MURDOCH SHE WROTE

Jul 25, 2011 Features / Columnists, Tony Deyal column

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In the mid-70s when I studied journalism at University, the word “hack” in ordinary usage meant to cut up or sever something with irregular blows – not your smooth sawing action but frenzied chopping with an axe or cutlass.
Generally you would see it in the headlines, “Man Hacked to Death.”  Those of us who read Conan Doyle’s “Sherlock Holmes” or old British detective fiction found out that a “hack” was a vehicle.  It comes from the term “hackney” which means a carriage or cab for hire.  The word “hackie”, used to describe or address cab drivers, has fallen into disuse perhaps because in spoken Jamaican it may be mistaken for the toxic fruit named after the infamous Captain Bligh of “Mutiny on the Bounty” fame (ackee or Blighia sapida), which may be further confused with the game played on a field or on ice called “hockey” but pronounced “ackee”.
As an old joke goes, “In Jamaica we don’t play ackee we heat hackee.”
My lecturer in practical reporting told the entire class that our best efforts were equal only to the work of a “competent hack”.  In the specific context of journalism, a “hack” is a journalist who produces dull, unimaginative, banal or mediocre work.  It also applies to professional journalists who renounce or surrender their independence, integrity and beliefs in return for money or other rewards, or basically writers who slave away at routine, mundane tasks.  For various reasons I could not hack it and left for other pastures that were a trifle more verdant.
With the advent and mass marketing of personal computers and the internet, the old “hack” got a new twist.  Added to its other meanings is “to manipulate a computer program skillfully especially to gain unauthorised access to any computer, system or network.”  Someone who “hacks” is a “hacker” or “person who breaks into computers and computer networks for profit, in protest, or because they are motivated by the challenge”.
The term then extended to cover someone who breaks into cellular phones or networks since the technology is almost the same.
However, there is a controversy among the computer cognoscenti about hackers.  One view is that those who break into your system are really “crackers” and not hackers.  There is also a school of thought, probably based on the old Western movies where the good guys wore white hats and the bad guys or outlaws wore black hats.
In this typology, computer criminals are “black hats” and computer programmers are “white hats”.  A “grey hat” is a combination of white and black hats and is the type of hacker who breaks into your system, tells you that your system has been hacked and offers to make it hacker-proof for a fee.  There are “blue hats” or those who test systems before they are launched and “hacktivists”- those who have an ideological bias and either deface your site or deny entry to legitimate users.
The most recent hacking controversy involves phone hacking.  During this week, the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee of the House of Commons held an enquiry following confirmation that a paper owned by billionaire publisher, Rupert Murdoch, “The News of the World (NoW)”, had been illicitly hacking into the voicemail messages of prominent people to find stories.
The NoW admitted intercepting voicemails in April after years of rumour that the practice was widespread, and amid intense pressure from those who believed they had been victims.  The worst incident involved a missing girl, later found dead, whose electronic mailbox was hacked leading her parents to believe she was still alive.
This underhand attempt to gain information added new life to the word “blag”.  Generally, it is a slang term for robbery, especially with violence.  It could also mean obtaining information or benefits under false pretences by wheedling or “fooling” someone.  However, it has become more specifically related to information and “blagging” is defined under the British Data Protection Act 1998 as, “”Knowingly or recklessly obtaining or disclosing personal data or information without the consent of the data controller”.
Blagging addresses, phone bills, bank statements and health records has been illegal in the UK since 1994.
On July 12, 2011, Gary Hold writing in The BBC News UK stated: Information Commissioner Christopher Graham – who describes blagging as a “modern scourge” – said it only attracted a ‘rather puny penalty’.  The Criminal Justice Act of 2008 provides for a maximum two-year sentence for illegally obtaining personal information without its owner’s consent, but the penalty has never been activated because of a ‘stand-off between politicians and the press’, he said.  “Frankly, we need to say to people ‘You will go to prison if you do this’,” he said.
In January 2007, Now royal editor Clive Goodman was jailed for four months, while private investigator Glenn Mulcaire was jailed for six months, for intercepting voicemail messages on royal aides’ phones.  It was said this was a one-off – the work of a “rogue reporter” – but it appears now that illegally accessing data was much more routine.
It is possible that the various enquiries now taking place in Britain would result in less hacking and blagging by the media.  However, we should learn from the incident of the pie in the face intended for Murdoch during Tuesday’s hearing.  It was not a real pie and did not hit its intended target.
Given the public’s insatiable appetite for the “inside story”, the likeliest outcome of these hearings is more pie in the sky – and I don’t mean the sale to Murdoch of the UK’s popular television service BSkyB.
*Tony Deyal was last seen repeating what Pulitzer Prize winner, Mike Royko, a columnist with the Chicago Sun-Times said when Murdoch bought the paper, “No self-respecting fish would be wrapped in a Murdoch newspaper.”

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