New allegations have been published about the extent that the News Corp owned company NDS engaged in undermining rival pay TV companies. This time the piracy relates to Murdoch's rival operators in his native Australia but the story is all too familiar.
The report claims that (NDS) Operational Security “promoted a wave of high-tech piracy in Australia that damaged [regional pay TV operator] Austar, [rival satellite operator] Optus and Foxtel at a time when News was moving to take control of the Australian pay TV industry”.
Operational Security was originally set up by NDS security chief Reuven Hasak in 1996 to fight piracy of News’ own satellite TV systems and used the services of hackers and pirates as consultants. But its also alleged the unit engaged in piracy against BSkyB competitor On Digital – and sabotaged other rivals, allowing News Corp to pick up satellite TV assets cheaply including DirecTV in the US, Telepiu in Italy and Austar.
News Corp has a 25 precent stake in and management control of Australian pay TV giant Foxtel and is currently in the process of acquiring Austar United Communications, majority owned by Liberty Global Inc, with anti trust regulator, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, to rule next month whether Foxtel’s acquisition of Austar would lessen competition in the market here.
The original story in the
Australia Financial Review goes into even greater detail on how Murdoch has sought to become the monopolistic supplier of pay TV worldwide. The tentacles reach into every continent apart from Antarctica! What's fascinating is that News Corp control of these satellite TV operators and Murdoch's control of News Corp itself is all based on minority shareholdings.
As well as Murdoch, another name keeps cropping up in these reports. that of Ray Adams, the former (London) Metropolitan Police senior officer who the BBC claim helped expand the TV encryption card piracy site 'The House of Ill Compute' into a major operation financed by NDS to kill off rivals. Perhaps we should be clear. the allegations of hacking by NDS are not new, they have only been resurrected by a combination of the problems the Murdochs are having over phone hacking and the BBC finding Lee Gibling, the founder of the House of Ill Compute, where he had been disappeared to. The initial allegations go back a decade. From March 14. 2002 in the Guardian.
Evidence in the hands of the Guardian suggests that a former Scotland Yard commander who represents two of Rupert Murdoch's companies provided funds to a website that enabled counterfeiters to produce forged smart cards used to defraud ITV Digital, a principal rival in the pay TV market.
Ray Adams, who is the head of security at NDS, a company controlled by Mr Murdoch's News Corporation, had a working relationship with the website, which has now been closed down and whose founder, Lee Gibling, has gone missing.
According to emails in the possession of the Guardian, Mr Gibling was in contact with Mr Adams and received several thousand pounds from NDS paid directly into his personal bank account.
As a representative of NDS and BSkyB, News Corporation's British TV business, Mr Adams is a board member of AEPOC, a European industry action group set up to combat piracy.
So it looks like Adams was at the same time both poacher and gamekeeper. He seems to have a facility for keeping fingers in two conflicting pies (or should that be his snout in two troughs?) at the same time. Adams was a senior police officer in charge of investigating serious and organised crime. During his time in the Met, he was subject to suspicions that he was too involved with the very people he was supposed to be investigating although none of the internal investigations found evidence sufficient to implement disciplinary or criminal proceedings. After perhaps the more serious for the police, that he had connections with the father of a suspect in a seminal racist murder in London, he was declared unfit due to a 'bad back' and retired from the police as a result. It was after that he joined NDS as Murdoch's European pirate captain.
To fully comprehend the link, we have to know of the British career criminal Kenneth Noye.
With his lower-middle class background, Noye did not come from a traditional gangster family and he did not have the pathological hatred some felt for the police. From early in his criminal career he was prepared to do deals with officers, offering bribes and information on fellow villains.
Noye's big opportunity to fraternise with corrupt officers came when he was arrested by Scotland Yard in 1977 for receiving stolen goods.
The underworld was becoming wary of Noye. John 'Little Legs' Lloyd, a well known east London gangster, was warned about him by south London villains, others received similar messages.
Towards the end of the 1970s Noye was proposed for membership of a Masonic Lodge by two police officers and rose to become the Master of the lodge. His contacts there included those involved in the gold trade and he set himself up as a trader. In December 1983, there was a violent break-in at a security warehouse during which large quantities of gold were stolen. This was the so-called "Brinks-Mat raid'. Noye was suspected of laundering the gold by melting it down in his unit attached to his home. Police undertook surveillance and Detective Constable John Fordham was found hiding in his grounds. Noye stabbed Fordham to death.
Mr Fordham's partner, DC Neil Murphy, who was was present at the killing, told The Independent " There was enormous worry about leaks right from the start. I remember before the briefings took place the room was electronically swept for bugs - this, mind, a room in a top security police station. The name of a senior officer kept cropping up as someone being close to Noye.
"The other thing that stands out in my mind is how little we knew about Noye. This man was obviously a top level launderer, yet he had managed avoid much scrutiny.
http://www.independent.co.uk/...
Noye claimed he acted in self-defence and told investigators that they should talk to Chief Superintendent Ray Adams, who would vouch that he was neither a violent man nor a killer.
Mr Adams had investigated Noye in the mid-70s and was one of several officers who regarded him as a useful source of underworld information.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
While Noye was acquitted of murder on the grounds of self-defence, he was convicted and sentenced to 14 years for the money and gold laundering. He was released after 8 years but went back to his old wayseven as he was being prepared for release:
While in prison, Noye kept in touch with his police contacts and this paid off for his comeback in the crime business. While still a prisoner at a " halfway house", he became involved in a £50,000 deal to import cocaine from the US involving the Miami mafia.
The US Drug Enforcement Agency received intelligence about the plot, but a sting operation failed when Noye suddenly pulled out of the deal. He had been warned off by a corrupt detective on the National Crime Intelligence Service, John Donald, who had been corrupted by an associate of Noye's, Micky Lawson.
Two years after being release, Noye again stabbed
somebody to death.
Noye became involved in an altercation with 21-year-old motorist Stephen Cameron on the M25 motorway during what was described at the time as a road rage incident, but which has also been suggested to have been a dispute over a drug deal, Cameron being a small-time drug dealer who owed Noye money. However, it suited the purposes of both the prosecution and the defence not to mention this during the trial. During the fight, Noye stabbed and killed Cameron with a knife. Noye immediately fled the country, sparking a massive police hunt. In 1998 he was tracked down in Spain, and Cameron's 17-year-old girlfriend Daniella Cable, who had witnessed the killing, was secretly flown out to positively identify him. Despite the obvious risks involved, she opted to testify against Noye, who at his trial in 2000 again pleaded self-defence. This time found guilty, he was convicted of murder and given a life sentence.
One of Noye' s associates in the South London criminal underworld was a violent drugs dealer,
Clifford Norris. Norris had built up his empire using a combination of violence, intimidating witnesses and corrupting the police. On April 22, 1993, his son David was one of a gang of racist youths who stabbed the talented black teenager Stephen Lawrence. David and another of the gang were finally convicted of Stephen's murder earlier this year.
Stephen's murder was a seminal event in the history of the Metropolitan Police (MPS). Their inept handling of the initial stages of the investigation and the acquittal of the gang at a trial led to the Macpherson Enquiry. In his subsequent report, Macpherson branded the MPS "institutionally racist".
In 2006, a BBC programme claimed one of the detectives involved in the initial investigation had been paid by Norris senior to protect the family from prosecution.
(Set Sgt John) Davidson told me that he was looking after Norris and that to me meant that he was protecting him, protecting his family against arrest and any conviction," Mr Putnam said.
"From my conversation that I had with John Davidson on that day, I would say that John Davidson was receiving cash from Clifford Norris by his expression that he was using it was, he was getting a little earner out of it - it was a good little earner.
Davidson had been suspected and the whistleblower claimed that he had passed on his allegations as early as 1998.
Met Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Yates, who was given the task of ridding the force of corruption, admitted he thought Mr Davidson was corrupt.
"From all the evidence I've seen, and the intelligence I've seen, I have no doubt he was corrupt," he said.
But he said there was no evidence to suggest the alleged relationship had been suppressed.
"To suggest that we would in any way try and hide references to it is simply ridiculous," he added.
"Yates of the Yard" is of course the now resigned Assistant Commissioner of the MPS who in 2009 (in)famously conducted a review of the evidence seized from the private investigator convicted of hacking phones for the News of the World, only to find that there was nothing there to support further prosecutions.
We now circle back to "Adams of the NDS". On March 16 this year, the following appeared in the Guardian.
A secret Scotland Yard report detailing questions about the conduct and integrity of a police chief involved in the Stephen Lawrence case was not given to the public inquiry into the racist killing, the Guardian has learned.
Lawyers for the Lawrence family questioned former commander Ray Adams at the Macpherson inquiry in 1998 about corruption.
But neither the Lawrence family nor the inquiry panel were given a report by Scotland Yard containing the intelligence and findings of an investigation by its anti-corruption command.
The investigation, codenamed Operation Russell, raised questions about Adams's conduct before the Lawrence case, informed sources say, while finding insufficient evidence to bring criminal charges
Lawyers for Stephen Lawrence's family have asked that this new evidence be used to open an inquiry into whether "whether the killers of Stephen Lawrence were shielded by corruption"
Again I should emphasize that internal Metropolitan Police investigations found no evidence that would have enabled criminal or disciplinary proceedings against Ray Adams in respect of his work as a senior police office. You might say that was not surprising given the MPS's history of incompetence, racism and corruption and their remarkable inability to be able to uncover evidence against those involved with the Murdochs; I cannot possibly comment.