Taken to the extreme, ask yourself how do you know the source of the information or opinion is even real? It could be the very enemy you fight, freely using dis-information to confuse you, get you to tilt at windmills, fight a tangential fight. While you attention is on that, the real game is going on behind you.

Think about it.

Freely I give my name here…

Paul Bailey

Barry

The public interest was not served by shutting down this whistleblower. On the contrary; only the political interests of some narrow-minded senior policemen were served, and the interests of everyone else were damaged.

What *does* need opposing would be any legislative attack on anonymous publishing, online or elsewhere: making it an actual offence to publish anonymously. But in a roundabout way, this is what we face in the UK and elsewhere; via data retention and effectively unlimited trawling, but also by mooted suggestions, which keep coming back, of *confirmed* online identities. Whether that is via some kind of biometric login, or a packet by packet ISP-attached identifier, or any other such scheme, that needs to be opposed strongly.

As it stands, you can, more or less, publish anonymously if you’re clued up enough, try hard enough, use the right tools – moves to criminalise those tools, or worse, put them out of reach with some “gentlemen’s agreement”, eg P2P, need exposing for what they are.

I shall miss Nightjack, but it’s the police at fault for refusing to accept dissent in the ranks, rather than the press, or even that publicity hound Eady.

Surely those who argue for freedom of expression and complain against the broadning of rights of privacy should not complain when the Times reveals the identity of an anonymous blogger. It would be very different if an internet provider were forced to reveal a blogger’s identity but that is not what this case is about.

While the British judiciary is to be condemned for issuing gag orders in other cases, the double standard is better remedied by refusing to apply gag orders anywhere, rather than applying them everywhere.

Anonymity is important exactly because it is an enabler of freedom of expression. But to protect it, and poorly, while curtailing freedom of expression is counter-productive.

As for WikiLeaks, it does not need protection of these laws; Although we are, in theory, protected under Belgium and Swedish source-protection laws, these laws are directed against the state itself, not journalists, and many of our opponents do not follow the rule of law. That is why we have technical systems to protect our sources regardless of law.

Would bloggers be so up in arms about this if Night Jack had been attempting to injunct a blogger rather than a newspaper?

The Night Jack case will serve to strenghten anonymous blogging not weaken it, as it is a warning that you must do things properly. Don’t set yourself up as an anonymous blogger and then actively court attention or make it relatively easy for people to find out who you are.

The MacIntyre case seems to me, a non-expert, to be a bit of a red herring. Nice sentiment though. It was about whether MacIntyre could publish without being required to put her name on every pamphlet. That is akin to not being allowed (rather than able) to publish on a blog anonymously. It did not concern absolute protection from ever being named.

Night Jack can still publish anonymously if he wants to – just pick another pseudonym and be more careful. He would have stood a better chance of remaining anonymous by being less specific with the details he published.