The Curious Case of NightJack Richard Horton: What Does It Mean For Blogger Anonymity? 

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The facts first.

In February 2008, Lancashire detective constable Richard Horton started writing the anonymous NightJack blog, which shared an insider’s perspective on policing and politics in a small English town. By January 2009, he had a daily readership of about 1500, but grew tired of the blog and stopped writing. Then NightJack won the prestigious Orwell Prize in March 2009 and his readership went up to half a million visitors a week.

When Times reporter Patrick Foster found his true identity by triangulating the digital trail he had left behind, Richard Horton deleted his blog and asked for an injunction to prevent the Times from revealing it. Justice Eady rejected the plea. The Times revealed Richard Horton’s identity in an expose and Richard Hortonhimself wrote a piece in The Times explaining why he had started and deleted the blog.

For more details see Daily Mail, Financial Times, BBC1 and BBC2.

It’s important that we begin by trying to understand the complex moral ambiguity in the curious case of NightJack Richard Horton.

On one hand, there’s the moral ambiguity of a police officer anonymously blogging about his cases and making controversial statements about policing and politics. On the other hand, there’s the moral ambiguity of a leading newspaper revealing the identity of an award-winning blogger, even as it fights to protect its right not to reveal the identity of its anonymous sources.

So, even as we question the motivations of The Times, and criticize its hypocrisy, we should also consider the unreasonable nature of Richard Horton’s plea: to stop The Times from revealing his identity because 1) it will cause damage to his police department and force it to take action against him and 2) it will be a setback to blogger privacy worldwide. The first concern is inconsequential and the second concern is an overstatement.

In rejecting Richar Horton’s plea, Justice Eady is only saying that  1) bloggers should be willing to take responsibility for what they write and 2) bloggers should take responsibility maintaining their anonymity, if they wish to remain anonymous. That’s it.

So, bloggers are still allowed to blog anonymously, except in countries like South Korea where your online accounts need to be linked to a real world ID. The judgment doesn’t mean that bloggers will be forced to reveal their identities.

Only a handful of anonymous bloggers in India, who write about controversial topics and have large followings, would be affected by this judgement. Most anonymous bloggers write about personal topics and have rather small followings and needn’t worry about such sting operations. Even these bloggers can use anonymizing tools like Psiphon and Tor to protect their identities, so the judgement doesn’t really affect them either.

The whole “end of blogger anonymity” story is hyped up by bloggers and journalists who don’t really understand what’s happening here. The judgment will have absolutely no impact on how many people start new blogs, how many bloggers write anonymously, or how many readers read anonymous blogs.

The bigger threat is legislation in free, democratic countries like India, UK and South Korea which 1) empowers police officials to seek personal details about bloggers from ISPs and platform providers like Google & Yahoo! and 2) seeks to link internet access to real world identity. It’s surprising that such legislation that threatens blogger privacy hardly hit the front page.

For more perspectives on the story see: Frances Gobbs at The Times, Oliver Kamm at The Times, Peter Robins at The Guardian, Afua Hirsch at The Guardian, Jean Seatton at The Guardian, Damian Thompson at The Telegraph, Becky Hogge at The Guardian, Gawker, Abby Lee and Tom Reynolds.

BBC, Global Voices, Paul Bradshaw, and Journalism.co.uk also have nice roundups on the controversy.