The pair chatted behind closed doors as a former New York cop made the 9/11 hacking claim. He alleged he was contacted by News of the World journalists who said they would pay him to retrieve the private phone records of the dead.

Now working as a private ­investigator, the ex-officer claimed reporters wanted the victim’s phone numbers and details of the calls they had made and received in the days leading up to the atrocity.

A source said: “This investigator is used by a lot of journalists in America and he recently told me that he was asked to hack into the 9/11 victims’ private phone data. He said that the journalists asked him to access records showing the calls that had been made to and from the mobile phones belonging to the victims and their ­relatives.

“His presumption was that they wanted the information so they could hack into the ­relevant voicemails, just like it has been shown they have done in the UK. The PI said he had to turn the job down. He knew how insensitive such research would be, and how bad it would look."

Indeed. That said, this article raises more questions than it answers, and I would note a couple of major caveats. One, the story is pretty thinly sourced, as we say in the business. Two, the Mirror is a non-Murdoch-owned British tabloid driven by the same kind of competitive pressures that led to this whole scandal in the first place.

But I think the significance is this: Given the scandal in the UK, the American activities of Murdoch-controlled journalists -- at both his British publications and his U.S. emterprises -- deserve closer scrutiny, including from law enforcement. Maybe Murdoch's journalists' alleged illegal activities stopped at the far shores of the Atlantic, but we should find out for sure.