavior. But he has also been criticized for acting too slowly in 2007 to bail out Northern Rock, the mortgage lender whose collapse that year was the onset of Britain’s financial crisis.

The central bank’s broader regulatory powers will be wielded by a newly formed Financial Policy Committee, operating inside the bank and presided over by the governor. The framers of the new structure hope the bank will be better able to sniff out early warning signals, like excessive risk-taking and borrowing by the banks, and move to defuse a crisis — something it was not able to do in 2007.

Reflecting the importance of the position, Mr. Osborne cast a wide net in searching for a successor and took the unusual step of considering candidates from outside Britain. The names of prominent investment bankers also surfaced as potential chiefs, indicating the hunger for an innovative appointment.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/27/business/global/canadian-to-lead-bank-of-england.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

The Media Equation: Same Gaffes, but Now on Twitter

Nowadays, the hidden recorder is no longer necessary: the Internet has become the Rose Mary Woods of the digital age, dutifully transcribing every wiggle and wobble of the people who hold office. Public officials are being ambiently recorded, one way or another, regardless of whether they intend to be.

Extensive efforts were expended over the weekend to comb through Sarah Palin’s e-mails from her time as the governor of Alaska. Ms. Palin may have thought that she was just chatting with her staff and friends, but now every comma, every aside, every random thought is being picked apart for meaning.

There may have been some legitimate news buried in the trove of e-mails, and she remains a person of significant public interest. So the press response makes sense, but she could not be blamed for feeling that she was under attack from a horde of biting ants.

“A lot of those e-mails obviously weren’t meant for public consumption,” she told Chris Wallace of Fox News, where she is a source, a commentator and a subject, all wrapped into one.

As it turns out, the 24,000 pages of e-mails that journalists and the public spent the weekend poring through contained nothing notable — quite an achievement that Ms. Palin seems guilty of nothing more than the excessive use of exclamation points.

But the results are beside the point. She is of interest not because of what she did as governor but because she has almost perfected the modern hybrid of politician and celebrity: once your daughter appears on “Dancing With the Stars,” your celebrity is far more important that your position on off-shore drilling. That means that all those e-mails are destined for public consumption whether she likes it or not.

Like all other celebrities, politicians are expected now to be in constant digital contact with their fans/voters. Ms. Palin has excelled at this with her ubiquitous Twitter messages, her bus tour and her frequent appearances on Fox News. But unlike during the early days of the Internet, when a static Web site was all that politicians needed, communication these days travels not just one way or two, but in all directions. Being in touch means that people can touch you back.

We could blame the transparency of our age, a time when the words “online” and “privacy” should never be juxtaposed. While the keyboard creates an atmosphere of intimacy — you can ask Representative Anthony Weiner about that — digital culture is the opposite of private. If it is typed, linked or attached, it will eventually become known. And as the line between celebrity and governance has been erased, the press tradition of staying away from the private lives of public officials has been rubbed out.

The creep of public officials into the age of telecommunications has been under way for a long time. Franklin Delano Roosevelt mastered the intimacy of radio with the fireside chat. Mr. Nixon understood, somewhere in his lower cortex, that the beast must be fed, and dished up the Checkers speech that referred to the family dog, a domestic motif that met the public media appetites precisely. John F. Kennedy, running against Mr. Nixon, did him one better, realizing early on the importance of appearing presidential on television.

With the stage management of Michael Deaver, the presidency of Ronald Reagan became “Morning (Show) in America.” Bill Clinton, who as a presidential candidate played the sax on “The Arsenio Hall Show,” relied on Hollywood friends to buff his image as the boy from Hope. George W. Bush stumbled with his “Mission Accomplished” moment — but then, like his father, he was never good at playing himself on television.

The Obama presidency was supposed to represent the culmination of governance as a media narrative for the modern age. People voted in favor of the historic narrative, eager to see how it would turn out. But the candidacy that was built on social media, on transparency and openness, has become something far more closed now that he is in office. He has opted for the most part for the historical Rose Garden approach to communications, honing a message to be broadcast to the general public.

And the administration has been particularly aggressive in hunting down and jailing leakers. Mr. Obama may want to be your friend of Facebook, but he, like every other president, wants to maintain custody of the narrative. Now that he actually has to govern, his ratings — an operative word in both politics and media — have dropped.

Perhaps the president realized early what Ms. Palin and Mr. Weiner were learning last week: while e-mail, Facebook and Twitter may be wonderful tools of engagement, easy communication has its downsides.

“The digital revolution for a lot of people in politics is like a high school party where they experience alcohol for the first time,” said Mark McKinnon, former media adviser to George W. Bush and John McCain. “They get very excited, lose their inhibitions, say and do things they shouldn’t, and realize too late they’ve made complete idiots of themselves. And then can’t undo it.”

He continued: “Digital politics invites and rewards quick triggers and does not reward thoughtful reflection or careful judgment. And so it is no surprise that we see so many politicians fail to clear their holsters before they drop the hammer.”

The lessons from this last week were anticipated by Martin Lomasney, a ward boss in Boston at the turn of the last century. “Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink.”

Eliot Spitzer, a host on CNN and a politician undone by his own indiscretion and a paper trail to match, has since added a fourth: “Never put it in e-mail.”

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;
Twitter.com/carr2n

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=99b1069c6d201bb8f8c3ba99bb1f556a