Andy Coulson

The mobile phone bites the hand of those who feed it, ha ha!
Today is a good day for most the MSM. Not for the News of the World I'll agree, but the rest of the pack are whooping it up. The phone hacking allegations are high octane stuff and the story of the moment. As you might expect there's more to this than a quick look reveals. From the Spectator we get the following -

Oh how funny! We can't trust the press to regulate itself, but the police? Oh that's just fine! I shall be laughing all day at this.

Even more laughter when you remember that just days ago when whinging about the proposals to reform the police Sir Hugh Orde said -

Policy wonk being hacked?
As a child I was told that a wasp can sting as much as it likes whereas a bee can sting only once, then it dies. Is this true? No matter; it could be the situation the Guardian is in. Apart from the BBC no section of the MSM has worked harder on the Andy Coulson case. So his departure from the Cameron inner circle at No 10 must have brought the Guardian joy, given them a buzz if you like, so what happens now? Following the successful sting, the very health of the Guardian comes into focus as well as the life of the political spinner. It's said that the sales figures of the Guardian are going down at an alarming rate; how long can this go on? It's wise to remind ourselves that Coulson denies any wrongdoing and would appear to be innocent until proven guilty. You may regard this as either a tiresome tradition that means nothing or a corner-stone of good legal practice, feel free to choose.

Also feel free to wonder at the lives of the assorted celebs and smart people who are not smart enough to live without a mobile phone. The Coulson case goes back years and is not the first case of this sort. It would seem smart people have yet to learn that mobile phones are not totally secure and have been leaking data for years. We also have to wonder why Cameron wanted to employ a house trained version of Alistair Campbell.

Spymaster Djanogly
The basis of the News of the World/Andy Coulson story is that the newspaper hacked into mobile phone traffic and this is illegal. Also we can assume that the people who had their phones hacked wished the data to remain private. Ignoring the, 'did-he-know' question hovering over Coulson, that he works for David Cameron plus that the NotW is owned by Murdoch and that all of these things are bound to inflame passions on the left, we could describe this activity as spying. But the state would rather we did not. For they spy all the time on us and upon what they would like us to think of as threats to our way of life. But in reality they see us as a threat to their way of life and it's this that they use to justify their actions. And if the state can spy why not newspapers? After all the former likes to use the latter, but only on its terms. But we are also told a free press is essential to our way of life, so the definition might include free to spy.