A police officer and blogger who reported from inside the police has been revealed. He had battled in the courts to keep his identity secret, but the judge overruled him and he was unmasked. He called himself 'NightJack. In fact he is Richard Horton, a detective constable in the Lancashire constabulary.
The ruling is significant because it sets a precedent: My Justice Eady ruled that blogging is essentially a public activity and that bloggers therefore have no automatic right to privacy.
So it’s a bad day for us bloggers. If you are a whistleblower exposing corruption or incompetence, the law will not ride to your defence. Even if you have something interesting to say that gets you a following (NightJack had 500,000 apparently – if only I had that!) you have no legal right to privacy and so your employer can, and probably will, catch you. And sack you.
The Times is responsible for this. The reporter who sniffed out NightJack is Patrick Foster. Readers of my blog will see that I worked at The Times recently, doing work experience on their Home News section. I didn’t meet Patrick Foster, but as you will see in my previous post, I got a flavour of the ethos of The Times during my time there.
Was this a blow for, or against freedom? This judgment doesn’t restrict freedom to blog, just freedom to hide. And as we can see in Iran and China, anonymity is an essential tool in the arsenal against the power of the state. But there is a competing freedom: the freedom to report.
If The Times wants to report upon, and scrutinise, an anonymous blogger who may or may not be telling the truth 100% of the time, then why shouldn’t they? NightJack wasn’t asking the court to allow him to write; he was asking the court to censor someone else’s freedom to publish. So the onus in this case was on NightJack to explain why the media should be muzzled, not why he should be allowed to blog with complete anonymity. If you want to have freedom of the press – and I do – it has to be absolute, and cut both ways.
I am a blogger. If I want to publish something critical, mischievous, seditious, scurrilous or scandalous then I remain free to do so. That is freedom of expression. As long as I’m not doing anything criminal, that remains the case. What this judgement says, however, is that I cannot expect other journalists’ freedom of expression and reporting to be curtailed on my behalf, just because I will be left feeling uncomfortable when my employer (or anyone else) finds out who I am.
Now there’s a lot of cant being spouted by The Times right now. They weren’t acting as guardians of free expression in bringing this case, that’s for sure. They argued in court that it was in the public interest for NighJack to be exposed. Come off it. We love the sheer cheek of a guardian of the law savaging his superiors and gving us the inside picture on how the fuzz go about their business. The Times knew full well that if they won then anonymous blogs that challenged authority in any way shape or form would be doomed.
Legally The Times deserved to win, because their freedom of reporting trumps NightJack’s desire for court censorship. Yes the ruling will restrict his freedom to publish, and will worry all the other subversive bloggers out there. But NightJack’s discomfort when the Chief Inspector asks him into the office for ‘a little chat’ is part of the chain reaction of the ruling, and not strictly the issue the courts had to pass judgment on.
The Times doesn’t come out well from this. They brought this case out of self-interest, not to champion freedom of speech. When I worked at The Times in May 2009 I was told over and over again that the printed media is in a death spiral, unable to pull out of the destructive wake left by online media content. Why pay for a paper owned by Rupert Murdoch to tell you about the police when a real copper can give you the inside picture without having to pass through the filter of the Police’s own media department?
So The Times brought this case to kill off blogs as a viable alternative to mainstream media. Perhaps they didn’t set out with that aim in mind initially – no-one can really say, apart from the editor. But they are smart people; I know because I’ve met and worked with them. They knew that the blogosphere, at least in the UK, would never be the same if they won this case.
The Times’ defence, as articulated by Daniel Finkelstein, doesn’t pass muster. Sure, NightJack might have been a politician masquerading as a copper. So what? The whole point of the internet, of ‘citizen journalists’, is that there are so many of them. We don’t have to take anyone’s word for it.
So the end result is that blogging is really no different to standing up on Hyde Park corner and yelling something. You can say what you like, as long as you don’t break the law. If what you say upsets your company, they can sack you. You can challenge them in an industrial tribunal. If your contract has a clause of ‘gross misconduct’, the tribunal must interpret whether you have been in breach of this. It’s not an automatic ‘you’re fired’ judgment. Companies need protecting from anonymous employees who may lie about them. But the downside of this judgment is that one more avenue for whistleblowers has been firmly closed. It looks like they’ll just have to go to The Times now. Which is probably what they wanted. If anything good is to come out of this judgement it should be how to give whistleblowers more protection. The blogosphere is not the answer.
So I mourn the exposure of NightJack, and The Times' victory. But it was inevitable, and bloggers need to understand that the internet isn’t anonymous. It never was. Suppose The Times had lost the case. What if another blogger found out who NightJack was and wanted to expose him? Would the courts be right in silencing him too? You can’t pick and choose freedom of expression. Get over it guys. And keep blogging.
The ruling is significant because it sets a precedent: My Justice Eady ruled that blogging is essentially a public activity and that bloggers therefore have no automatic right to privacy.
So it’s a bad day for us bloggers. If you are a whistleblower exposing corruption or incompetence, the law will not ride to your defence. Even if you have something interesting to say that gets you a following (NightJack had 500,000 apparently – if only I had that!) you have no legal right to privacy and so your employer can, and probably will, catch you. And sack you.
The Times is responsible for this. The reporter who sniffed out NightJack is Patrick Foster. Readers of my blog will see that I worked at The Times recently, doing work experience on their Home News section. I didn’t meet Patrick Foster, but as you will see in my previous post, I got a flavour of the ethos of The Times during my time there.
Was this a blow for, or against freedom? This judgment doesn’t restrict freedom to blog, just freedom to hide. And as we can see in Iran and China, anonymity is an essential tool in the arsenal against the power of the state. But there is a competing freedom: the freedom to report.
If The Times wants to report upon, and scrutinise, an anonymous blogger who may or may not be telling the truth 100% of the time, then why shouldn’t they? NightJack wasn’t asking the court to allow him to write; he was asking the court to censor someone else’s freedom to publish. So the onus in this case was on NightJack to explain why the media should be muzzled, not why he should be allowed to blog with complete anonymity. If you want to have freedom of the press – and I do – it has to be absolute, and cut both ways.
I am a blogger. If I want to publish something critical, mischievous, seditious, scurrilous or scandalous then I remain free to do so. That is freedom of expression. As long as I’m not doing anything criminal, that remains the case. What this judgement says, however, is that I cannot expect other journalists’ freedom of expression and reporting to be curtailed on my behalf, just because I will be left feeling uncomfortable when my employer (or anyone else) finds out who I am.
Now there’s a lot of cant being spouted by The Times right now. They weren’t acting as guardians of free expression in bringing this case, that’s for sure. They argued in court that it was in the public interest for NighJack to be exposed. Come off it. We love the sheer cheek of a guardian of the law savaging his superiors and gving us the inside picture on how the fuzz go about their business. The Times knew full well that if they won then anonymous blogs that challenged authority in any way shape or form would be doomed.
Legally The Times deserved to win, because their freedom of reporting trumps NightJack’s desire for court censorship. Yes the ruling will restrict his freedom to publish, and will worry all the other subversive bloggers out there. But NightJack’s discomfort when the Chief Inspector asks him into the office for ‘a little chat’ is part of the chain reaction of the ruling, and not strictly the issue the courts had to pass judgment on.
The Times doesn’t come out well from this. They brought this case out of self-interest, not to champion freedom of speech. When I worked at The Times in May 2009 I was told over and over again that the printed media is in a death spiral, unable to pull out of the destructive wake left by online media content. Why pay for a paper owned by Rupert Murdoch to tell you about the police when a real copper can give you the inside picture without having to pass through the filter of the Police’s own media department?
So The Times brought this case to kill off blogs as a viable alternative to mainstream media. Perhaps they didn’t set out with that aim in mind initially – no-one can really say, apart from the editor. But they are smart people; I know because I’ve met and worked with them. They knew that the blogosphere, at least in the UK, would never be the same if they won this case.
The Times’ defence, as articulated by Daniel Finkelstein, doesn’t pass muster. Sure, NightJack might have been a politician masquerading as a copper. So what? The whole point of the internet, of ‘citizen journalists’, is that there are so many of them. We don’t have to take anyone’s word for it.
So the end result is that blogging is really no different to standing up on Hyde Park corner and yelling something. You can say what you like, as long as you don’t break the law. If what you say upsets your company, they can sack you. You can challenge them in an industrial tribunal. If your contract has a clause of ‘gross misconduct’, the tribunal must interpret whether you have been in breach of this. It’s not an automatic ‘you’re fired’ judgment. Companies need protecting from anonymous employees who may lie about them. But the downside of this judgment is that one more avenue for whistleblowers has been firmly closed. It looks like they’ll just have to go to The Times now. Which is probably what they wanted. If anything good is to come out of this judgement it should be how to give whistleblowers more protection. The blogosphere is not the answer.
So I mourn the exposure of NightJack, and The Times' victory. But it was inevitable, and bloggers need to understand that the internet isn’t anonymous. It never was. Suppose The Times had lost the case. What if another blogger found out who NightJack was and wanted to expose him? Would the courts be right in silencing him too? You can’t pick and choose freedom of expression. Get over it guys. And keep blogging.
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