If you are on the public payroll and you blog ‘anonymously’ but vigorously about things going on at work, sooner or later someone is going to say who you are. (Note: I worked for the FCO for nearly thirty years. Had I started blogging about UK foreign policy as a senior anonymous insider I would have been amazed if someone had not wanted to expose me, for good or less good reasons.)

That’s just the way it works. It may be that the person who ‘outs’ you is being obnoxious. But freedom includes the right to be obnoxious.

Not enough attention has been paid to the point that the prospect of being ‘outed’ eventually is one strong mechanism for giving anonymous bloggers incentives to stay honest and accurate.

On my own site I have written about how it might work if public bodies allowed their staff to blog anonymously. New awkward problems would emerge soon enough:

http://charlescrawford.biz/blog.php?single=1036

Bottom line: if you want to blog anonymously and not get revealed, you have to work very hard at covering your e-tracks. And then, when disaster strikes, take it on the chin.

I disagree with you about freedom, though. NightJack is still free to blog if he wishes to. He’ll just have to either do it with his name against it, or as a brand new secret pseudonym. He’s not lost the freedom to write at all.

But only when that doesn’t take away your own freedom. Freedom is the freedom to do anything that doesn’t destroy freedom. NJ is no longer free to publish.

The Times are probably within the Law here. That is irrelevant. What matters is that they are acting like a bunch of spiteful tw@ts. They know that they can’t beat bloggers on quality, so they’re hitting below the belt instead. My advice is, do not buy the Times ever again (I never have, myself); if they can act this irresponsibly, how can we trust any of their ‘news’ to be accurate?

I’m actually quite pleased with that sentence

If those who know, know (or should know) that they have received the information under conditions of confidence – either expressly, or implied from the circumstances under which they acquired it, then they have a duty to keep the information confidential. There is nothing criminal about disclosure, but there is a common law action that can be brought under the civil law to either restrain publication (if it hasn’t happened yet) or seek damages if it has.

Anyway, enough of this. I’m going to out you. You’re ██████ ██████, and you live in █████. There: how does that feel

Suppose: if NightJack hadn’t been named by a newspaper, but his identity had come to us from some other source – say, another blog, or one of his colleagues, or a family member. Suppose it had been posted publicly on the internet. Would the family member or colleague who posted it be a criminal? Would they have done something illegal?

Even better, imagine I had discovered your real name, and I referred to you by it on this blog. Would that make me a criminal?

Not really. It would be a betrayal of trust, and it would be dishonest and low, but it wouldn’t be a violation of your rights. I don’t see how this situation is any different – The Times came across the information independently and decided it was within their interests to publish it. Shame on them, indeed, and a sad, sorry state of affairs, but not a violation of rights.

Tizzy – “a form of whistle blowing or a menacing attempt to undermine a legitamately elected government” I wouldn’t really say so. NightJack was just observational. I rarely read his blog (though I looked through a fair amount of old posts following the Orwell Prize win), and he stopped updating it at the beginning of this year. He did level criticism at the Government, but no more than you would expect from a typical newspaper columnist or opposition politician.

You are right that NightJack could have written under many guises – but that would really have been far less effective. Words mean more when they come from a consistent source. It’s hard enough to be noticed in blogging anyway, let alone being noticed multiple times under different identities.

As for putting a real name to articles, is that gutsy or is it stupid? Only time will tell.

patently – interesting, but was his identity ‘confidential’, or just ‘not public knowledge’? Is there a difference?

Your comments are reasonable; we just have a slightly different take on the issue.

I will just correct one point, though; confidential information has long been subject to protection at law, and is (in general) enforceable against newspapers. There is no general rule that one’s identity is excluded from this – quite the opposite, in fact.

As NightJack won the Orwellian prize I’m guessing his blog resonated with lots of people. This would have have spurred him on to write more and more on what is necessarily his perspective. How much he left out, whether what he wrote was representative, I’ve no idea.

The police are in a difficult position in that they are state employees, with a duty to protect all, regardless of their, or their employers, policitics. One can take it that his blog was a form of whistle blowing or a menacing attempt to undermine a legitamately elected government. Yes, the last few words were difficult to write but remain true.

If Nightjack’s desire to remain anonymous was absolute he could have written under several guises and managed to put his case across – that is at the heart of blogging, as I understand it.

As you and I know, Stu, it isn’t that difficult to establish yourself under several names yet it remains relatively easy to find someone if you want to. I seriously doubt that The Indie and Times were the only ones interested enough to find out his id.

Blogs and their contributors who may go on to launch their own blogs (if they can get off their backsides long enough, ahem) should still be able to claim their name is their brand though I agree with your in that anyone who wants to start now, with the full intent of dissing who/whatever should have the guts to put their real name to their articles.

Blogging is old enough to have gained cachet for them who blog regularly. A 40-something professional should know exactly what they are getting into and, if he truly didn’t want publicity, should have demanded the withdrawal of his name from the prize.

What do I know though?

I wonder why the Times chose to do this. It is not comfortable thinking by any means.

We do not know why someone chooses to be anonymous so we should respect their decision. Those who object to statements someone makes can do so on the basis of their merits or lack thereof, rather than trying to beat them into submission with the law & other tools used by bullies. It doesn’t even matter who the person is, their blogging should be addressed on whether their information is right & whether their conclusions are logical & practicable.

This is a sad day. I never even particularly liked the Nightjack blog, but it is a sign of how much some in the media & that hate us.

You don’t have a ‘right’ to anonymity. You have the ability to remain anonymous for as long as nobody is willing to put in sufficient research to identify you.

There’s certainly a parallel with the Iraq enquiry and I absolutely agree with you that it seems disingenuous that this group of public figures can give their opinion entirely off the record whilst this public figure* must be place entirely on record. You’re also right that it’s entirely the wrong way round anyway – that if there were any decency in the world, NightJack would remain anonymous and the Iraq enquiry would have complete public scrutiny (barring details of ongoing operations).

But just because we might want that to be the case doesn’t mean it has to be.

Julia, absolutely! Well said.

*I’d be interested to know the legality of it all, but I’d say it’s plausible that NightJack, the pseudonymous writer, could be considered a public figure, whilst Richard Horton, the man behind the pseudonym, is a private individual.

I feel for Night Jack, but I can’t see that the answer to that should have been ‘yes’.

That doesn’t mean that The Times have acted honourably, but then, when did we ever expect our papers to do that?

It boils down to a form of bullying. The Iraq enquiry is, in part, about what public figures did in public. They are well-known enough, experienced enough, and sufficiently well resourced (from public funds) to look after themselves. Accordingly, at least that part of the inquiry should be in public.

Nightjack is just one copper, on his own. He is pointing out what is actually being done by The Establishment. In a straight fight, he is not going to win; already he has had a written warning and it is obvious that his career progression is over (at best).

His only defence against being bullied into submission was his anonymity.

Besides, the biggest competition for the mainstream media is blogs. They’re just defending their own territory against an onslaught of bloggers who are looking to make them irrelevant.

They are the establishment. They don’t get to pick sides.

The media should be part of the establishment criticism process, not part of the attempts to close criticism down. There is one good thing that has come out of this: nobody will be under any illusions as to which side of the fence Rupert Murdoch’s business stands.

Of course, ideally both would be public. Ideally public service workers wouldn’t have to blog anonymously, and their departments would be able to accept honest criticism for what it is. Ideally enquiries would be held in public.

We may be free to write anonymously, though, but others are still free to discover us and out us if they wish. That message seems to be getting lost a little, which is why I wrote the above.

I guess I’ll be ok, then. )

There is a distinct air of inconsistency, though.