what is going on to see the serious questions and answers, i think would make the public debate but to keep things that our democracy that would bid good thing can you force us could expand have never been with a case like to less and it is always a challenge to pass along which would require the supreme court to do something then for it to decide if you can do it with the justices deciding if they could do that in all likelihood.

testimony. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> can you tell the inquiry your full name please? >> paul mcmullan. >> and your address? not your home address. >> [inaudible] >> sorry? >> the castle inn dover. >> thank you. i understand that you are a professionally trained journalist?

>> yes. >> and that you initially gained experience working for the regional press? >> yes. >> and then you moved and have further experience in london working for the fleet street news agency? >> yeah, i started with thompson regional newspapers that has now folded, and i was a journalism student with michael, and i'm quite pleased to say i finished top of my class, and he came bottom end and he's now minister of education. [laughter] >> well, thank you for that. you then obtained a position as a shifter working for the fund today in 2002; is that right. >> yeah. >> and then you obtained the staff job working for the sunday sports? >> i was news editor there for three months. it was, you know, a bit of post

graduate silliness, but it was fun. >> and then you worked for an agency? >> yeah. it was in france. >> before working for the news of the world for a period of seven years? >> yes. >> including at working for part of that time at a deputy featured editor? >> yes. >> you then moved to the sunday express for a period of around two years 1234 >> yeah. >> and led the investigations there. >> i was, yeah. >> and you also worked for the national inquirer, i understand? >> the last three years of my career, if you like, before they had a buyout and couldn't afford a european correspondent anymore. >> is it right you're now in semiretirement as a journalist working partly as a journalist and partly at the republican? >> yeah, i bought an old inn with seven bedroom, and the fire

services closed off the top floor. >> [inaudible] >> it's important in saying we need a fire escape, the build's committee saying you can't have a fire escape, so, again, came up against government annoyance, and so that's why i'm working two jobs at the moment. >> thank you for that. i think we can concentrate on your experience as journalist. can i start by asking you some general questions about the pressures of the job at a journalist. you've mentioned in some of the interviews you've given by line count. >> yes. >> can you explain what the by line count process is? >> yeah. i mean, you can do it now, but before the days of count word search, you had to get more than 12 stories 5 year in -- a year in a newspaper, and that doesn't sound like many, but a weekly newspaper, and my longest

investigation on a prison governor sneaking women in to have his way with them, and and that took months doing that, and sometimes 12 stories becomes a bit of a burden which is why, you know, i kept all of my stories out just if it came to the crunch. now i've actually done 15 or 35 this year. >> i see. could i ask you to speak up a little, please? >> okay. >> and so the consequence of not getting sufficient by lines was what? >> well, you got fired. >> and was the threat of the sack something that leans over journalist generally? >> yeah, i mean, you can get a front page from sunday, but by next tuesday, you've got to have three fresh ideas, and that's not for a few months, but week after week after week, it becomes a real pressure to build up a list of contacts for, you know, police officers to pis to

basically anyone to give you a story, and you lean on those fixes to help you keep your job. i mean, -- >> is there a sense of competition, then, with your fellow journalists? >> massively. i mean, probably goodman, fouler, you know, phone hacking because he was getting on a bit. he was royal editor. had a really high salary, and plenty of people who were 25 years old and would have taken his job, and he worked harder and always snapping his heels to stay one step ahead of them. he, you know, got sucked into phone hacking. >> and is there also a competition with competing titles? >> very much so. the whole problem with working for a weekly newspaper is you get a story on wednesday, you got three days to sit on it, just hoping no one else is going to, you know, steal it from

you. i was locked in a hotel room in a foreign country with somebody, for example, princess diana's instructor, and spent two weeks with him in amsterdam of all places, his choice, so nobody else could get to him, and so, yes, constantly hiding in vans from other journalists. i remember buying up a couple of won a marriage, a blind date marriage, and we flew them to the bahamas. it was a lovely story, and we spent two weeks there, but we spent the entire two weeks hiding there for the pop rat cy, and we speaked them out of hotels at two in the morning, and having car chases, and it was good fun, and i mean, it's been a really enjoyable way to spend my career. >> flights to the bahamas

accepted. any pressure on your experience of the resources available to you to research stories 1234 >> probably not, no. the brief was i don't care what it costs, i just want the defining stories of the week. our budgets were massive. i mean, when i took over the deputy features editor, i had a budget of 3.1 million pounds a year, biggest budget of any newspaper department in the country, so yeah, no, i had a lot of money to spend, wasted on pis to be honest, but giving the money to people who could tell us a good tale, about, you know, a corrupt politician or a sports star, but i never felt restraints. that was the good thing having a big pot of money to work there. >> on the question of editors, you mentioned at the start of

that last stance, was it a question of the editors setting the cultural tone in the newsrooms you worked in, or did the new editor come into an established culture? >> well i think being there, i think i felt like it was a british institution just because you bought it, and i think that was a bit -- >> i'm having difficulty. i'd be grateful for you to speak up just perhaps a bit louder. >> okay. >> thank you. >> my first editor, piers morgan very much set the trend. he was, i want that story at all costs pretty much. i don't care what you have to do to get that story. i mean, he wanted to be number one. he was driven to sell over 5 million copies a week, which is a lot. you know, guardian sells

230,000. it's nothing in comparison. at one point you could say half the population of the country were not reading what we had written, and so i think in a sense we were -- in terms of power of the penn because we had the biggest relationship. what i wrote was read by half the population. >> i'll stop you there. you said a little bit about the editor, and his influence on the culture of the newsroom. can i ask you now about proprietors? was it your experience the proprior -- proprietors influencing the content of that published? >> a couple examples point to the exact opposite. for example, in hugh grant was in l.a., and she was a black

prostitute and i was part of the team -- [inaudible] we put her on the front page, and i remember rupert saying why putting that on the front page? doesn't that bring the tone down a little? don't you read your own newspaper? i only met him once and came into the news room, and just a little guy with a tweed jacket. he got stuck between two doors, so i let him out. i said i can't believe this guy is in charge of the biggest media empire of the world and can't get into the newsroom. >> the intervention mentioned with the brown story, was it usual to have an intervention, or was that an intervention?

>> well, to his editor, rebecca brooks or piers morgan, apart from having looked over my shoulder once, you know, just to see what i was up to for no particular reason, no, he would never go to someone as lowly as me. >> moving on to the topic of serious journalism, and i understand you have, for example, covered the golf war. -- gulf war? >> yeah. >> kosovo? >> bosnia, yeah. >> sangat ?rks >> yeah. i pretty well gave up because i was in journalism five years ago and got hit in the head by a lump of concrete by those intent on killing me, but i smuggled myself across the channel in

every way imaginable. >> on the question of what happened to convicted files, you wrote a controversial piece, didn't you, as part of the news of the world naming and shaming campaign? >> yeah. that was rebecca brook's one good idea and initially given to a girlfriend to research, and she couldn't find any so went to the library, and listening to the radio, had recently done a program on the boy scouts and their day-to-days, and a little bit said, you know, we'd like to follow-up, and can we have a look at the workings of the data base, and just went down there basically went through the files of pedophiles who raped and abused children and served the sentence and were now out and the whole point was that, you know, i might live in my house with my children playing in the

back garden and for the first time ever pete the pervert lives next door serving ten years because he raped a child as young as like yours so possibly be the one good thing that -- many good things, but that was the most visible. >> a number of things i want to ask you about that story. the first is you referred to blogging some of the information necessary for that story. when you do that, did you give consideration as to whether or not it would be in the public interest? >> yes. always thinking of the public interest. circulation defines what is the public interest. i see no distinction between what the public is interested in and the public interest clever enough to make a decision whether or not they want to put their hand in their pocket and bring out a pound and buy it. i don't see it's the job of anybody else to force the public to be able to choose that you

must read this. you can't read that. so, yes, and no -- >> that's not quite the point, is it? it's not that anybody's forcing the public then to choose -- >> i'm sorry. >> it's rather whether it is appropriate to do things which otherwise might be considered unethical in some wider goal or maybe you don't think there is an ethical -- >> no, i think they are clever enough to decide on the ethics of its own paper and not someone making the decision of what should be published, and the reason why news of the world sold 5 million copies because there were 5 million thinking people and that's what they wanted to read. that's what drove the people. we were the mirror to society, and the daily mirror, in fact, 23 you want to dirty the moisture roar with putting lawyers in charge of what people can see, you're going down the wrong route.

>> the targets of your story, neither here nor there, is that it? that's a serious question. >> yeah, no, if the public found the target of the stories distasteful, they would not have bought it. the inverse was true. >> a test to what is of interest to the public? >> what is of interest to the public is what they put their hand in their pocket and buy. >> consequences of the of the campaign is it's necessary to have public disorder, wasn't there? >> yes. >> and did you think that the coverage at light of being such to rip up a certain amount of hysteria? >> yeah, no i -- i felt slightly proud that i create the something that made a riot and got a pediatrician beaten up or

whether it was the case to the aspect of what our readers latched on to, but in another way, the republic was outly outraged that for the last 20 years you could have a child rapist living next to a family of four and them never knowing and sometimes letting them babysit, and the abuse would carry on. >> can you -- i'm sorry, i just want to check whether i'm reading this correctly. i felt slightly proud that i'd written something that created a riot and got a pediatrician beaten up. >> oh, yes. i suppose i'm being frivolous, but in the sense have you judged what you do in your career, you like to have an impact, and that was one story that certainly had an impact. i mean, you, yourself, would not like to spend your career in the back room and having created or

achieved anything, and that was the achievement with not having a pediatrician having beaten up clearly, but that was writing a story on such an impact that there were riots because the public was so furious about the way the law was, and it needed to be changed. >> i understand that. i read it back because i didn't think you met what i just -- meant what i just read was the point. >> it was a bit of a joke. >> well, that may not be how it's reported. >> well, i wouldn't. >> perhaps to pick up a little bit more about what you felt, and did you feel that you had a certain power as a journalist who could write a story which would provoke a reaction from a very large audience? >> yeah, i used to love sitting on the train watching people read things that i had written. isn't that one of the reasons why we do it? i liked the idea that this paper

was not just the biggest paper in britain, but in the english speaking world. clearly, we were doing something right, and given that, yes, there was a certain influence that one did that. >> did it matter what the subject matter was? >> no, because that was decided by the reader. we simply mirrored back what they wanted to read. i mean, the whole, you know, the whole point of chasing circulation and nothing else to be the best paper you can be to be the number one circulation is you have to appeal to what the reader wants to read. they are the judge and jury of what is in the paper. if they don't like it, they don't like the fact that you've written a story about charlotte church's father having three in the bed on cocaine, then they stop buying the product, and the reality was it was bought in millions. this is what the people of britain want. i was simply serving their, what

they wanted to read. >> to that extent, you'd have to say the end justifies the means? >> yes, i think so. i think in order to drsh i mean, one of the things we did at news of the world was every interview we ever did, and, in fact, it was not made up because every article i've ever written is recorded and the legal department sometimes wants a transscript of it if we were going to get sued about it. all i've ever tried to do is to write truthful articles, and to use any means necessary to try to get to the truth, and there's so many barriers in the way that sometimes you enter a gray area that i think you should sometimes be applauded for entering because it's a very dangerous area. my life has been at risk many

times and been in war zones, and i used to get death threats at least once a month for 15 years of my career. i never used my own name, never had a house in my own name. my wife received death threats on her home phone. we had security guards living outside my house for a time, moved out, lived in a hotel, you know, it's not an easy life. my surveillance was satellite, you know, huge sacrifices. for the first time in my life i stepped out in the public into a pub, and before that no one had ever known what i did for a living or indeed where i lived. i sacrificed a lot to write truthful articles, you know, for the biggest circulation english language paper in the world, and i was quite happy and proud to

do it which is why i think phone hacking is perfectly acceptable tool given the sacrifices that we make it all we're trying to do is get to the truth. for example, we went to cover the iraq wars, the embedded correspondents, and we spent five weeks in the desert at their station living with the pilots and the ground crew, and all of them were convinced that they were -- there were weapons of mass destruction, and the pilot said they were risking their lives because they've been told by, you know, tony blair and john prescott and the cabinet there were weapons of mass destruction, and i spent half the time in a chemical suit and they fired 17 missiles towards that base, and all of us were

under great risk of being killed, and, indeed, as the war went on, some of these lads that i got to know came back in body bags, and so i think when i, you know, spoke to john prescott and, you know, have no problem at all saying, you know, if i'd -- i didn't actually hack the phone, but if i had to to prove he was not an honorable man because he stood up in front of 200 people in church saying to his wife that i will love you, this is my pledge, and yet he sneaks around the corner and has sex with his secretary. i want to know the man who is partly responsible for sending out these men to their deaths is an honorable man. i would hack his phone, go through his bins because that's a more important truth than this nonsense of sending journalists to jail which is not good for the country.

if you look at the countries sending journalists to jail, china with 34 and the turks have about 20 or 30, and we laugh at those countries saying oh, we're so much better than them, but i'm here because you served me with a section 21 notice that i could be jailed if i didn't show up, seven of my colleagues are under arrest, and all we ever tried is to write the truth. >> i'm not threatening to send you to jail for seeking the truth, but requiring you to come and tell me if i didn't want to hear from you, i wouldn't have done that. i am giving you a platform to say what you are saying. isn't that what it's about? >> well, i suppose it is, but not all of your witnesses have been issued with a section 21 notice, but having said that, i'm happy to be here. so given that, thank you. >> could i just ask the views

you just expressed were commonly held in the news of the world newsroom? >> yes. i think most of us would have done what it was required to get a story. it's hard to get a story. you just don't go up to a priest and say, hello, good sermon. are you a priest because you're not abusing ch o, ir boys. >> i'll come back to another example in a while, but perhaps i could explore the methods that are used by the tabloid press, and certainly in your experience a step at a time. first of all, can we deal with the interception of conversations? is it your evidence that before

2000, the use of scanners to intercept conversations and obtain stories was widespread amongst journalists 1234 >> yes, it was. >> and that practice has diminished as a result, fist of all, of the switch from analog to digital? >> yeah. >> and secondly because of the ban on scanners? >> no. just the other day there was an example, but its use is really -- the police have taken radios out of the scanning range, but fundamentally what people failed to realize is the mobile phone, all it is is a radio transmate mitter. you transmit your words and anyone can have a radio with a larger bandwidth, and listen. that's all it is. tony blair didn't have one of these because it just is so easy

for anyone to listen in. >> i've been asked to put the next question to you. i understand that when you were growing up, you believed your fellow's telephone was asked and asked to suggest to you there's an irony between that fact and the willingness of journalists to intercept conversations. do you see an irony there? >> well, my father was a journalist, and he used to receive phone calls from campaigns, and he was looking after the fact that there could be a way to kick start the war, and, you know, my parents at the time saying their phones were hacked. what joy it was that you know in

the snows you could spend 50 qid on a spanner and hack conversations, and my understanding of it was it was not illegal, and do we really want to be in a world where the only people who can do the hacking are mi-5 and mi-6? for a brief period for 20 years we actually lived in a free society where we can hack back, and if you start jailing journalists for that, then this is going to be a country that is laughed at by iran and by china and by turkey. >> can i move now to the question of voice mail interception? in your experience, how common was voice mail interception by journalists at news of the world? >> with the rank-and-file

journalists, not uncommon. the journalists swap numbers with each other, you know, you might swap, i think i swapped sigh -- sylvester stallone's mother -- >> stopping you there. my questions are not to be asking about what you personally did unless you want to tell it. you don't have to tell us what you did. >> point being, which actually is ironic given what you just said, that you're absolutely not obliged to incriminate yourself in any way whatsoever, and you ought to know that. how you choose to answer questions is up to you, but i'll give you the warning. >> it makes nonsense of my assertion that we were acting in the public good, and if i now turn around and say, well, i'm not going to tell you about it. the point of the inquiry is you

treat me as a witness rather than the police asking me, and treat me as a potential criminal. to prove politicians are dishon -- dishonorable men and may have dishonorable motives is more important than jailing me for saying i hacked david beckham's phone for example if i were going to say that. >> you were saying that the interception of voice mail by reporters was by the rank-and filer, the phrase yao used, was not uncommon. were intercepted voice mail messages used as leads for the further investigation of stories? >> yeah. i mean, i will say, i mean, what happened is mobile phone was invented in the 90s, and, you know, the time when industry caught --

>> and tell the phone that you are the owner, and then in the old days put in four 0's because that was the default code. a great many people from, you know, wives thinking their husbanding were staying out late for example, and friends had an episode where one of them hacked into the phone of another one of them just to see if they were having an affair, and it was all very jolly, and what a joke that was. i'd say at least maybe 20 of the

friends., and say your daughter is staying out late, and you want to know where they are and you hit "9" and you want to listen to their messages, but journalists are going to do that to for people who give them stories. the problem came sometimes when they did hit nine and rang them up and they answered the thing. i can say in all honesty once i rang up david beckham expecting the phone to ring because he'd never answer the phone to me, and he did, and he said, how did you get my number? nine, oh, too late, so i didn't hack the phone in that instance because he answered really quickly, and then the other issue, call waiting, and so again 2 in the morning, you know, much better at these

things than a journalist. >> interesting answer, but it digressed a little bit from my question. can i take it then that these intercepted messages were used as leads to investigate stories? >> yeah. >> and you said that it was not uncommon for the rank-and-file to be listening to other people's voice mail. can i ask you now about extent of knowledge in voice mail interception? at this stage, i'm not asking you to name names, but i'm asking you to give as an impression. was voice mail hacking within the news of the world, would you describe it as widespread or go further and say endemic? >> well, it depends what period you're talking about. if you talk about the period i think it was legal to do it,

pre-2001, although this is a gray area here. >> asking about the period in which you were working for the news of the world. >> actually, it was something that might have been done as a last resort because funny enough if you ring someone up and then do whatever you might do to get the engage tone, and yeah self-incrimination. it's a shame you said that because i spoke about it, and, yeah, i'm saying it was illegal to listen to someone's messages before 2001. >> i'm asking you how widespread was news of the world with knowledge that people were intercepting voice mails. >> oh, well, i was told that it was done by my colleagues before i realized my colleagues had not

-- >> let me put it a little more blueprintly. did your -- bluntly. did your editors know that voice mails were being intercepted? >> yes. >> can i move now to the question of the sunday express? >> i can go a bit further on that in that we did all of these things for our editors, for rebecca brooks and andy, and, i mean, you only have to read andy corson's column in bizarre, and it was just belittling one pop star a is leaving messages on pob star b's phone at two in the morning. meet me for a drink. blatant and obvious. i don't think anyone realized they were committing a crime at the start, and my assertion's always been that andy corson brought that practice wholesale

with him when appointed deputy editor, a person i couldn't believe, you know, he should have been made a junior reporter, not the editor, and they should have had the strength of their conviction to say, you know, yes, sometimes you have to enter into a gray area or indeed a black illegal area for the good of our readers, for the public good, and you sometimes are, you know, we're asked our reporters to do these things, but they turned around and said, oh, i didn't know they were doing that. oh, heavens, and then they said, oh, yeah, it was a few others. they should have been heros of journalism, but they are not. brooks and corson have scorned journalism for trying to drop me and all my colleagues in it. look at what i said. i never said anything bad of anyone who worked with me or any

one of my colleagues. if they were with me saying how bad the people throw us to the wall and run off scott free like they did for a year. it was only because i was jumping up and downgoing, you know, the police investigation is a fake, and the phones, and tell the rest to me. eventually, you know, they did a proper investigation, and then the notebook was unearthed, and i had scouts of two senior police officers, you know, happily, you know, on my tele. >> your answer is comprehensive if i may say so about news of the world. let me ask you now about sunday express. while you were working for sunday express, to your knowledge, were any members of the staff at sunday express hacking voice mails? >> actually, i think the answer to that is no.

there wasn't the money available for that investigation that there was at news of the world. you sat outside someone's house for three months cost tens of thousands of pounds, and you might not get a lead from it. >> to your knowledge, were any members of staff hacking into voice mails at national inquirer? >> nope, i never did then, but this is post-2006, so, no. >> and now i'd like to move to the question of the conversation that you had with mr. hugh grant at actual public house at which he tape recorded. and perhaps on the screen, please, the document, the reference which ends 3 # and then 41.

cite evidence about this document earlier in the inquiry. on the page displayed in the screen, on the left hand column about half of the way down, you are asked some questions about the daily mail. >> oh, yeah. [no audio] >> are you familiar with that? >> yeah, i remember that. i think that is a bit of a misunderstanding. i was just trying to say that, you know, the two biggest paying

papers in britain always had the best story, and therefore the highest circulation. the news of the world and the mail. i just didn't say that i wouldn't know if the mail hacked anything or whoever worked at the mail. old stories too. in fact, hugh grant breaking down in his ferrari on sunday, and, yeah, i'd like to at least defend the mail in that regard in that i think i also have proof that story about the issues -- >> i'll come to that in just a very short moment, but having made clear opposition on the daily mail, could i ask you first, think you wanted to headache clear the opposition as to whether or not you had ever hacked hugh grant's phone. >> yeah, i don't recall.

i don't remember having his nur, and i don't recall being in a situation where it would have been useful. >> moving now to the question of the tinglan story, and mr. grant gave evidence to the up -- inquiry, and you've been in contact to say that you know something about this source of the story about -- >> well, i just wanted to do mr. grant a favor because he's a nice bloke, and he said he or she is to hand over the tapes to yourself and also to the police in which i have sufficiently incriminated myself if i suggested add lunch for me to go to prison possibly, and so thanks very much here, but i think you also overruled him by ordering him to give him the section 21 as well, and he could go to prison if he didn't give

them to you; is that right? >> that's not my -- it's your job to answer the question. >> all right. >> perhaps i can steer you back to the land story. >> no, no. i remember it well. >> you have provided us with a letter -- >> yeah. >> the technician should have it, a redacted copy of the letter. at which my solicitor has to be passed up to the technician now to be displayed on the screen a redacted form. >> yeah. sir, i just wanted to say, hugh, thanks for that, thanks for not wanting to send me to prison. you did your avenged number as you said, and i wanted to say in return the source of the -- you referred to it as ting ting, and maybe that's the nickname, that was -- it didn't come from a

phone hack. it came from one of your friends, and they wrote me a letter at the irn in dover saying well, you committed it bit of a there, but, basically, you know, you'd gotten her pregnant, and maybe i'd like to stick a surveillance van outside and get a good set of pictures. that was on april the 12th, 2w0 weeks before the -- two weeks before the news of the world broke the story and something which i immediately sold to the mail on sunday, although there was a technical mixup. >> do you know who you sent this letter to? >> i don't. it was done ano , ma'am mousily, done so swiftly after hugh grant published his tapes that it was -- it was kind of hi lair yaws in a -- hilarious in a way, but it's great, how often does a story about a star drop into your lap and the next minute he's got a

girl pregnant, oh, well. >> and so the bottom line is based on what you know about the source of the story so far as you're aware, it wasn't the result of any phone hacking? >> no. it was just one of those nights going up to mischief really. >> can i move now to some evidence which the inquiry is expecting to hear from mr. campbell and his account. he says poor mcmullan, one of the few former journalists to have mentioned the section of the legal activity to describe hacking as the tip of the iceberg. have you done that? >> oh, i think i was just -- i'm not -- in context of the extreme length we went to to get a story -- going back to the

priest? >> well, i'm asking you whether you've told mr. camp bell -- >> no, indeed, yeah. it was something that you wouldn't start an investigation because the last thing you want to do is tip someone off that, you know, there is someone pretending to be who you wouldn't ordinary think because they had a weird phone call, and so that's why the news of the world went wrong in the sense of that becoming the first port of call instead of the last ditch one. i put that down to the inexperience of andy corson who didn't have a sure editorial hand. first thing an editor asks when brought a story is how do you know and where did you get it? i got it from a phone hack. want a listen? so if you can actually play that tape that says, you know, meet me at midnight. we'll have -- or in the case of one of these stories, tackling you into the ground and have my way with you.

you can hear that from the horse's mouth himself. you know that you're not going to get sued. remember elton john took the lines, and if you don't absolutely know you're not going to get sued for 5 story that you run, and so i would put mr. corson's inexperience at the requiring that degree of proof and not just letting the story run because we had the experience to know that actually you probably wouldn't get sued for that, so instead of it became common place and it was not too badly done. >> i see. so he goes on to say when making a short film for the bbc one show on phone hacking, i interviewedded mr. mcmullan, and some of the remarks were not broadcast on the advice of bbc liars and included his observations that phone hacking was widespread across the street

and not confined to the news of the world. did you say that? >> yeah probably. it's on video. >> seemly editors and executives at news of the world were aware that this and other illegal practices were taking place, and on occasion listening to some of the messages. did you say that? >> yes. >> also in a statement that you believed that phone hacking was widespread across fleet street true? >> yes. i thought the news of the world was one of the really bad defenders. the others were much worse. >> and similarly, was your comment that senior editors and executives of the news of the world on occasion listened to the messages, is that true? >> when i broke the story, and if i was not in the office or away on story either in a foreign country or in north hampton or something, i would

occasionally play a tape of the words that would allow us to run that story without fearing being sued over the fun, and then the editor would go, okay, we've got it. we've got it. we can go with that. >> mr. campbell goes on to say in other meetings i've had with him, he said the use of private detectives was widespread across newspapers and in addition to hacking journalists on occasion sat outside the homes in vans fitted with technology capable of listening into conversations taking place inside. based on the assumption of part-time now using mobiles at home instead of land lines. did you say that? >> well, we all know that. we all know -- we read the squinty tapes, and when prince charles rang up the darling, we'll know that that was -- i think actually not just the mobiles because if you use a

land line without a wire, that's acting as a radio transmitter as well, so i think the squinty tape came from a bt phone, but on a cordless one. >> so when you gave that answer, were you referring only to matters a very long time ago, or were you meaning to refer to matters in this millennium? >> i absolutely know that it still goes on because we were chatting over lunch and i said i'm come out in public clearly and can't be an investigative journalist anymore, but someone came into the bar offering me a digital scanner to buy, and i felt a bit like ewen mcgregor and there was personal phone numbers of all police officers on a particular force, where five years ago, that's a great source of information, what a

great story, but now i can't do that, so, yes, the criminal underworld still uses that. do journalists still use digital scanners? i don't know. i think you can buy them in america and you can have done to make them work in the u.k., but i haven't got one. we used a digital scanner, technology beyond me, and i'm sure that as soon as you invent a new better technology, someone over in taiwan will be inventing a way to listen in, an app or, you know, my days have gone in the last 20 years, not the next 20 years. >> can i ask you now about e-mail hacking? >> yes. >> was news of the world responsible for hacking into anybody's e-mail account?

>> i don't know. i don't remember that. i certainly nothing i have been ail to do to do a story. >> i understand that you have been made aware of a technology which allows information from smart phones, in particular from iphones to the tape; is that right? >> yeah. that's always going to be the case. hugh grant kept going on, can they read my text? the reality is now there's an app that it can be transmitted 20 someone else's phone. >> do you know whether or not journalists are using that technology? >> i don't know. i'm out of the loop and don't do investigations anymore, but, yeah, to be honest, you might be able to legislate against staff reporters, but you can't legislate against all the italians, mexicans, all around

the world, actually don't give a hoot about what you're saying here. they are not watching it. they don't care. they just want to make money and get pictures of someone being profitable and then send it back to mexico. it doesn't matter at all what you say or what matters you pass here because it won't stop it. >> moving from that form of hacking to a completely doirchlt information -- different information gathering technique -- >> before you do. entitled to a break so that's our five minutes. [inaudible conversations] with n

going undercover for a tabloid story. >> did you inpersonate others 20 run stings? >> i was either a drug user, dealer, or a millionaire from cambridge. hopefully i don't look too much like one, duh -- >> and can i ask you now about the question of photographs and obtaining photographs? was it ever considered an acceptable practice to steal a photograph of somebody to print and at the news of the world? >> yes. looking for it now. that, by the way, is my surveillance van after i potioned as a drug dealer. lucky i was not in it when it was torched. anyway, it was a difficult job

and a dangerous job. oh, yeah, here we go. i think that's what we are talking about. >> you may not wish to hold that one up. >> that's the president's wife in france. >> it's a limit early for -- little early for that. [laughter] >> it's a family paper. it's news of the world. >> perhaps you can tell us a little bit about how the news of the world got hold of that photograph? >> yeah, it came from really obscure paris fashion photographer who published a really small no circulation magazine just for the fashion world and found it and said, wow, that's pretty good, and copied it with a camera, and both of those, going back awhile, and piers morgan got it from them, and said i got this,