 I am going to describe how action should be swiftly taken to curb Rupert Murdoch and his newspapers now that supposition and dark suspicion have become proven fact. (Heck, he doesn’t even like to close massively unprofitable papers.) “I am satisfied that Rebekah — her leadership and her standard of ethics and her standard of conduct — is very good,” the younger Murdoch told BBC News in an interview. He cites the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act of 2000, the law used to imprison News of the World reporter Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, who teamed up to invade the voicemail accounts of various celebrities. Smith notes that the law, as worded, has remarkably broad scope: 
 
 Where an offence under any provision of this Act… is committed by a body corporate and is proved to have been committed with the consent or connivance of, or to be attributable to any neglect on the part of a director, manager, secretary or other similar officer of the body corporate, or any person who was purporting to act in any such capacity, he (as well as the body corporate) shall be guilty of that offence and liable to be proceeded against and punished accordingly. “If you have presided over an organisation that has conducted criminal activities, either you gave the orders, or you gave permission, or you connived, but if you did none of these things, then you were neglectful,” writes Smith. “That is the trap, that is the box in which the directors of News International will find themselves.” 
 
 I ran this reading by Jonathan P. Armstrong, a partner at the law firm Duane Morris who specializes in corporate law with a concentration in technology and compliance. Brooks has denied having any knowledge of the illegal hacking, but she was editor of the NotW at the time it published stories that cited voice mail messages obtained that way, and it was Brooks who first hired the private investigator who hacked the voicemail of murdered teenager Milly Dowler. In Brooks’s case, therefore, it’s possible to argue that the only way she wouldn’t have known about the hacking was by making it clear she didn’t want to know.
– Rupert Murdoch, who yesterday shut down the 168-year-old News of the World, faces the worst PR crisis of his six-decade career, reports the Washington Post. So far, the scandal is threatening to derail Murdoch's $12 billion bid for British Sky Broadcasting. It could even force Murdoch to testify before the British Parliament under oath. But as bad as things are, could Murdoch himself end up in jail? One analyst, writing in the Independent, thinks so. Andreas Whittam Smith explains that phone hackers were convicted under Britain's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, and he points readers to Section 79 of the act, which states that when a corporate body commits "an offense under any provision of this act ... with the consent or connivance of ... a director, manager, secretary or other similar officer, he (as well as the body corporate) shall be guilty of that offense and liable to be proceeded against and punished accordingly." Perhaps Murdoch is a stretch, but observers think Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International and former editor at News of the World, could be in danger of criminal charges. Just like this former editor.