“THE HACKED WATERS”

There is one thing that political and economic mindsets have in common- The need and use of information for manipulation to achieve their interests. Information has over the time been seen as power and he who has it, is empowered albeit relatively. The 4^th estate uses information to set the agenda as other disciplines such as the Science, use information to solve real life problems. In Kenya, the NSIS uses information for intelligence surveillance in quest for national stability. Information just like waters is multi purpose and can be used for cleansing, tainting and quenching-just like water information can be constructive or even destructive and once let out, can never be redeemed. As the river begins from a tributary and finally drains into the Lake in either contaminated or purified form, is a semblance of how information moves.

Richard Nixon, the 37^th US President who happened to be a Republican between 1969 and 1974 resigned after the infamous Water-Gate scandal that changed the political paradigm of the most powerful state in the world. The Watergate follow-up commenced from the time a popular paper-Washington Post-Sunday June 18^th 1972 published the story-‘Five held in Plot To Bug Democratic Offices’. This is the story that would convulse the Washington for months through the Agenda Setting function of the 4^th Estate, intriguing two young reporters on The Post's staff, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward who were called in to work on the story. As Woodward's notes show, he learned from police sources that the men came from Miami, wore surgical gloves and carried thousands of dollars in cash. It was, said one source, "a professional type operation."  As the reporters found out, the burglars- James Mc Cord was on the payroll of President Nixon’s re-election committee. It was also discovered that Nixon ran a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage on behalf of reelection effort. This was a schematic and well calculated approach to gain access to information on the strategies of the Democratic candidates directly.

Richard Nixon, former US President.

Richard Nixon was overwhelmed by the evidence adduced at the jury against his aides which culminated to indictment, trial, conviction and incarceration of several his administration officials. The investigations revealed that President Nixon had a tape recording system in his offices and that he had recorded many conversations. Recordings from these tapes implicated the president, revealing that he had attempted to cover up the break-in. After a series of court battles, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the president had to hand over the tapes; he ultimately complied. On sensing that he was facing a near-certain impeachment in the House of Representatives and a strong possibility of a conviction in the Senate, Nixon resigned the presidency on August 9, 1974. His successor, Gerald Ford, issued a pardon to President Nixon after his resignation

The thirst and fetish for gathering information in the most unethically brutal fashion saw the crumbling of the world's second largest media and Entertainment Company in respect to its credibility. The  News International phone-hacking scandal, also known as Murdochgate or Rupertgate, is an ongoing controversy involving the News of the World, a British tabloid newspaper formerly published by News International, a subsidiary of News Corporation. Employees of the newspaper were accused of engaging in hacking, police, and exercising improper influence in the pursuit of publishing stories. Investigations conducted from 2005–2007 concluded that the paper's phone hacking activities were limited to celebrities, politicians and members of the British Royal Family. However, in July 2011, it was revealed that the phones of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, relatives of deceased British soldiers, and victims of the 7/7 London bombings were also accessed, resulting in a public outcry against News Corporation and owner Rupert. Advertiser boycotts contributed to the closure of the News of the World on 10 July, ending 168 years of publication.

Rupert and Richard apart from sharing the 18th letter of the alphabet as their first letter to their first names, also share some form of rabid libido for control of information for monetary and power trappings respectively. Rupert had some of his employees sucked into phone hacking sprees to get first hand information for publication and as it were, journalists are not expected to name there sources-so they took a ride and spiffed off this privilege to maxima. The editorial philosophy of Murdoch’s media empire was sensationalism and his employees diligently worked to smoke out celebrities and politicians from their holes of privacy. Richard on the other hand, had a cowardly modus operandi on his political schemes where he piped in a structure to get first hand information about his political foes. This was executed with the aid of his allies.

According to Wikipedia, Information in its most restricted technical sense is an ordered sequence of symbols that record or transmit a message. It can be recorded as signs, or conveyed as signals by waves. Information is any kind of event that affects the state of a dynamic system. As a concept, however, information has numerous meanings. Moreover, the concept of information is closely related to notions of constraint, communication, control, data, form, instruction, knowledge, meaning, mental stimulus, pattern, perception, representation, and especially entropy. All the canons and artillery for information are regarded with utmost fear and equal respect due to their ability to change human mindsets and perceptions into logical or illogical assumptions. Politicians use this effect to woo followers as entrepreneurs use this to lure the public into making rapid decisions about product and service usage. The end result-the user of information in the most manipulative ways gets his/her way through riches and power as the financial and political lives of the two R’s can attest to it.