Scotland Yard spying with Indian hackers
The newspaper, which employs two of the reporters named in the letter, has confirmed that most of the passwords were correct.
London: Scotland Yard is facing allegations of using hackers in India to illegally spy on email accounts of British journalists, environmental campaigners and activists, an anonymous letter to the UK’s policing watchdog has claimed.
A letter believed to be from a whistleblower alleges that a secretive unit at the Metropolitan Police used contacts in the Indian police to obtain passwords and monitored targets for several years.
The UK’s Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) has launched an investigation after the letter containing passwords for email accounts belonging to four Greenpeace campaigners as well as journalists and photographers was sent to Baroness Jenny Jones, former leader of the Green Party.
“For a number of years the unit had been illegally accessing the email accounts of activists. This has largely been accomplished because of the contact that one of the officers had developed with counterparts in India who in turn were using hackers to obtain email passwords,” an extract of the letter published in The Guardian reads.
The newspaper, which employs two of the reporters named in the letter, has confirmed that most of the passwords were correct.