I have been trying to maintain interest in the controversy regarding Andy Coulson, home secretary in the UK. Was he involved in authorization of “phone hacking” when he was editor of a paper? Very little technical detail is being discussed; it appears to be devolving into a political mud campaign. A good example is the BBC news that Ed Balls demands statement on ‘phone hacking’ claims

Leadership hopeful Ed Balls said David Cameron should ask Theresa May to assure MPs that the allegations would be properly investigated. […] “But look, we cannot have somebody being paid over £140,000 a year to run the government’s communications when there are questions about whether he misled Parliament or not, and whether or not he was systematically involved in illegally bugging the telephones of members of Parliament and wider citizens.”

Apparently it takes Balls to ask Cameron to ask Theresa to make a statement.

Sorry, couldn’t resist that line. Seriously, though, what does a salary have to do with anything? Balls appears to be trying to use it as a wedge to drive resentment against Cameron, or against Coulson, or both.

The issue I see first is whether or not Coulson was involved and second to what level. It would be nice to see a third part describing details of the incident. Tessa Jowell, for example, claimed 28 individual hacks on her phone. How were those counted as individual “hacks”? Many of the hacks seem to be just sloppy impersonations that left behind obvious indicators like messages being flagged as read before the mobile owner had read them — a PIN code was stolen once and then used repeatedly.

The New York Times suggested that Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid practice of privacy breaches and surveillance was widespread in the industry.

Scotland Yard collected evidence indicating that reporters at News of the World might have hacked the phone messages of hundreds of celebrities, government officials, soccer stars — anyone whose personal secrets could be tabloid fodder. Only now, more than four years later, are most of them beginning to find out. […] Andy Coulson, the top editor at the time, had imposed a hypercompetitive ethos, even by tabloid standards. One former reporter called it a “do whatever it takes” mentality. The reporter was one of two people who said Coulson was present during discussions about phone hacking. Coulson ultimately resigned but denied any knowledge of hacking.

Coulson is being pinned with raising the stakes in the game. Maybe that is why his salary as home secretary is being tossed out in debate even though it does not really belong in any of the three parts I mentioned. It does seem to fit into a “do whatever it takes” competitive culture.

I say it will be hard to isolate fault in tabloids for digging in and bringing everything to the front page when the same style of sensationalism is used by leaders in British Parliament. Coulson’s salary is perhaps public information, which would clearly differentiate it from details of his private communications, but the context still illustrates what might motivate tabloid surveillance. The fights get dirty.

The politics and arguments between those trying diligently to preserve privacy and those working to expose information hopefully will evolve into another story; how industry and mobile owners can detect and report surveillance regardless of source. Will the UK government, in other words, move now towards support of privacy that counters private industry surveillance, given that those same skills and tools will probably interfere with their infamous government-led surveillance?