Operation Motorman (ICO investigation)
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Operation Motorman was a 2003 investigation by the
Information Commissioner's Office The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) is a non-departmental public body which reports directly to the Parliament of the United Kingdom and is sponsored by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). It is the independ ...
into allegations of offences under the Data Protection Act by the British press. The ICO first became aware of the scale of the problem in November 2002, when an ICO investigator attended a search under warrant of John Boyall, a private investigator in Surrey. Documents found on the premises revealed the misuse of data from the
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. This discovery led to two investigations: Operation Motorman, conducted by the ICO and led by ICO Senior Investigator Alec Owens, who prior to joining the ICO had been a Merseyside Police
Inspector Inspector, also police inspector or inspector of police, is a police rank. The rank or position varies in seniority depending on the organization that uses it. Australia In Australian police forces, the rank of inspector is generally the ne ...
; and Operation Glade, conducted by the Metropolitan Police. The ICO later obtained search warrants for the Hampshire office of a private detective Steve Whittamore. A huge cache of documents revealed, in precise detail, a network of police and public employees illegally selling personal information obtained from government computer systems. The personal information that Whittamore obtained from his network was passed on to journalists working for various newspapers, including the ''
News of the World The ''News of the World'' was a weekly national red top tabloid newspaper published every Sunday in the United Kingdom from 1843 to 2011. It was at one time the world's highest-selling English-language newspaper, and at closure still had one ...
'', the ''
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'', the ''
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'', the ''
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'' and the ''
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''. At least 305 different reporters have been identified as customers of the network. In February 2004, four suspects pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit misconduct in public office: Whittamore and Boyall, retired police officer Alan King, and Paul Marshall, a police communications officer. The four were given conditional discharges. Other members of Whittamore's network were due to stand trial but the case collapsed. In September 2011, former policeman Alec Owens, the original lead investigator of Operation Motorman, criticised the senior management of the ICO for the way in which the investigation was handled. He stated that investigators were prohibited from interviewing journalists and alleged that this was because the management "were frightened". He said that had the team been allowed to question journalists the use of phone hacking might have been uncovered earlier. In November 2011, just a few days before Owens was due to give evidence to the
Leveson Inquiry The Leveson Inquiry was a judicial public inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the British press following the News International phone hacking scandal, chaired by Lord Justice Leveson, who was appointed in July 2011. A series o ...
, his home was raided under warrant by Cheshire Police. Before leaving under police caution for an interview at
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police station, Owens informed
Lord Leveson Sir Brian Henry Leveson (; born 22 June 1949) is a retired English judge who served as the President of the Queen's Bench Division and Head of Criminal Justice. Leveson chaired the Leveson Inquiry, public inquiry into the culture, practices a ...
by phone of the raid. On 9 April 2012, right-wing political blogger
Paul Staines Paul De Laire Staines (born 11 February 1967) is a British-Irish right-wing political blogger who publishes the Guido Fawkes website, which was described by ''The Daily Telegraph'' as "one of Britain's leading political blogsites" in 2007.Graeme ...
published information on over 1,000
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requests to Whittamore from the Operation Motorman files. The day before the files were released ''
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s "Media Monkey" column had reported rumours that Staines was going to release the files, and was preparing to fly to Ireland to escape the jurisdiction of the
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.


See also

*
Leveson Inquiry The Leveson Inquiry was a judicial public inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the British press following the News International phone hacking scandal, chaired by Lord Justice Leveson, who was appointed in July 2011. A series o ...
* Metropolitan police role in phone hacking scandal#Operation Glade (2003) * News International phone hacking scandal#Information Commissioner's report * News media phone hacking scandal#Early investigations (1990s–2005) *
Operation Elveden Operation Elveden was a British police investigation into allegations of inappropriate payments to police officers and other public officials. It was opened as a result of documents provided by News International to the Operation Weeting investig ...
* Operation Glade *
Operation Rubicon Operation Rubicon (German: ''Operation Rubikon''), until the late 1980s called Operation Thesaurus, was a secret operation by the West German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), lasting from 1970 to ...
*
Operation Tuleta Operation Tuleta is a British police investigation by the Metropolitan Police Service into allegations of Hacker (computer security), computer hacking, related to the News International phone hacking scandal. As of June 2011, it was reported to hav ...
*
Operation Weeting Operation Weeting was a British police investigation that commenced on 26 January 2011, under the Specialist Crime Directorate of the Metropolitan Police Service into allegations of phone hacking in the ''News of the World'' phone hacking affair ...
*
Phone hacking scandal reference lists The news media phone hacking scandal is a controversy over illegal acquisition of confidential information by news media organizations that reportedly occurred in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia between 1995 and 2011. This art ...


References

{{reflist, 30em 2003 in the United Kingdom News International phone hacking scandal