Reuters reported that BBC journalist Jeremy Paxman said Wednesday that the former tabloid newspaper editor Piers Morgan showed him how to hack into phones 10 years ago when he was editor of the Daily Mirror. Morgan’s consistently denied authorizing phone hacking during his tenure there.
Morgan responded on Twitter: “Right - that's the last time I'm inviting Jeremy Paxman to lunch. Ungrateful little wretch.” (Some, like The Washington Post, thought Morgan was “joking.”)
Paxman said Morgan had boasted to him at a lunch in 2002 about how easy it was to gain access to the voice mail of others’ cellphones. He said Mr. Morgan “explained that the way to get access to people’s messages was to go to the factory default setting and press either 0000 and 1234.” Mr. Paxman said Mr. Morgan told him, “If you didn’t put your own code in, his words, ‘You are a fool.’ ”
