Fleet Street’s Arab Spring

„Investigations in America by the F.B.I. and the Justice Department into charges that Murdoch’s papers might have tried to hack into the voice-mail systems of 9/11 victims could prove damaging not only to the company’s image but also to its standing on Wall Street. The News Corporation’s board of Yes Men directors would be forced to take a stand. And shareholders might begin demanding more of a say. It certainly hasn’t been a good year for the company. The $580 million that Murdoch paid for MySpace in 2005 was redeemed in June for a mere $35 million. (This after his $5 billion investment in 2007 in  The Wall Street Journal had its value written down by half within two years.) If the 9/11 charges have any weight, Fox News’s influence with the conservative base will be grievously undercut. And it’s fair to say that James’s future as a mogul of any standing is at considerable risk. It may just be that the whole mess will mark the beginning of the end of the Murdoch era of journalism. Which would be a good and bad thing. His type of red-top reporting has debased journalism on both sides of the Atlantic. But at the same time, he is one of the last press barons who actually loves newspapers. Whoever replaces him, it’s unlikely to be someone who sees the romance in owning papers like  The Sunday Times or  The Wall Street Journal.

The News of the World affair may be the most public hacking scandal of the year, but it’s dwarfed by the continuous assault on the computer systems of American corporations. These attacks are intended not to disrupt systems but to pry security secrets and intellectual property from one set of hands and place them in another. The cyber-assaults have penetrated the defenses of Internet giants such as Google and Intel, defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, energy companies such as ExxonMobil and BP, and Wall Street powerhouses such as Morgan Stanley. Who or what is behind the attacks? Very few people in corporate (or political) America want to come right out and say it on the record—the potential implications for business and foreign policy are too great—but the answer in many cases is: China. The attacks have become so frequent, and so consequential, as to verge on acts of war.”