By Sandrea:-MY Opinion

When will it stop, and how many more lives will be destroyed is the question that most ordinary citizen in the UK is asking regarding the News of the World phone hacking scandal.

This is unprecedented and something that has not been seen in this country for as long as anyone can remember.  This phone hacking scandal equates to an epidemic of enormous proportion and needs to be curtailed before anyone else life is ruin.

We have seen two of the UK most senior police officers resign, the ‘so called whistleblower’ Sean Hoare dead, Rebekah Brooks, arrested and a 168 year old newspaper closed and the government scrambling to find solution to a problem that should never exist in the first place.

It is because individuals do not respect the concept of democracy and the manner in which we should treat each other why we reach a cross-road such as this and find ourselves on a roller coaster that seems to have no brakes and is continuing to roll along unable to stop.

Individuals must and should always expect privacy in their lives and although the great majority of us realise that we live in a climate whereby because of terrorist and terrorism we have had a number of our rights eroded and in the interest of safety we have largely ignore these erosion of our rights.  However, there cannot be any justification whatsoever to have the mobile phone of either ordinary citizen or even celebrity hacked into in order to generate sensational headlines.

I cannot believe that the individuals responsible for hacking into or agreeing to have these ridiculous methods to obtain information did believe that this would have escalated into the epidemic that it has become.  It is disgraceful that individuals have to be subjected to this kind of scrutiny and have their privacy compromise in such a way and lay their vulnerability open when they are at the lowest point in their lives.

This saga called into question journalist and journalism, less we forget it is fair-minded journalist that alert us to this problem in the first place, so before we castigate all journalist we have to remember that there are journalist who only role is to find the truth, bring us the news without having to embellish, or the need to undertake illegal actions in order to do so.  We have to remember the journalists who have lost their lives in the pursuit of bringing international news from around the world and in places where human rights have been compromise.

This phone hacking scandal should not taint all journalists; all that we can hope for is that legislation is put into place in order to ensure that we never again see this kind of invasion of individual’s privacy.