Yet More Reasons (As If We Needed Any) to Abolish the TSA

What would enrage you enough to “kick a wall, throw a suitcase or make a pithy comment to a screener” at an airport? How about the screener’s electronically denuding and then leering at your wife? What if the gizmo whereby he stripped also her exposed both her and the month-old child she didn’t yet realize she was carrying to carcinogenic rays? Fast-forward a few years: now, as your toddler struggles with a congenital deformity, you learn your wife’s virtual strip-search at the airport may have been responsible. How many walls, suitcases and screeners will escape your wrath then?

Beware: the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), keeper of blacklists to which it secretly adds folks it has never charged with any crime, let alone tried in a court of law, and from which its victims have little recourse, maintains yet another list, this time of “people who make its screeners feel threatened… A TSA report says the database can include names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, home addresses and phone numbers of people involved in airport incidents, including aggressors, victims and witnesses.”

Read The Rest At Orwell's Dreams

UK recruits army of child spies to report on ‘anti-social neighbours’

Child spies will be encouraged to report their neighbours as part of the latest drive to cut thuggery and anti-social behaviour on estates.
As part of a campaign launched yesterday, youngsters will look for residents with untidy or litter-strewn surroundings and then try to persuade them to clean up their homes.

Read The rest Here

My Left Breast Put Fancy TSA Scanner to the Test

A funny thing happened to me at airport security this week: The full-body scanner appeared to detect my fake left breast.

Read The Rest Here

Facebook Hit With More Privacy Lawsuits

Facebook has been hit with two new potential class-action lawsuits stemming from recent re visions to its privacy settings.
The cases, filed recently in federal district court in San Jose, Calif. on behalf of nine Facebook users, allege that the new settings are “confusing and materially deceptive” and lessened their privacy.

Read The Rest Here

EU blasts Sweden over failure to store data on people’s phone calls, email…

EU blasts Sweden over failure to store data on people’s phone calls, email…

by Peter Vinthagen Simpson The European Court of Justice has told Sweden that it must implement a 2006 measure requiring telecom operators to store information about their customers’ phone calls and emails.The European Union directive, known as the Data Retention Directive, was approved by Brussels in March 2006, but Sweden has yet to implement the measure.

Read The Rest Here

UK.gov uses booze to lure London kids into ID scheme

By John Oates

Young people in London are getting the chance to get their hands on an ID card, the lucky so-and-sos.

The next stage of the Home Office's attempts to get the cards accepted is to target those privacy-..disregarding, Facebook-..obsessed youths in the capital. People aged between 16 and 24 years old who hold a current or recently expired passport can apply for a card from 8 February.

Read The Rest Here

The 2010 Census: Beware the State’s Assault on Privacy!

by Gary D. Barnett

The time is near for the national headcounters “SWAT” teams to once again begin their decennial assault on privacy. Some of those neighbors you thought to be decent people will now be hounding you incessantly to extract personal and private information that is none of theirs or the state’s business. Don’t be fooled by their claim that they are just doing their constitutional duty, as nothing could be further from the truth.

Read The Rest Here

Terror police to monitor nurseries for Islamic radicalisation

by Alex Ralph and Sean O’Neill

Nursery-age children should be monitored for signs of brainwashing by Islamist extremists, according to a leaked police memo obtained by The Times.

In an e-mail to community groups, an officer in the West Midlands counter-terrorism unit wrote: “I do hope that you will tell me about persons, of whatever age, you think may have been radicalised or be vulnerable to radicalisation … Evidence suggests that radicalisation can take place from the age of 4.”

The police unit confirmed that counter-terrorist officers specially trained in identifying children and young people vulnerable to radicalisation had visited nursery schools.

Read The Rest AT Orwell's Dreams

Will you get caught by the REAL ID deadline?

Will you get caught by the REAL ID deadline?

REAL ID is scheduled to go into effect on January 1. The good news is that it may be repealed by then. The bad news is that it may be replaced by something worse, the PASS ID.

Please tell Congress to repeal REAL ID and reject the PASS ID.

This is what I wrote in my letter . . .

REAL ID has proved to be unworkable and unwanted.

• 36 states will not be in compliance with REAL ID by the January 1 deadline
• Fifteen states have passed statutes prohibiting it, and another ten have passed resolutions denouncing it. http://realnightmare.org/news/105/

If REAL ID is not repealed,

Read The Rest Here

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Google expands tracking to logged out users

Now, everyone has their activities tracked in the name of a better service

Anyone who’s a regular Google search user will know that the only way to avoid the company tracking your online activities is to log out of Gmail or whatever Google account you use. Not any more.

As of last Friday, even searchers who aren’t logged into Google in any way have their data tracked in the name of providing a ‘better service’.

Read The rest Here

Google CEO says privacy doesn’t matter. Google blacklists CNet for violating CEO’s privacy.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt says privacy isn’t important, and if you want to keep something private, “maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place” (in other words, “innocent people have nothing to hide.”)

Bruce Schneier calls bullshit with eloquence: “For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that — either now or in the uncertain future — patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.”

But JWZ has the kicker, when he reminds us that Eric Schmidt’s Google blackballed CNet’s reporters after CNet published personal information about Schmidt’s private life:

Read The Rest Here

The Spying Industrial Complex

Chris Soghoian, whose post on 8 million times the government has used GPS tracking on Sprint’s customers in the last year, has apparently flushed out the spying policies of many of the nation’s telecoms. Cryptome has them posted–though (as Mary points out) Yahoo has freaked out and initiated take-down proceedings.

Yahoo isn’t happy that a detailed menu of the spying services it provides law enforcement agencies has leaked onto the web.

Shortly after Threat Level reported this week that Yahoo had blocked the FOIA release of its law enforcement and intelligence price list, someone provided a copy of the company’s spying guide to the whistleblower site Cryptome.

The 17-page guide describes Yahoo’s data retention policies and the surveillance capabilities it can provide law enforcement, with a pricing list for these services. Cryptome also published lawful data-interception guides for Cox Communications, SBC, Cingular, Nextel, GTE and other telecoms and service providers.

Read The rest Here

What do ISPs charge the law to spy on you?

Cryptome is hosting several ISPs’ pricelists and guidelines for “lawful spying” activities on behalf of law enforcement. Included is Yahoo’s price-guide (hilariously, Yahoo tried to send them a copyright takedown notice to make this go away).

One of the more remarkable elements of Yahoo’s document is the sheer quantity of material that Yahoo retains for very, very long periods. From /.: “IP logs last for one year, but the original IPs used to create accounts have been kept since 1999. The contents of your Yahoo account are bought for $30 to $40 by law enforcement agencies.”

Read The rest Here

Don't Let Google Close the Book on Reader Privacy

Google is poised to radically expand its book service, monitoring the digital books you search, the pages you read, how long you spend on various pages, and even what you write down in the margins. Google could then combine your reading habits with other information it has about you from other Google services, creating a massive "digital dossier" about you, your interests, and your concerns. With numerous reports of government efforts to compel online and offline booksellers to turn over records about readers, the time is now for Google to pledge to protect reader privacy.

You shouldn't be forced to pay for digital books with your privacy. Tell Google it needs to develop a robust privacy policy that gives you at least as much privacy in books online as you have in your neighborhood library or bookstore. Google must:

• Protect your reading records from government and third party fishing expeditions by responding only to properly-issued warrants and court orders, and by letting you know if someone has demanded access to information Google has collected about you.
• Make sure that you can still browse and read anonymously by not forcing you to register or give personal information and by deleting any logging information for all services after a maximum of 30 days.
• Separate data related to Google Book Search from any other information the company collects about you, unless you give it express permission.
• Give you the ability to edit and delete any information collected about you, transfer books from one account to another without tracking, and hide your "bookshelves" or other reading lists from others with access to your computer.
• Keep Google Book Search information private from third parties like credit card processors, book publishers, and advertisers.

Email Google CEO Eric Schmidt today and demand that the new Google Book Search service protect your privacy rights. Tell him that you won't pay for digital books with your privacy and that Google Book Search must include these basic safeguards to protect readers!

Source: Electronic Frontiers Foundation

Equality snoopers to keep files on your sexuality

People will be routinely asked to answer sensitive questions about their sexuality so a Government quango can compile a massive ‘equalities’ database, it emerged last night.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission is to take information given in confidence by millions and place it on a huge ‘Lifestyle Database’.

It will draw information from sources including visits to A&E departments, government surveys and the reporting of crimes to police.

In order for bureaucrats to measure whether gay or straight citizens are suffering greater ‘inequality’, the EHRC said everybody should be asked to provide information about their sexual identity.

They will be asked if they are heterosexual/straight, gay/lesbian, bisexual or other.

Campaigners said the establishment of the ‘Big Brother’ database – which will be available on the quango’s website – would alarm the public.

Alex Deane, Director of Big Brother Watch, said: ‘This intrusive database is being built without even the smallest consideration for privacy.

‘When people go to hospital, they don’t think that information about their illness is going to be shared with the EHRC.

‘What possible right does the EHRC have to build this database, and then share what they’ve gathered with other people on their website?’

Details of the plan emerged after the EHRC, led by chairman Trevor Phillips, began the tendering process for establishing the database.

Freedom of Information requests, obtained by the Old Holborn blogger, then revealed what the scheme involved.

Equalities bosses have decided they must work out whether citizens are suffering inequality based upon various different factors.

These include age, gender, disability, sexual orientation, religion and belief, transgender status, ethnicity and social class. Citizens’ characteristics will be checked through their answers to various government surveys and information on whether they need hospital care or have called the police.

It will allow bureaucrats to check different groups are not more likely to die young, be murdered, suffer illness, or violent crime.

Checks will also be made of happiness, healthy living standards and educational attainment. Any minority groups considered to be losing out can then be targeted for Government help.

It will not be possible to identify individuals from the information on the database.

But what is alarming campaigners is the way the information will be compiled.

Staff are planning to take data which is given to a list of 45 different sources by members of the public.

This includes their A&E records, the British Crime Survey, the British Election Study, the Census, Childcare and Early Years Parents’ Survey and the Citizenship Survey.

The information is not provided in the knowledge it will be handed over to an equality quango.

But the EHRC’s report on the way the database should be established says the sexual identity question should become a standard part of major surveys ‘as soon as practicable’.

An EHRC spokesman said: ‘Crime rates, poor hospital treatment, lack of childcare places and inadequate housing are some of the things that British people are worried about.

‘Looking at each of these problems in isolation doesn’t tell the whole story, as these factors may combine together to have a bigger effect on our lives.

‘By looking at all the issues together, our framework will show what needs to be done to make Britain a fairer place to live.’

Source: Orwell's Dreams

Sprint’s 50 Million Customers Have Been Geo-Tracked 8 Million Times–in the Last Year

Chris Soghoian caught a remarkable admission at a surveillance conference in October. Sprint’s Manager of Electronic Surveillance revealed that law enforcement has used Sprint’s geotracking function 8 million times in the thirteen months prior to his comment.

Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers’ (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. This massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers.

The evidence documenting this surveillance program comes in the form of an audio recording of Sprint’s Manager of Electronic Surveillance, who described it during a panel discussion at a wiretapping and interception industry conference, held in Washington DC in October of 2009.

[snip]

[M]y major concern is the volume of requests. We have a lot of things that are automated but that’s just scratching the surface. One of the things, like with our GPS tool. We turned it on the web interface for law enforcement about one year ago last month, and we just passed 8 million requests. So there is no way on earth my team could have handled 8 million requests from law enforcement, just for GPS alone. So the tool has just really caught on fire with law enforcement. They also love that it is extremely inexpensive to operate and easy, so, just the sheer volume of requests they anticipate us automating other features, and I just don’t know how we’ll handle the millions and millions of requests that are going to come in.

Now, as he documents in extensive detail, using cell phone location to get the geolocation of someone is just one of a number of uses of legal surveillance techniques that is eluding public reporting.

But that’s by design. Even assuming many of these uses of Sprint’s geo-tracking capabilities are multiple requests for the same person, there are a whole lot of people whose physical location is being tracked.

Probably a bunch of people who bought acetone and hyrdogen peroxide for home improvement uses.

Anyway, click through for a bunch more numbers and discussion, as well as MP3s of this admission.

Source: Orwell's Dream

Surveillance cameras in Pennsylvania town prompt privacy concerns

A security camera is mounted on a utility pole in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP

Horses drawing buggies regularly clop down the roads approaching Lancaster, Pennsylvania a peaceful city in the heart of Amish country that had only three murders last year and relatively low crime.

But if the community sounds reminiscent of the past, it also has some distinctly modern technology: 165 surveillance cameras that will keep watch over thousands of residents around the clock.

When it is complete, the surveillance system will be bigger than those in large cities such as Philadelphia, San Francisco and Boston. And the fact that it will be monitored by ordinary citizens has raised privacy concerns.

"They are using fear to sell the cameras as much as possible," said Charlie Crystle, a member of a fledgling citizens group that opposes the cameras and is trying to raise public awareness about them. "There's just a huge potential for personal and political abuse."

Officials in the city of 54,000 say the cameras have deterred crimes and helped solve them.

The white, domed cameras sit atop utility poles in public spaces, business districts and some residential areas. They are monitored 18 to 24 hours a day by employees of the Lancaster Community Safety Coalition, a non-profit board with workers who report suspected crimes to police.

Lancaster is the seat of Lancaster county, a popular and peaceful tourist destination known for having one of the nation's largest Amish populations. Horses and buggies are common on surrounding roads.

The safety coalition, directed by city councilman Joseph Morales, screens prospective monitors and provides training about racial profiling and how to spot trouble. The group has seven monitors, all paid. The coalition does not release their names.

Monitors sit in a room with two large plasma screens and six smaller ones, each divided into views of different cameras. A joystick allows them to zoom in or move the cameras if they see something unusual. If they do, they call police.

"What they are typically seeing is people in their everyday life going through their business," Morales said. "They're looking for anything out of the ordinary."

A special commission recommended the $2.7m (£1.6m) camera system in 2001 in response to a spike in some crimes. Police chief Keith Sadler strongly supports having citizens monitor the cameras because he does not have the manpower to do it with a force of 159 officers, about 20 fewer than two years ago.

"In this economy, nobody has the luxury to take cops off the street," Sadler said. "You are probably watched more by non-police agencies than you are by us."

Lancaster has seen some declines in property crimes since the cameras went up, but those numbers have fluctuated — along with the totals for violent crimes.

Despite inconclusive statistical evidence, police and the commission say the cameras are providing officers with a new tool. Last year, commission workers called police 492 times and provided video to police 305 times. That work led to 82 arrests and 86 citations, as well as 18 charges pending.

Police also credit the cameras with helping to solve a murder in which a man was shot outside a restaurant and the shooting was caught on tape.

Other small cities have also invested in surveillance cameras, though not as heavily as Lancaster.

In Wilmington, Delaware, the city of about 73,000 developed a network of 21 publicly owned cameras and networked them with more than 200 private cameras owned by businesses.

That city also has 37 neighbourhood cameras, and the combined system is monitored by a non-profit group, which refers calls to the police.

Wilkes-Barre, a north-eastern Pennsylvania city even smaller than Lancaster, is planning to install 150 cameras this year, also monitored by a non-profit.

Some research has cast doubt on just how much surveillance systems reduce crime.

A January study by the University of California found that cameras did not reduce homicide in San Francisco but did help reduce the number of burglaries and some thefts. A New York University study found that cameras did not do much to deter crime in some public housing projects.

Those findings and others are part of why Crystle and other critics do not think the effort is worth the risk in a small town like Lancaster.

He also points to examples such as Cambridge, Massachusetts, where officials decided in February against adding surveillance cameras because of privacy concerns.

Crystle and others in Lancaster say they have done nothing to warrant being watched. Nick Boots, who owns a barber shop near a camera, said he thinks the city is using fear to gain support for the cameras.

"Through the fear of the perceived threat, people are willing to give up certain rights," Boots said. "You got to think of Lancaster now being like an open-air prison. Who's the warden?"

Others praise the project, including Francisco Cruz, 65, owner of Cruz Barber Shop, who said he's seen less drug dealing and fewer prostitutes outside his shop since cameras went up.

"I don't care if they put one right here in the shop," Cruz said.

The American Civil Liberties Union also objects to the project, especially since it covers the entire city — not just high-crime areas.

"When you have a blanket network of surveillance, you are no longer about solving crime," said ACLU attorney Mary Catherine Roper, citing studies that show cameras mainly help solve just small crimes. "Now you're talking about a surveillance community."

Source: The Guardian

Government plans to install CCTV in 20,000 homes

The UK Government’s Children’s Secretary Ed Balls has announced a controversial new CCTV monitoring scheme, in which thousands of problem families are to be monitored 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Balls claims that the £400 million “sin bin” scheme will put up to 20,000 problem families under 24-hour surveillance in their own homes, to ensure children go to bed and school on time and eat proper meals.

“Private security guards will also be sent round to carry out home checks, while parents will be given help to combat drug and alcohol addiction,” reads a report in the Sunday Express.

Family Intervention Projects

Mr Balls wants every local authority to fund such ‘Family Intervention Projects‘, noting that: “This is pretty tough and non-negotiable support for families to get to the root of the problem.

“There should be Family Intervention Projects in every local authority area because every area has families that need support.”

Pupils and their families will have to sign ‘Home School Agreements’ which set out parents’ duties to make sure their kids attend school.

However, privacy campaigners are already up in arms over the latest government plans to install surveillance tech within people’s homes.

Source: RINF News

The Criminal Gossip Bureau can ruin your job prospects

It's been a big week for databases, although nobody has managed to make them sexy. On Monday, the pressure group Liberty underlined the failings of the Criminal Records Bureau – more precisely its enhanced check – for the Today programme. It was quite a story: a woman had been turned down for voluntary work, having been "spoken to" (as opposed to "reprimanded" or "warned") by police for leaving her children in the park while she went to the shops. It's one of those stories you can imagine Basil Fawlty popping an eyeball over. And then you think, hang on – I'm popping an eyeball. This is outrageous. She only went to the shops.

This evening Damian Green, the shadow immigration minister, gave a speech to the Centre for Policy Studies, asking if Britain is a free country. He identifies 28 agencies that hold personal data about individuals. In the light of his very credible starting position – that politicians have a duty to create an environment in which "the citizen has some personal space in which the state has no power, interest, or influence" – many of these agencies and their purview do seem … well, bogus is a strong word. Let's start with "a bit much".

The Tories have seized this ground – they are tighter with Liberty than is Labour; and there is no telling whose manifesto will promise the most in terms of individual privacy.

It's not a bad time, therefore, to look at database management as practised by the Criminal Records Bureau, which is as uncontroversial and hi-tech as any similar initiative of the past three terms of government. It is also a massive undertaking – the 1.5m people checked in 2002 had gone up to 4m in 2008-09.

Now, this park lady (who wishes to remain anonymous) was the victim of the enhanced criminal records check – the standard check, everybody agrees, is almost totally unproblematic. It passes on only current and spent convictions, cautions, reprimands, and warnings – which proceed from an admission of guilt (to be cautioned you have to accept a caution). A standard CRB check can also access List 99, a register of people who have been barred from working with children – but basically this check is not open to tittle-tattle. Furthermore, and I believe more important, the CRB is on target to process 95% of its standard-check applicants within 10 days.

The enhanced check, conversely, has come to the attention of Liberty – and not just on behalf of the park lady – because it can include, above and beyond that raft of convictions and warnings, "relevant and proportional information held on that individual", as decided by the chief officer of police. This really could be anything. People are warned when they put in for an enhanced check that it could even flag up other people living at their address.

As another for-instance (if you are of a mind that one shouldn't go to the shops while one's children are in the park), say you have a very loud argument with your partner, and a neighbour calls the police: this information will be logged even if you personally don't make a complaint, and rightly so, because the police are thereby alerted to respond maybe fractionally faster if you were to make a 999 call.

But say this isn't domestic violence, and it's just a very loud argument – it will still end up on your CRB check. This has now entered the realm of gossip: it will be passed on to a prospective employer with no warning to you. When you do find out, you have no right to get it struck from your record; and if your application was for a job in a domestic violence refuge, for instance, you might well find yourself considered unsuitable to work there.

Worse to my mind, however, is the sheer bureaucracy of the enhanced check – the bureau has targets of 90% of applications being processed within 28 days. That sounds good, but it is missed in 10% of cases. And in the Metropolitan police area applicants are quoted six to eight weeks. Moreover you have to re-apply every time you change jobs; or every three years, and after maternity leave, if you stay in the same job. In summer the system is slower because teachers are all being vetted.

This is no victimless matter – people in these "caring professions" are left without income, or even the means to bring in a temporary income, for weeks at a time. Bear in mind that working with children or vulnerable people is rarely well paid in the first place, and you have a system with unjust financial penalties built into the very bureaucracy.

The gossip element will, I believe, be ironed out in time, especially as a new vetting and barring process will be introduced in October that should in the long run obviate the enhanced check. But the way people are treated by government agencies – this high-handed, "well, we do most of you in a month, what are you complaining about?" attitude – is astonishing to people who work outside these altruistic sectors. The Conservatives might have a much bigger vote-winner with their anti-surveillance crusade than it initially appears.

Source: The Guardian

Murdoch papers paid £1m to gag phone-hacking victims

• News of the World bugging led to £700,000 payout to PFA chief executive Gordon Taylor
• Sun editor Rebekah Wade and Conservative communications chief Andy Coulson – both ex-NoW editors – involved
• News International chairman Les Hinton told MPs reporter jailed for phone-hacking was one-off case

Rupert Murdoch's News Group News­papers has paid out more than £1m to settle legal cases that threatened to reveal evidence of his journalists' repeated involvement in the use of criminal methods to get stories.

The payments secured secrecy over out-of-court settlements in three cases that threatened to expose evidence of Murdoch journalists using private investigators who illegally hacked into the mobile phone messages of numerous public ­figures to gain unlawful access to confidential personal data, including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemised phone bills. Cabinet ministers, MPs, actors and sports stars were all targets of the private investigators.

Today, the Guardian reveals details of the suppressed evidence, which may open the door to hundreds more legal actions by victims of News Group, the Murdoch company that publishes the News of the World and the Sun, as well as provoking police inquiries into reporters who were involved and the senior executives responsible for them. The evidence also poses difficult questions for:

• Conservative leader David Cameron's director of communications, Andy Coulson, who was deputy editor and then editor of the News of the World when, the suppressed evidence shows, journalists for whom he was responsible were engaging in hundreds of apparently illegal acts.

• Murdoch executives who, albeit in good faith, misled a parliamentary select committee, the Press Complaints Commission and the public.

• The Metropolitan police, which did not alert all those whose phones were targeted, and the Crown Prosecution Service, which did not pursue all possible charges against News Group personnel.

• The Press Complaints Commission, which claimed to have conducted an investigation, but failed to uncover any evidence of illegal activity.

The suppressed legal cases are linked to the jailing in January 2007 of a News of the World reporter, Clive Goodman, for hacking into the mobile phones of three royal staff, an offence under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. At the time, News International said it knew of no other journalist who was involved in hacking phones and that Goodman had acted without their knowledge.

But one senior source at the Met told the Guardian that during the Goodman inquiry, officers found evidence of News Group staff using private investigators who hacked into "thousands" of mobile phones. Another source with direct knowledge of the police findings put the figure at "two or three thousand" mobiles. They suggest that MPs from all three parties and cabinet ministers, including former deputy prime minister John Prescott and former culture secretary Tessa Jowell, were among the targets.

Last night, Prescott said: "I think Mr Cameron should be thinking of getting rid of Coulson."

However, a spokeswoman for Cameron said the Tory leader was "very relaxed about the story".

Lib Dem MP Simon Hughes, one of many victims of mobile phone hacking by Rupert Murdoch's News Group Newspapers, comments on the huge out-of-court settlements Link to this video

News International has always maintained it had no knowledge of phone hacking by anybody acting on its behalf.

Murdoch told Bloomberg news last night that he knew nothing about the payments. "If that had happened I would know about it," he said.

A private investigator who had worked for News Group, Glenn Mulcaire, was also jailed in January 2007. He admitted hacking into the phones of five other targets, including the chief ­executive of the Professional Footballers' Association, Gordon Taylor. Among the phones he hacked were those of the Lib Dem MP Simon Hughes, celebrity PR Max Clifford, model Elle MacPherson and football agent Sky Andrew. News Group denied all knowledge of the hacking, but Taylor last year sued them on the basis that they must have known about it.

In documents initially submitted to the high court, News Group executives said the company had not been involved in any way in Mulcaire's hacking of Taylor's phone. They denied keeping any recording or notes of intercepted messages. But, at the request of Taylor's lawyers, the court ordered the production of detailed evidence from Scotland Yard's inquiry in the Goodman case, and from an inquiry by the Information Commissioner's office into journalists who dishonestly obtain confidential personal records.

The Scotland Yard files included paperwork which revealed that, contrary to News Group's denial, Mulcaire had provided a recording of the messages on Taylor's phone to a News of the World journalist who had transcribed them and emailed them to a senior reporter, and that a News of the World executive had offered Mulcaire a substantial bonus for a story specifically related to the intercepted messages.

Several famous figures in football are among those whose messages were intercepted. Coulson was editing the paper at this time. He said last night: "This story relates to an alleged payment made after I left the News of the World two and half years ago. I have no knowledge whatsoever of any settlement with Gordon Taylor.

"The Mulcaire case was investigated thoroughly by the police and by the Press Complaints Commission. I took full responsibility at the time for what happened on my watch but without my knowledge and resigned."

The paperwork from the Information Commission revealed the names of 31 journalists working for the News of the World and the Sun, together with the details of government agencies, banks, phone companies and others who were conned into handing over confidential information. This is an offence under the Data Protection Act unless it is justified by public interest.

Senior editors are among those implicated. This activity occurred before the mobile phone hacking, at a time when Coulson was deputy and the editor was Rebekah Wade, now due to become chief executive of News International. The extent of their personal knowledge, if any, is not clear: the News of the World has always insisted that it would not break the law and would use subterfuge only if essential in the public interest.

Faced with this evidence, News International changed their position, started offering huge cash payments to settle the case out of court, and finally paid out £700,000 in legal costs and damages on the condition that Taylor signed a gagging clause to prevent him speaking about the case. The payment is believed to have included more than £400,000 in damages. News Group then persuaded the court to seal the file on Taylor's case to prevent all public access, even though it contained prima facie evidence of criminal activity.

The Scotland Yard paperwork also provided evidence that the News of the World had been involved with Mulcaire in his hacking of the mobile phones of at least two other football figures. They filed complaints, which were settled this year when News International paid more than £300,000 in damages and costs on condition that they signed gagging clauses.

Taylor declined to make any comment. Goodman, now out of jail, said: "My comment is not even 'no comment'." A spokesman for News International said: "News International feels it is inappropriate to comment at this time."

Last night, John Whittingdale, the Conservative MP who chairs the culture, media and sport select committee, said the revelation "raises a number of questions that we would want to put to News International".

He added: "The fact that other people beyond the royal family had their calls intercepted was well known. But we were absolutely assured by News International that none of their journalists were aware of that, that Goodman was acting alone and that Mulcaire was a rogue agent".

Asked if the committee would reopen the issue, he said: "The committee will want to discuss it very urgently. I think we will do so tomorrow morning, and if we decide that there are further questions to ask, then certainly we would summon back witnesses and ask those questions."

Former Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil described the story last night as "one of the most significant media stories of modern times". "It suggests that rather than being a one-off journalist or rogue private investigator, it was systemic throughout the News of the World, and to a lesser extent the Sun," he said. "Particularly in the News of the World, this was a newsroom out of control.

Source: The Guardian