ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

News International phone hacking scandal

Okay, so basically, there are some people who work for a company called News International. They own some newspapers and they want to get juicy stories to put in their newspapers so that more people will buy them. But sometimes, they can't get those stories just by asking people questions or looking for clues. So, some of these people at News International decided to do something called "phone hacking."

Phone hacking means that they figured out how to get into other people's phones and listen to their private conversations or read their private messages. This is not a nice thing to do because it's like being a sneaky spy and invading someone's privacy.

The people at News International who were doing this wanted to find out secrets about famous people or important people so they could tell everyone and make their newspapers popular. But, when they got caught doing this, a lot of people got angry and they thought it was really unfair and wrong.

So, the whole thing became a really big deal and lots of people in the news and the government and even regular people started talking about it and trying to figure out what should be done about it. In the end, some of the people who did the phone hacking got in trouble and the company had to say sorry and promise not to do it again.

So, that's pretty much what happened in the News International phone hacking scandal. It's all about people who worked for a company trying to get secrets by hacking into other people's phones and it was not a good thing to do.