In a landmark decision relating to confidentiality on the Internet, a police officer who wrote an anonymous blog has lost the legal battle to keep his identity secret.
Detective Constable Richard Horton, of Lancashire Constabulary, chronicled his behind-the-scenes experiences of frontline policing in his cult pseudonymous NightJack blog, which in April won this year’s Orwell blogging prize for political writing. He was also courted by agents and publishers hoping to secure the rights to his work.
When a journalist from The Times uncovered Mr Horton as the blog’s author, Mr Horton sought an injunction from the High Court to prohibit the newspaper from publishing the information. At the hearing to decide the issue, which took place on 4 June 2009, Mr Justice Eady granted “temporary cover” to restrain publication of the information, at least until he had considered the parties’ arguments and made his judgment.
At the hearing, Mr Horton’s counsel argued that his name should remain secret as Mr Horton was at risk of disciplinary action for breaching police regulations. Certain cases that he reported on the NightJack blog, although anonymised, could still be traced back to genuine prosecutions and, in places, Mr Horton roundly criticised the criminal justice system. Mr Justice Eady rejected this argument as “unattractive”, adding, “I do not accept that it is part of the court’s function to protect police officers who are… acting in breach of police discipline regulations.”
Mr Horton’s counsel also argued that there was a public interest in allowing bloggers to share their opinions but not their names. He said that thousands of bloggers would be “horrified” if they could be unmasked similarly.
Counsel for the Times responded that there was a public interest in exposing a police officer’s breach of his obligations under the statutory police code and under his general public law duty to protect information obtained during the course of a police investigation.
On 16 June 2009, Mr Justice Eady handed down his judgment. He removed the interim injunction that had been in place since 4 June 2009, ruling that Mr Horton could have no reasonable expectation of privacy “because blogging is essentially a public rather than private activity”. Mr Horton’s identity did not have the requisite “quality of confidence”, as defined in the leading case relating to breach of confidence, Coco v A N Clark. Its publication would not, therefore, contravene the right to privacy afforded by Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. In any event, the court added that the public interest inherent in revealing Mr Horton’s identity as a police officer would outweigh any right to privacy claimed.
For authors of blogs wishing to remain anonymous, particularly authors of blogs that reveal confidential or controversial information about their employer, this judgment serves as a warning that the courts will generally not offer protection if their identities are discovered and threatened to be published.
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