There's been a great deal of press coverage about the News of the World and alleged interception of phone messages among the country's celebs and public figures, but a huge amount of it is missing the point.

Friday's Times devoted two early pages to the story, saying the DPP, Keir Starmer QC, has ordered 'a renewed examination' of the case of Clive Goodman, the jailed Royal editor at the NoW. The Times's investigations editor, Dominic Kennedy, wrote two full columns about the things hacks get up to that aren't quite legit, attempting to make the case that legally grey actions have exposed a fair amount of corruption.

All of which may well be true, but it's not the point at hand at all. The accusation is that a newspaper has allegedly been routinely paying for information hacked from famous people's voicemails. I used to be an IT journalist and have attended court cases wherein individuals have been convicted under the Computer Misuse Act for 'hacking' into computers and doing nothing at all. Merely gaining unauthorised access to a computer system is, as far as I was aware, a criminal offence under the act. You can get two years for behaviour like that.

The last CMA judgment I attended was of Daniel Cuthbert, convicted in 2005 of hacking into the Disasters Emergency Committee website set up after the Asian tsunami of 2004. Cuthbert didn't do anything to the site, but he set off an internal alarm, later explaining himself by saying he had left a donation then wanted to check site security by 'knocking' it himself.

He was found guilty of one offence under the Computer Misuse Act and fined £400. It was accepted that Cuthbert was not attempting to be fraudulent or to make money by hacking.

So why do the police seem so unconcerned about potential widespread hacking of voicemail accounts that, if true, patently is being done 'to make money'?

More important, why do the police seem to care more about someone like Cuthbert who didn't actually 'break' anything than about alleged organised criminality? Surely it can't be because people like Cuthbert are easier to take down. Or because journalists have more friends who are coppers than do IT engineers.

As for the 'public interest' involved, it's not like the alleged victims were suspected of being secret members of the Taliban, unless Elle Macpherson and Simon Hughes have bigger secrets than even I can imagine. If you are, though, Simon, you really need to do more work on the beard. I'm not buying it.