Hacking

Gordon Brown, the former Prime Minister, has asked police to investigate whether his phone was hacked while he was Chancellor, joining Sienna Miller and several others. Soon it will be the turn of the ‘C’ list celebrities and you won’t be able to get on a reality TV show unless you can claim the News of the World had got into your ‘phone.

Perhaps we are not being told something, but I think it is worthwhile recalling exactly what is alleged to have gone on. Phones have voicemail, what we used to call an answerphone, so if you don’t answer a call – let’s say you are asleep – the caller can leave a message. These messages are accessed by the owner of the phone, even from another phone, by entering in a 4-digit number. The phone manufacturer usually sets this as 0000 or 1234 and you can change it to your choice, but most people don’t bother. The guilty reporters are said to have called a number at a time when it wouldn’t be answered, and guessing the 4-digit code to access the voicemail. Technically this isn’t hacking but let that pass.


So what we are being asked to believe is that despite there being all night staff at the Treasury, the controller of the nation’s finances simply doesn’t answer his phone if he is in a meeting or asleep. The Governor of the Federal Reserve, not realizing this, leaves a message ‘Hi Gordon, Ben Bernanke here, I wanted to talk about your plans to pour tens of billions into the banking system, which will depress the pound against the dollar’. Gordon has set his voicemail code as 4321, to be clever, but the wily hack guesses this and the story is out.

As I say, it may be we aren’t being told something, but it looks more likely to me that this is a simple case of paranoia.