Not Much of a Fan of Gordon Brown, But...

This is downright obscene:

In October 2006, the then editor of the Sun, Rebekah Brooks, contacted the Browns to tell them that they had obtained details from the medical file of their four-month-old son, Fraser, which revealed that the boy was suffering from cystic fibrosis. This appears to have been a clear breach of the Data Protection Act, which would allow such a disclosure only if it was in the public interest. Friends of the Browns say the call caused them immense distress, since they were only coming to terms with the diagnosis, which had not been confirmed. The Sun published the story. On the Sun's website it claims it 'set the news agenda' by 'breaking the sad news that Gordon Brown's baby boy Fraser has Cystic Fibrosis'.

Five years earlier, when their first child, Jennifer, was born on 28 December 2001, a small group of specialist doctors and nurses was aware that she had suffered a brain haemorrhage and was dying. By some means which has not been discovered, this highly sensitive information was obtained by news organisations, who published it over the weekend before Jennifer died, on Monday 6 January 2002.

In 2003, Devon and Cornwall police discovered that one of their junior officers was providing information from the police national computer to a network of private investigators. The Guardian has established that one of these investigators, Glen Lawson of Abbey Investigations in Newcastle upon Tyne, used this contact to commission a search of police records for information about Brown on 16 November 2000. Lawson also commissioned searches related to two other Labour MPs – Nick Brown and Martin Salter.

Lawson made these searches on behalf of journalists, a previously unreported court hearing was told. Transcripts obtained by the Guardian show that the search on Martin Salter was made at a time when the News of the World, then edited by Brooks, was attacking him for refusing to support the paper's notorious "Sarah's law" campaign to name paedophiles. Lawson currently refuses to name the journalists who commissioned him.

An attempt to prosecute this network was blocked by a West Country judge, Paul Darlow, who shocked police by ruling that it would be a misuse of public money to pursue the case. However, Devon and Cornwall police contacted the office of the then chancellor to warn him that he had been a victim, as they also did with his two Labour colleagues.

(H/t The Awl)