The Green Book And NOTW Phone Hacking Trial

A court heard the Windsors might have made life comfortable for alleged cell phone hackers by gathering the personal phone numbers of the family in a “Green Book” phone directory. Read on in order to find out more about this news.

Everybody knows how obsessed the British newspaper was with the royal family. So, we are not surprised about the fact that Windsors is the centre of attention in the court hearing underway in the UK courts.

According to the reports, the News of the World hired expert hackers to have them hack into the phones of many popular personalities, including some members of the royal family. The trial is one and many court hearing have taken place so far.

Hacking a phone is not a child’s play in the here and now. For hacking a mobilephone, you have to have many things. You must know the code that has been used to lock the target phone. By default, the password is 000 and most phone owners don’t change it, which makes the handset more prone to hacking techniques.

By the way, it is hard to get the personal phone number of famous personalities, such as Prince William, Prince Harry and their staff. In fact, very few people have their personal phone number. Then how did the hackers come to know their cell number? Well, this is a very interesting question.

We came to know the answer to this question during the phone hacking trial in the court. As mentioned earlier, the phone numbers of the royal family are written in the “Green Book”. During the court hearing, the court heard that an employee with the defunct News of The World was involved in making payments to a source for getting a copy of the “Green Book”.

On October 31, for instance, as per a report published in “The Guardian, Goodman allegedly composed and sent an email discussing the Green Book to his editor named Andy Coulson. The email was shown to the judges. According to the content of the email sent by Goodman to Coulson, Goodman asked Coulson that he required £1,000 in order to make payment to a source for getting a copy of that Green Book.

However, during the trial the other day, a routine observer might have concluded that Goodman paid more than £1,000 to obtain the directories. The proceedings revealed that the books were distributed around by many people.
The interesting news is that the court was also told that the Palace was not told about the fact that several copies of the phone book were discovered at the home of Goodman 6 years back. The Palace was informed of it in 2012; six years after the incident took place.
Furthermore, the court hearing also found that in 2006, the house of Goodman was combed and quite a few copies of Green Book were recovered, along with other copies of casual phone book called ITD, which had lists of royal residences, staff extensions and administrative cellphone numbers. This news was also published on the popular blog The Drum. This means that Goodman had paid a good deal of money for obtaining cell phone numbers of the royal family and he succeeded in getting his hands on the secret phone book.

According to Michelle Light who was responsible for the distribution of the telephone directories informed the court that about 1000 copies of Green Books were made each year. He also informed the court that all of the royal offices used to be locked overnight.
In order to find out if any phone directory was lost during those days, Light was questioned. She was asked if anyone was responsible for reporting the theft of the stolen phone book. She said that she would not think so. This means she didn’t knew that any copy of the phone book was stolen or lost.
Upon further investigation, it was discovered that old copies of the book were shredded for safety reasons. And one each written a security warning. According to Light, she trusted the people with the directories, and didn’t ask them to give the old directories back.
Moreover, according to a report from BBC, Light was oblivious to the fact that a whole host of Green Brooks were recovered from the house of Goodman in year 2006. She was informed of it in 2012. Since 2012, The Guardian reports, only a few directories were around. This means a lot of copies of the phone book were in the hands of many people in 2006.

To investigate into the matter further, the legal team of Coulson questioned Light about the security measures taken by the management to keep the books secured. She said that there was no security system in place in order to keep the books secure; however, inside the front page of each book, there was a warning saying that the books should not be given to unauthorized folks, and that it has to be shredded once the latest version is out. This information was also presented in the court of law in the trial.

Another solid evidence was presented in the court before the honorable jury: A document was shown to the court with edited directory pages listing several names and numbers. Some of the numbers were of royal personalities like Professor Perrins and Prince of Wales’s secretary named Michael Peat.
The trail also revealed at interesting news about Prince Philip. Many rumors were circulating about his that he didn’t own a cell phone. In the phone book, his phone number was listed as the Switchboard in Buckingham Palace.

The trail will continue in order to find out the truth. So far, a few pieces of evidence have been presented in the court. This piece of news contains the information about how the hackers get their hands on the phone numbers by buying the royal phone book containing phone numbers of all the important people linked with the royal family. Let us see what happens next.