Telecoms firms provided “inside help” to phone hackers - MacKenzie
Kelvin Mackenzie, former editor of The Sun, has claimed that telecoms firms must have provided “inside help” to renegade journalists within News International to fuel their phone hacking operation.
The allegation was made in The Spectator after Mackenzie was informed by the Metropolitan police that his phone had been hacked on six separate occasions in the Spring of 2006.
MacKenzie wrote: “Up to this moment I had always believed that the pin codes of mobiles were 0000 or 1111 and that's why it was so easy to crack. But no.
“In my case it was something like 367549V27418. That surely must kill the idea that the hackers guessed or blagged the number – they must have had inside help from the phone networks."
Unlike other victims however MacKenzie won’t be pursuing Murdoch’s shilling, telling the paper: “I won’t be taking News International’s money. That would be a betrayal of the many happy years I spent there, plus I have a sense that to pocket the cash — and one lawyer was anxious for me to know that it would be tax free, always attractive — would be to indicate I thought Rupert Murdoch would ever have turned a blind eye to the hackings.”