Philip Williams: 'There may well be a host of people using this for journalistic purposes'
The senior Scotland Yard officer involved in the original police investigation into phone hacking at the News of the World was aware that the practice was "likely" to be widespread, the Leveson inquiry heard today.
Detective chief superintendent Philip Williams today defended the scope of the 2006 inquiry, which resulted in the jailing of News of the World royal editor Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire in January 2007 and was carried out at a time of "unprecedented" demand on police resources.
The Leveson inquiry heard that the Metropolitan police had uncovered "a number of people in all walks of life" at the time who were potential targets or victims of voicemail interception.
However, Williams said he had raised concern about the force using anti-terrorist officers on an investigation into phone-hacking, questioning whether the media would see it as "using a sledgehammer to crack a nut".
He told the inquiry: "My mindset then was that he [Mulcaire] is getting information presumably for the media world and he may well be using a whole range of different techniques and some of those may well be distasteful to the public but many of them may well be perfectly legal."
Williams later added: "I agree absolutely that there are more leads that we could have followed up. What I wanted to do was a more thorough investigation, but the decision was that we were not going to do that."
Goodman and Mulcaire had admitted listening to voicemail messages left on the phones of royal aides Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, private secretary to the princes William and Harry, and Helen Asprey, the princes' personal secretary. Police found "about nine rogue phone numbers" were calling into the voicemails from outside.
The Metropolitan police was widely criticised for limiting the scope of the investigation, despite evidence from Mulcaire's notebooks that there could be many more hacking victims.
Robert Jay QC said the list of potential targets known to police at the time made it "pretty obvious other journalists were involved" because they went further than the patch of a newspaper royal editor.
The inquiry heard extracts from a police document at the time acknowledging that "this ability [to intercept messages] is highly unlikely to be limited to Goodman alone" and that this pointed to a "much wider security issue within the UK and potentially worldwide".
Another document, read to the inquiry, said: "There may well be a host of people using this vulnerability for journalistic purposes."
Williams said Vodafone's initial position was "it's not possible" to intercept voicemails from an outside number. He told the inquiry: "This was new to them. They didn't know this could be done."
Robert Jay QC read out a police log, from January 2006, that noted: "The implications are quite far-reaching because Vodafone have apparently not appreciated that this [hacking] was even possible.
"If this is possible it is likely to be far more widespread than CG [Clive Goodman], hence serious implications for security confidence in Vodafone voicemail and perhaps the same is true for other service providers."
Williams told the inquiry today: "At that time I was entirely open to the speculation that this could be a technique used across all media."
However, he added: "At no time did any of the phone companies, once they were fully aware of the potential risk, come back to me and say actually we've seen that this is happening all over our system.
"I had spoken to colleagues to find out whether any of them had come across this type of criminality before. They hadn't. The Crown Prosecution Service had never come across a case like this."
He said he reached the conclusion that the technique was restricted to the media, and that it did not pose a wider "threat to life or physical harm" or a threat to national security.
Another operational note by Williams at the time, read out today, stressed the "need to balance resources against all anti-terrorist operations" and that "this investigation is being conducted against a backdrop of increasing workload".
It also emerged today that police initially believed that for hacking to be a criminal offence, the message had to be intercepted before it was read by the intended recipient - but that the Crown Prosecution Service later corrected this.
The Metropolitan police admitted earlier this month that it did not follow adequate procedures to inform potential hacking victims, and it has apologised personally to each claimant.
Jay QC told the Leveson inquiry on Monday: "It might be argued that the police deliberately failed to notify people in order to avoid a public furore, which might have called their whole strategy, including their relationship with News International, into question."
Of the 418 potential victims identified, the Metropolitan police informed those who fell into one of four categories: MPs, the royal household, police and military.
Williams said he was "very mindful of resources" and he had expected mobile phone companies to inform affected customers, adding: "I accept it didn't work out as I intended."
Two other officers involved with the original 2006 inquiry - detective inspector Mark Maberly and detective chief superintendent Keith Surtees - will give evidence to the Leveson inquiry today.
Free daily newsletter
If you like our news and feature articles, you can sign up to receive our free daily (Mon-Fri) email newsletter (mobile friendly).
