News of the World Attempted to Hack 9/11 Victims' Phones

Bad news doesn't stop for News Corp.

This article is from the archive of our partner .

The skeletons in the closet of the now defunct News of the World just keep escaping. The Daily Mirror is reporting that staffers for the paper contacted a New York police officer about hacking into the phones of 9/11 victims. The report in the Monday edition says a source told the Mirror that staffers from News of the World contacted a former New York police officer, now a private investigator, and asked him to attempt to hack into the phones of British victims to retrieve information on outgoing and incoming calls from the days before the attack that could help hack into the victims' voice mail accounts. The Daily Mirror writes:

“This investigator is used by a lot of journalists in America and he recently told me that he was asked to hack into the 9/11 victims’ private phone data. He said that the journalists asked him to access records showing the calls that had been made to and from the mobile phones belonging to the victims and their ­relatives."

The private investigator turned the job down, because, "he knew how insensitive such research would be, and how bad it would look."

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.