In general, societies benefit from having ‘whistleblowers’. This doesn’t mean that everything they say will be right, rather that we need a system that allows people to reveal information ‘in the public interest’ without fear of prosecution/harrassment.

Now, you can argue how this law should be drafted, but the one thing that is clear from this case the the way the Times behaved: there was no public interest in knowing his real identity.

P Foster would have done well to read this when he was confronted at his door by the boys in blue

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1531307/Student-barred-over-sex-film.html Patrick Foster Peeping Tom

The comments are worth reading.

Leon, I didn’t even think of the Murdoch angle yet. He was talking up paid subscriptions for all news websites a while back a.k.a “Google News stole our Headlines”.

b’shalom

bananabrain

At least three police bloggers have been forced to stop blogging and take their past posts down or be disciplined, and one actually emigrated.

b’shalom

bananabrain

And onward the march to an increasingly regulated internet…

(By the way, this dovetails nicely with restriction of ‘undesirable’ opinion on the Net, and perhaps with a longer-term objective of dumbing down the Net as a knowledge resource in favour of the corporate media model. Anyway, the cynic in me thinks “You lot worry about Islamic Extremism/Iran etc. while these fuckers strip your freedoms…it worked with the Credit Crunch and MP Expenses didn’t it?”).

but suddenly it’s OK for them to expose bloggers?

i am very disappointed if i’ve understood this correctly.

b’shalom

bananabrain

1. Setup blogs under email addresses you don’t use for any other reason, stick to free ones like hotmail or gmail, and don’t register it with your real details.

2. There is software available on the internet, and as far as I know it is legal, and you can use it to mask your IP address.

I think the security services can still track you down, but your average tabloid journalist, not a chance I think.

Having said that I don’t really care. I say what I say, and I’ll say it to someones face.

However I do have mixed feelings about this. If someone is breaking the law, then the law has the capablity and the right to track you down.

However do you deserve privacy as an individual, in say this case, or that case where it was exposed a self styled security expert was posting hateful comments on ummah.com to then sell the story to the papers? We all pretty much supported his outing. We generally don’t support this outing.

Why? I think the reason is where we draw the line between right and wrong. I think it varies from individual to invidivual, and I don’t feel comfortable having someone legislate on that.

Otherwise privacy is a free speech matter: without privacy we censor ourselves out of fear of the consequences.

Hmmmmm….

Blogs are public and can wield real influence…