(A story of massive illegal electronic surveillance.)A multimillionaire (one of Britain's richest men) was jailed yesterday after hiring corrupt private detectives to tap telephone conversations and hack into computers. Adrian Kirby used the detectives to spy on environmental investigators and residents opposed to the activities of his waste disposal company.
The agency he used, which employed private investigators, serving police officers and retired detectives, operated illegally over five years until 2004.
Hundreds of telephone lines were compromised by an array of illegal snooping equipment used to reroute and record conversations. Personal banking information and “targeted” computer hacking were available to customers willing to pay thousands of pounds a time. Confidential medical notes were also obtained.
Kirby, who is on The Sunday Times Rich List, paid the agency £47,000 to monitor opponents of his company’s plans to dispose of toxic waste. (more)
Others involved as well...
Another job taken on by the London-based agency, which cannot be named for legal reasons, was an acrimonious divorce case.
Prestige bathroom company boss Anthony Waters paid them £50,000 to "spy" on his estranged wife with the help of special software to monitor everything she typed onto her laptop about the divorce proceedings and her finances.
In a third example, a Strathclyde woman asked the agency to monitor the phone calls of someone she believed had killed one of her elderly relatives to pocket a large inheritance.
Also before the court are the detective agency's "telephone interception specialists" Michael Hall, 35, of Battersea, London, and Stuart Dowling, 30, from Sittingbourne, Kent, who made some of the telephone monitoring devices, and two more of the company's clients, Adam Share, 35, of Corby Glen, Lincolnshire...
They variously admitted intercepting illegal communications and making unauthorised modifications to a computer. (more)
