A court heard that the Windsors may have made life easy for alleged cell phone hackers by collecting the family's personal phone numbers in a "Green Book" phone directory. Read on to find out more.
Everyone knows how obsessed the British press was with the royal family. So it is no surprise that the Windsors are the centre of attention in the court hearing underway in the UK.
According to reports, the News of the World hired expert hackers to break into the phones of many famous people, including some members of the royal family. The trial is ongoing, and many court hearings have taken place so far.
Hacking a phone is no child's play these days. To hack a mobile phone, you need several things. You must know the code used to lock the target phone. By default, the password is often 0000, and most phone owners do not change it, which makes the handset more vulnerable to hacking.
It is hard to obtain the personal phone numbers of famous people, such as Prince William, Prince Harry and their staff. In fact, very few people have their personal phone numbers. So how did the hackers come to know them? This is a very interesting question.
We learned the answer during the phone hacking trial. As mentioned earlier, the phone numbers of the royal family are written in the "Green Book". During the hearing, the court heard that an employee at the defunct News of the World was involved in making payments to a source to obtain a copy of the "Green Book".
On October 31, for instance, according to a report published in The Guardian, Goodman allegedly wrote and sent an email about the Green Book to his editor, Andy Coulson. The email was shown to the judges. According to the email Goodman sent to Coulson, Goodman told Coulson that he needed £1,000 to pay a source for a copy of the Green Book.
However, during the trial, a casual observer might have concluded that Goodman paid more than £1,000 to obtain the directories. The proceedings revealed that the books were passed around by many people.
Interestingly, the court was also told that the Palace was not informed that several copies of the phone book had been discovered at Goodman's home six years earlier. The Palace was told about it only in 2012, six years after the incident.
Furthermore, the hearing also revealed that in 2006 Goodman's house was searched, and quite a few copies of the Green Book were recovered, along with copies of an informal phone book called the ITD, which listed royal residences, staff extensions and administrative cell phone numbers. This was also reported on the popular blog The Drum. This means Goodman had paid a good deal of money to obtain the cell phone numbers of the royal family, and he succeeded in getting his hands on the secret phone book.
Michelle Light, who was responsible for distributing the telephone directories, told the court that about 1,000 copies of the Green Book were made each year. She also told the court that all the royal offices used to be locked overnight.
To find out whether any phone directory had been lost during those years, Light was questioned. She was asked whether anyone was responsible for reporting the theft of a stolen phone book. She said she did not think so. This means she did not know that any copy of the phone book had been stolen or lost.
Upon further investigation, it was discovered that old copies of the book were shredded for security reasons, and each carried a security warning. According to Light, she trusted the people with the directories and did not ask them to return the old ones.
Moreover, according to a BBC report, Light was unaware that a whole host of Green Books had been recovered from Goodman's house in 2006. She was told about it in 2012. Since 2012, The Guardian reports, only a few directories remained in circulation. This means a lot of copies of the phone book were in many people's hands in 2006.
To investigate the matter further, Coulson's legal team questioned Light about the security measures management took to keep the books secure. She said there was no security system in place to protect them; however, inside the front cover of each book there was a warning that the books should not be given to unauthorized people, and that each had to be shredded once the latest version was out. This information was also presented in court during the trial.
Another solid piece of evidence was presented to the jury: a document with edited directory pages listing several names and numbers. Some of the numbers belonged to royal figures such as Professor Perrins and the Prince of Wales's secretary, Michael Peat.
The trial also revealed interesting news about Prince Philip. Many rumours had circulated that he did not own a cell phone. In the phone book, his number was listed as the switchboard at Buckingham Palace.
The trial will continue in order to establish the truth. So far, a few pieces of evidence have been presented in court. This article explains how the hackers got hold of the phone numbers by buying the royal phone book, which contained the numbers of all the important people connected with the royal family. Let us see what happens next.