The Rupert Murdoch paper News of the World hacked into a the mobile phone of a missing 13-year old girl in Britain and deleted mobile phone messages, destroying evidence and hindering the investigation into her disappearance.
Here is more from the New York Times:
The cellphone of a British schoolgirl who went missing in 2002 and whose murdered body was discovered six months later was repeatedly hacked by the News of the World tabloid at a time when no one knew what had happened to her, a lawyer for her family said Monday.
According to the lawyer, Mark Lewis, the newspaper not only intercepted messages left on the phone of the girl, Milly Dowler, 13, by her increasingly frantic family after her disappearance, but also deleted some of those messages when her voice mailbox became full — thus making room for new ones and listening to those in turn. This confused investigators and gave false hope to Milly’s relatives, who believed it showed she was still alive and deleting the messages herself, Mr. Lewis said.
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The second is that in 2002, the editor of News of the World was Rebekah Brooks, a confidant and favorite of Rupert Murdoch, whose corporation owns the paper. Ms. Brooks, who is now chief executive of News International, the British newspaper division of Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation, has always denied knowing anything about phone hacking at any Murdoch-owned papers. In an e-mail she sent to employees on Tuesday, she repeated that assertion, The Guardian reported.
People very close to Ruper Murdoch knew that his reporters at the paper were hacking into the voice mail accounts of newsworthy Britons.
Not just murder victims, but celebrities ... and members of government.
And this is a company that controls one US cable network, dozens of local TV affiliates, the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal.