NoW would have binned Snowden story

Phone hacking trial: Andy Coulson says NoW would have binned Snowden story

Ex-News of World editor, questioned on public interest, tells Old Bailey NSA surveillance leak 'would have endangered lives'

Lisa O'Carroll

The former NoW editor Andy Coulson said he would have rejected the Edward Snowden story if it had been offered to him when he was editing the newspaper, the Old Bailey has heard.

Coulson told the phone hacking trial on Tuesday he felt the news story about US National Security Agency surveillance, based upon a cache of documents leaked by the whistleblower Snowden, would have endangered lives.

He was being questioned by his defence counsel about the public interest tests applied to sensitive areas for newspapers, such as privacy breaches and law breaking.

"It's a topical example, Edward Snowden. If they came to me at the News of the World, I think I would have turned them down," he said, adding that the story on sweeping surveillance by the US government had "a potential for lives to be put at risk".

He said he knew that others would have run the story; "an awful lot of people" would have disagreed with him.

On privacy he said the rule of thumb at the News of the World was that "readers had a right to know about those seeking to get into [public] office, who they were, what they were about". He said: "Of course I ended up working on the other side of the fence, but I broadly maintained that position – people have a right to know about their politicians."

Coulson listed a number of "dark arts" that could have been used by the paper which, he said, would not have crossed the line, including concealed cameras, video bags, and "turning a mobile, spinning a mobile", which he explained was finding an address from a phone number.

Another "dark art" he listed was phone traffic, which he said was information on who was phoning who. Coulson said it would feature very rarely but that he should "have done more to interrogate the methods by which phone traffic was obtained".

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http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/apr/15/phone-hacking-andy-coulson-news-world-snowden-nsa