Thursday, September 22, 2011

#hackgate: #Guardians Amelia Hill, why did she go cold on Steve Nott and his phone hacking scandal?

We already know Amelia Hill has been questioned under caution. However, Steve has an inside story on Amelia that will never appear in the Guadian, her hot and cold interest in Steve Nott and his twelve year struggle to tell the world how easy it is to listen into everyones voicemail.















Steve has a valid question: Who can you trust ?


This story seems very divided amongst opinions. Some people are all for the Metropolitan Police and others for the Guardian. 


When I tried to get my story heard this year from January, I had a massive hill to climb trying to get any newspapers to listen to my story. I didn't take my story to The Sun or Daily Mirror for very obvious reasons but did try to get all of the other papers involved.


No matter how hard I tried I just couldn't get anyone to answer my emails, from any of the papers. I did get some interest from Private Eye magazine and I think their little bit of publicity along with the BBC Dragons Eye, a Welsh political programme doing a small bit too helped my story and its credibility. It was only until then that the Independent and Daily Mail Online went with my story.


The Independent ran a story in it's newspaper titled 'The Scandal is all my fault'. The Daily Mail Online ran the same story but a lot more detail taken from my website with the same title 'The Scandal is all my fault'. I never even spoke to The Daily Mail but they somehow went with the flow, took my photo off Facebook. The Guardian however was never interested in my story at all. It was only until everyone else was covering it that Roy Greenslade blogged about it. The Telegraph put a snippet about me in a live blog running one day but no news article.


I have to give my thanks to Matt Prodger at the BBC, he ran a great story and didn't try to make me look like a fool as The Daily Mail and Independent had. So, my confidence in the national press isn't the best. 


On the other side of the coin, I contacted Operation Weeting in January 2011 and explained to them my circumstances and they were very helpful and after some time contacted me to arrange to meet and make a witness statement. This happened on July 18th this year and lasted for 3 hours.


However, 12 years ago, New Scotland Yard, Security Services, Home Office and HM Customs and Excise completely ignored my warnings of the risks to security. My MP Paul Murphy, also didn't want to know, so to say I have a lot of faith in the authorities now, would be lying.


Back to the Guardian, when I spoke to Amelia Hill about my story, she was very enthusiastic and was very keen to run a story and even moreso if I managed to locate the original South Wales Argus news item called ' Anyone can hear private messages'. I then spent nearly 30 hours researching Newport reference library trying to locate this story. I didn't have a clue what month it was or in fact I wasn't even sure of the year. 


Amelia Hill at The Guardian said they would run the story providing I found the newspaper clipping. With my detailed story she said "It would make a great story"


Well, after I found this newspaper article and told them, they didn't seem interested anymore. I was told that my story was historical and wasn't news. I was amazed at Amelia's change of attitude. Wasn't news !!! ??


A few weeks had passed by and then I discovered my original documents relating to my campaign to expose The Daily Mirror, The Sun and Vodafone. I couldn't believe that I'd found them all especially as I thought I'd burnt the lot. What was great to find, was not only all of the names and phone numbers of everyone I contacted, including all of the newspapers back then, but I found an invoice from the Daily Mirror titled Mobile Phone Scandal dated Sept 1999 and also a copy of the letter I sent to New Scotland Yard etc which was called 'The Truth About Vodafone' and listed the serious security risks to everyone about the future of voicemail interception. It also had my story typed up in chronological order with dates and names etc and a list of everyone who I'd informed.


I emailed Amelia Hill about the find and thought she'd be really excited but no. I was ignored. All emails I sent to Amelia were ignored. Next time I had contact with her was on twitter a few weeks ago when she was covering the Leveson Inquiry. She never ran any story on me....you can read the rest of this fascinating article at Steve's blog scroll down to Sept.17th....and you may also question just what is going on at the Guardian ?

http://hackergate.co.uk/