And another thing…

The Times used to be a great newspaper but now its just narrow and small minded as this action justifies.

Agree with you wholeheartedly.
The Times don’t really seem to have done something that’s in the public interest.

Err…..don’t we all wish we did have that right, but a certain Judge profoundly disagrees.

However, the issue of anonymity should be viewed entirely separately from the issue of the journalist’s motivation in hounding down Mr. Horton. Just what exactly did it prove, and what has the public gained from this nonsensical (in my opinion) “old vs new” spat?

Can we take it The Times will now name all previously unattributed lobby sources, on the basis that we have a right to know their names as they are public servants? No, thought not.

Ahhh, completely agree with you. Except that there has to be a “trail” of sorts. On the one hand, a blog “works” because of the anonymity. On the other hand, if it’s used for libel, racist or other forms of proscribed abuse, to breach privacy or state security, there has to be some recourse in law for the state or the individual. The principle of “anonymity” must have reasonable limits. I’m not suggesting that NightJack has been in any way reprehensible, which makes him easy to defend, but I wonder if you’d be so staunch in your defence of, for example, a holocaust denyer? If it’s a principle, it’s a principle for one and all. Ticky, isn’t it.

One particular benefit of anonymity is that it means that arguments must speak for themselves. You can’t just rely on some kind of call to authority to justify what you say.

Of course, if you get too big, like Guido, you are bound to have to reveal your identity or be found out.

As for the Times, I have no idea what they were thinking. I can’t imagine that many people would have heard of the blog in question and I can’t imagine that many outside of the blogosphere actually care.

Hmm, he put his views into the public arena behind a supposed cloak of anonymity.

NightJack was a serving officer in the police force who regularly blogged about his dislike of police procedures and raised issues about the incompetence of government policy.

Personally I think there was a public interest in knowing who this person is, especially if he aspires to future promotion.

Tom. I agree with you 110% on this one.

Well said.

Tom, I agree with you.

But if we all have a right to anonymity, why is your government so determined to intercept all our private communications?

Absolutely…

I don’t subscribe to the anti Mr Justice Eady school. Having been involved in the legal world for thirty years I wouldn’t.

Eady is a judge. He has to apply the law such as it is. He has the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords above him and, of course, Parliament and statute. If Mr Justice Eady errs in law in giving a judgment he can be corrected in the Court of Appeal. That is how it works – as we all should know… Unless things have changed in the last few hours.

Judges are not there to please vested interests.

The Times has made a mistake with this story. Foster is being ripped to shreds, rationally and emotively, in the free world of blogging, Twitter and the coffee houses and bars of Britain. This is good for freedom of speech, if a bit uncomfortable for a young journalist.

Few of us can claim perfect lives – but Mr Foster has not begun his journalistic career with any style here. One would have thought that his experience at Oxford of rustication and amateur movie interests would have given him a degree of perspective?

If a blogger breaks the criminal law, uses anonymity to make the lives of those who cannot defend themselves on blogs, in the courts, in Parliament… a misery, through defamation or unfair persecution, then they should have no reasonable expectation of privacy. All other anonymous bloggers should have that right. I suspect that the blogging community would not be impressed by the activities of such a blogger – a contrast to the responsibility shown by The Times?

Politicians, since time immemorial, have had to bear the slings and arrows of outrageous blogging/parody (and they do so with some style in many cases) – but we should allow anonymity as a right for people who wish to talk about issues, about ideas, about abuse without fear of being oppressed by an employer or the State

I would just like to point out that as a blogger, I do NOT hide behind any false facade – Silent Hunter is my real name – as my Dad, Mr Hunter, was very into submarine warfare simulations at the time – and I would also just like to confirm that icon picture is really what I look like.

And anyone who says that I’m telling porky pies will be Deleted!

Got that?

Delete . . . Delete . . .Deleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeete!

(sound of electrical discharge)

Remember . . .”Emotion is a weakness”

On a more serious note . . . I DO agree with you Tom.

If indeed, that IS your real name.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time I put the cat out for the night

“Here Kitty, Kitty, Kitty…”

Can I add…oh, I suppose I am: to agree with (and hopefully reinforce) “Richard”. I don’t agree that there’s necessarily a a “public interest” here: the public being interested and “public interest are not the same thing. But “NightJack” breached the confidence his employers had a reasonable right to expect. They must have a recourse, even if only under employment law rather than criminal law.

Man I’m tired. Can’t write coherently.

Is this a campaign of the Times to wipe out all bloggers in favour of broadsheets? Maybe an interesting subject for an adjournment debate?

[...] Wednesday, June 17, 2009 by charonqc Anonymity should be a blogger’s right [...]

The interesting result of The Times making such a disgrace of itself is that the Guardian has now won the battle of the (ex-)broadsheets.

Well I agree with you, the Times has (if this ruling is also applicable to the dead tree press) just thrown out the right to keep sources confidential.

I’m not too sure what goes through Eady’s head, isn’t he the same judge who happily defends the right to secrecy of the rich and famous?

” I would go further than that: The Times has launched an all-out attack against blogging for no good reason.”

There’s a very good reason. Ask the question ‘qui bono’ and then look at the fact News International is interested in moving back to a model that charges for online news. Under those circumstances, I’d expect their organs to seek to undo their rivals, from bloggers (who’s anonymity is now gone making lives more difficult in our libel-tourism nation) or the BBC who’s license fee they campaign to cut.

Qui bono? Indeed.

Simon W

We used to have free speech in this country. I remember as a boy being taken to speakers corner. They would all be arested today for what they were saying.
You must allow free speech no matter how much you disagree. Laws pased by this Labour government on behalf of the EU have restricted it. You are not allowed to speak you mind anymore as it may offend someone. Just like Nazi Germany.

Quite ironically Orwellian really. Big brother wins and the historical record is deleted.

It is petty sensationalism in the Times. An attempt to apply tabloid celebrity journalismin away that appeals to the middle class. No concern about lives or careers destroyed in the course of this.

And his MP says????

I think you’re wrong. By choosing to put their musings into the public domain bloggers surrender any rights they might otherwise have to anonymity.

As Daniel Finkelstein http://tinyurl.com/nces4p observes “When a public servant decides to reveal the confidences of their colleagues and details of their work, especially on police cases, then their identity becomes a legitimate matter of interest. And other journalists might reasonably investigate the matter.”

And just because someone writes a blog it doesn’t follow that their view is impartial, “true” or worth reading.

Every single newspaper editor in the country has been itching to ‘get one over’ the bloggers ever since their business model started to fall apart.

The Times could have kept Nightjack’s identity secret, but they chose not to – and the reasons could not be more cynical, in my opinion.

@BH,

Thanks for the Finkelstein quote:

‘When a public servant decides to reveal the confidences of their colleagues and details of their work, especially on police cases, then their identity becomes a legitimate matter of interest. And other journalists might reasonably investigate the matter.’

This seems to be exactly the opposite of what journalists should be encouraging. How are we to learn about what really goes on in organisations in which we put our trust if anyone on the inside who could report breaches of that trusts fears that they themselves will come under scrutiny?

You could argue that anonymous bloggers have power without responsibility – they could, for all kinds of unpleasant reasons – personal grudges – undermine their colleagues, their employers, and public trust, and do so with no fear of redress and in in violation of the principle of natural justice that the accused have the right to face their accusers.

That though would be to misidentify the public interset and the accuser. The public interest is that organisations in which we place our trust do not betray that trust and work to rules under public scrutiny. Any honest member of such an organisation has a public duty to bring breaches of that trust to our attention, whereupon we become the accusers against whom the organisation may wish to defend itself. If the price of alerting a wider audience to malpractice or the effects on honest public officials of poorly drafted or unworkable legislation is to risk exposure, loss of income, and personal danger, then we can be sure that we will hear a lot less about what’s going wrong than would otherwise be the case, and the public interest will be thwarted. Thwart it is what The Times has done.

Agree with you Tom. When reading the Times’ self righteous defense of it’s actions people should ask themselves why it continues to publish anonymous leader columns.

Unrelated, but important tom. Kevin mbguire is on the dp reporting a huge labour whipping operation for margaret becket. Care to comment?

I stopped reading The Guardian because of its obscene partiality and unpleasant ambivalence towards anti-British thought and behaviour, particularly after 7/7.

I went to The Times for a far more balanced view.

This outrageous, self-serving, mean-spirited,autocratic action is almost enough to send me back.

Ben at 12.28 pm: “Kevin mbguire is on the dp reporting a huge labour whipping operation for margaret becket. Care to comment?”

Of course… MPs can’t be whipped on this vote, but if they choose to take the advice of a whip acting entirely unofficially and independently of the government, I suppose that’s up to them.

But to save any whip the trouble, I will not be supporting Margaret. I will vote for Bercow. My second choice will be Parmjit. And then probably George Young.

No, even now, I’ll always refer to him as Nightjack.

Anonymity rights aside, the Times’s explanation for this action reeks of utter hypocrisy. It’s true NJ was treading on thin ice when he occasionally posted on specific crimes, though he typically wrote about the general. I can’t say if he altered the facts sufficiently to hide the source completely, which ought to be the key aspect. Certainly, the paper’s decision to publish his details has made it easier to identify them.

The Times attacked his ‘guide for decent folk on being arrested’ because, they argued, it advises people to ‘Show no respect to the legal system or anybody working in it’. They have completely missed the point, again presumably with calculated hypocrisy. The guide was, in a tongue-in-cheek manner, outlining the ways behaving honestly and decently under arrest can count against you. And, by contrast, how dishonesty and non-cooperation often work in your favour. The Police’s regular customers know all this and exploit it accordingly. People with no experience of being arrested walk into the elephant traps.

It’s good of you to weigh in on this, Tom. Nightjack could hardly be described as a man of the Left. He’s highly critical of some of your sacred cows. It is curious how the main police bloggers (David Copperfield, Inspector Gadget, WPC Bloggs etc. ) do tend to post about the same gripes: how the target culture has distorted policing priorities and the amount of red tape involved in dealing with even the pettiest offences. They uniformly (?) grumble about an Underclass of generational benefit claimants which supplies them disproportionately with work. Maybe they are all intrinsically biased; the world of policing is too far from my experience to say.

If you have’t read any Nightjack (and I’m surprised Tom could be a fan) I suggest you do. It’s good writing. You can still find snippets here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/17/night-jack-orwell-prize

Richard @ 11:27

“NightJack was a serving officer in the police force who regularly blogged about his dislike of police procedures and raised issues about the incompetence of government policy.

Personally I think there was a public interest in knowing who this person is, especially if he aspires to future promotion.”

I rarely get annoyed by comments but what a nasty, creepy, sinister remark. Best to ‘out’ anyone daring to criticise Government policy, eh? With luck that’ll spike their careers. How very Stasi. Oh, and I think you actually meant ‘competence’. Still, I prefer your version.

Finally. Tom, I’m disappointed you’re voting for Bercow. I thought the whole point about selecting the Speaker is the avoidance of party point scoring. You know the Tories can’t stand Bercow. And, to quote Hannan: “we (the public) know that you know”. It means you weren’t being honest when you talked of reform.

@ Dave H. “Best to ‘out’ anyone daring to criticise Government policy, eh? ”

I’m sure those who regularly read this blog would probably agree that I’m hardly the government’s primary cheerleader.

I simply don’t think that a serving police officer should be able to publicly criticise his superiors (political or temporal) while still remaining “in post”.

As with so much else, what he does in the privacy of his own home is entirely his own business. When he brings his opinions out into the world he has to understand that he is accountable for them, in the same way as if he’s written a letter to the papers or given an interview on Sky.

@Richard

‘I simply don’t think…’

Hold it right there. You said it.

[...] Tom Harris is decrying the Times [...]

@ Jim Baxter
If you’re going to selectively quote I’d have gone with

“I’m [a] hard…prim…cheerleader”.

I agree, Tom. The Times has behaved disgracefully here, both because it’s chilled the free speech journalists are supposed to support, and because of its utter hypocrisy – it uses anonymous police sources repeatedly in its reports, even though it was prepared to argue in court that it’s in the public interest for police officers making such unauthorised disclosures to be exposed.

@Richard,

You were supposed to say, ‘I have been quoted out of context. I think you’ll find that what I was really saying was…’. You know, like Cabinet Ministers who get drunk and say to a journalist that so and so is a horror, then have to go around the TV stations after being bawled out to say ‘I have been quoted out of context. What I was really saying was that Wendy Alexander is wonderful’.

That kind of thing.

A hard, prim cheerleader though? Interesting. What’s your phone number?

@ Jim Baxter
I don’t think that anyone’s ever been quoted as saying that Wendy Alexander is (was) wonderful, in context or out.