Should a civil servant be sacked for posting a disobliging comment about a Minister on a website anonymously, using an official computer to do so?

Iain Dale has the link.

He asks:

Does this strike you as being a bit over the top? What it implies is that there is an army of civil service snoopers tracing anonymous blog comments all over the internet and then trying to trace them back to government employees. I am not sure how they do this, but no doubt someone out there can enlighten me.

Here is what happened as explained by the sacked civil servant Lisa Greenwood:

1)   She used google and ended up on Hazel Blear’s page on TheyWorkForYou.com
2)   She clicked through from it to Hazel’s official site
3)   She found the ‘contact me’ page on the official site and then
clicked on the email address, which, using a mailto: tag popped up her
work email client.
4)   She wrote and sent her fatal email, which was delivered from her
DCSF email account, not her Hotmail which she’d normally use.

Mystery solved. The recipients would have been able to spot from the email address that the sender was working for a government department and so report the matter to the Department responsible for further action. No army of government cyber-snoopers needed (or indeed existing).

Sacking someone for this silly behaviour is obnoxious and excessive.

But it is also wrong in principle – and fat-headed – to write rude comments about anyone let alone a Minister on a website using a government-funded computer.