I previously wrote about the ethics or not of one US blogger ‘outing’ an anonymous (to be precise pseudonymous) blogger who had persistently criticised him.

Now we have Orwell Prize winner Jack Night revealed to be Detective Constable Richard Horton by the Times.

Iain Dale is sickened.

FleetStreetBlues is/are pragmatic:

Why should newspapers be prevented from naming the author of a published website just because they’d rather not be named? There is no automatic right of privacy in the street – and neither should there be on the information superhighway.

Read the good Times account of the judgment for yourself, here.

The legal and ethical issues inevitably get tangled up in a case like this and the explosion of views afterwards.

But in my view based on the newspaper account the judge trod a narrow but firm line pretty well (my emphasis):

… people who “wish to hold forth” to the public often took steps to disguise their authorship. But it was a “significantly further step” to argue that if people could deduce their identity, they should be restrained in law from revealing it.

… Hugh Tomlinson, QC, for the blogger, had argued that “thousands of regular bloggers who communicate nowadays via the internet under a cloak of anonymity would be horrified to think that the law would do nothing to protect their anonymity of (sic) someone carried out the necessary detective work and sought to unmask them”.

The judge said: “That may be true. I suspect that some would be very concerned and others less so.”

But “be that as it may”, he added, the blogger needed to show that he had a legally enforceable right to maintain anonymity in the absence of a genuine breach of confidence, by suppressing the fruits of detective work such as that carried out by Mr Foster.

This is spot on. You have the right to try to hide yourself or some information. I have the right to try to peer behind your disguise or to lift up stones I see lying around to see what you might be hiding.

There is no law that lets you stop me doing that, merely because it is annoying or highly inconvenient.

If I had been an ‘anonymous’ blogger writing in frank terms about the FCO while I was still working for HMG, I would have been amazed if some or other journalist did not try to track me down and expose me. Why not? It’s a good story, which helps sell newspapers – and that’s their job.

If I had been writing in breach of internal disciplinary codes to which I had signed up as an employee, so much the worse for me as and when the story came out.

And if you are writing publicly in disobliging but anonymous terms about the place for which you work, are you not letting down your colleagues and the public? What’s so great about someone who wants to have all the benefits of anonymity at the expense of her/his professional responsibilities to the taxpayer and Crown? Not much.

The main point surely is that in today’s world people have formidable technical power. The House of Commons expenses disaster happened because the whole caboodle could be downloaded on to a CD and taken out of the building – impossible not that long ago.

And see what is happening as the regime and Iranian masses chase each other Twittering around the Internet.

Some of that power ends up being used to stir up trouble and embarrassment for other people. Too bad. Forget moralising about it. It’s like the weather. It’s just the way things work.

Not convinced? Try drafting a law to say otherwise, and watch how our freedoms to expose abuses, corruption, deceit, dishonesty – or just plain hypocrisy – evaporate.

Even Hopi Sen (v unhappy about this development) is not sure that the law is wrong. In which case, not much point complaining if a judge upholds it.

* * * * *

Is it a shame if Night Jack blogging ends? Yes, but life goes on. Other fine blogs in this area will emerge.

Should all anonymous/pseudonymous bloggers fear for their privacy? Yes, but no more than they did previously (and if I were them I’d look to step up their e-protection and other measures if they want to stay private for a bit longer). My own approach: be honest, and as open/public as possible – it gives pretty good protection in practice.

Does all sorts of stuff get revealed today whether we like it or not? Yes. It’s partly a new philosophically anarchic situation where we do not even know what anything is any more (remember a fuss about whether someone’s DNA can be patented?) and where any lines should be drawn.

And getting worked up about it assumes that the media have some moral standards, from which they have fallen. I don’t assume that. I assume that they only want to sell newspapers, and that millions of people want to read them.

So I am not worked up. 

Basically, it’s just plain old confusing contradictory freedom.

Let’s deal with it. As we have done for centuries.