This Jonathan Rees Fellow Is A Marvel!

When you have all-but-complete access to private databases, and all-but-complete access to the police, as this article from last March shows, you really have all-but-complete power! The world is your oyster! Your people can commit any crime, and escape! Working in the shadows of Rupert Murdoch's empire, Jonathan Rees must have been, in fact, England's unacknowledged monarch!:

The money came pouring in. Jonathan Rees worked from a dingy office in south London. He lived in a cramped flat upstairs. He was divorced, overweight and foul-mouthed but his business was golden: he traded information. His sources may have been corrupt. His actions may have been illegal. But the money kept coming – from one golden source in particular. As Rees himself put it: "No one pays like the News of the World do."

...The bug recorded the sound of Detective Constable Tom Kingston from the south-east regional crime squad collecting cash for himself and for his mate who was an intelligence officer involved in the protection of the royal family and other VIPs. DC Kingston sold Jonathan Rees a Special Branch report disclosing police knowledge of an Albanian crime gang in London, Police Gazette bulletins which listed suspects who were wanted for arrest, and threat assessments in relation to the terrorist targets his mate was supposed to be protecting. Rees sold them to newspapers – primarily the News of the World, the Sunday Mirror and the Daily Mirror.

...And the corruption did not stop with the police. The listening device caught Rees boasting that he was in touch with: two former police officers working for Customs and Excise who would accept bribes; a corrupt VAT inspector who had access to business records; and two corrupt bank employees who would hand over details of targets' accounts. (One of them had the first name Robert and was wittily referred to as Rob the Bank. The other was simply Fat Bob.)

Beyond that, Rees regularly hired two specialist "blaggers" who tricked their way into phone company records to obtain names and home addresses of subscribers and also itemised phone bills, highly valued on Fleet Street as a list of potential sources. One was a Londoner named Shaun who routinely provided lists of phone numbers called by Rees's targets. The other was John Gunning, a private investigator who has since been convicted of blagging the private information of subscribers from British Telecom's database.

Rees's relationship with journalists was a two-way street. An executive from the News of the World developed a corrupt source in the Passport Office who could provide home addresses, personal details and photographs of anybody who applied for a passport. Rees was paying the executive £100 a time for information from the source (although the executive was passing the source only £25 a time).

One person who is familiar with Rees's operations claims that he or one of his associates started using Trojan Horse software, which allowed them to email a target's computer and copy the contents of its hard disk. This source claims that they used this tactic when they were hired by the News of the World to gather background on Freddy Scapaticci, a former IRA man who had been exposed as an MI6 informer codenamed Stakeknife.

Two other sources claim that Rees was commissioning burglaries. One is a private investigator who was told directly by Rees's network that they had broken into targets' home on behalf of a Fleet Street newspaper. The other is a lawyer who claims to have evidence that a high-profile client was the target of an attempted burglary by Rees's associates in search of embarrassing information. There is no independent confirmation of this.

The bug betrayed the sheer speed and ease with which Rees was able to penetrate the flimsy fence of privacy that shields the vast reservoir of personal information now held on the databases controlled by the police and the DVLA, the phone companies and banks.