Is it ever acceptable for a journalist to hack into somebody else’s email?

Is it ever acceptable for a journalist to hack into somebody else’s email?

It’s an interesting question – and one that has recently come to the fore because of the alleged hack by Sky news journalist Gerard Tubb.

As Naked Security reported last year, Sky News correspondent Gerard Tubb managed to gain access to an email account belonging to John Darwin – the so-called “Canoe Man” who faked his own death as part of a complex fraud involving his wife.

In a case which gripped the British public’s imagination, keen canoeist John Darwin faked his own death at sea in 2002 only to subsequently walk into a London police station over five years later claiming to have no memory of what had happened to him.

Darwin’s wife acted surprised and overjoyed at her husband’s “back-from-the-dead” miracle, but the smiles soon disappeared when a photograph was found on the internet showing the couple posing for a Panama estate agent’s website.

It transpired that during his “missing years” Darwin had moved into a bedsit adjacent to his family home, and began to live secretly with his wife again…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.