tim's experiment

Full marks to Allan Chiang, the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data, for being willing to explain himself. Long letter in Pravda this morning repeating previous points. The man will not shut up. He has considerable chutzpah – Mr Chiang complains that personal names are ambiguous, which is not what he said when he was pushing the line that ID card numbers were a personal secret. But Mr Chiang’s basic problem is that he has lost track of the notion that some things should be public.  And if they are public that means people are free to use or misuse them as they think fit.

Mr Chiang says that the names of people engaged in criminal, civil or bankruptcy proceedings are “made available by government authorities for specific purposes”. This is nonsense. Actually government authorities have nothing to do with it. It is a basic legal principle that justice should be public.

When I first became a journalist this was not the legal fiction which it has become as newspapers got smaller and court lists got longer. I worked for a newspaper called the Morecambe Visitor (which is still afloat and is now online here: http://www.thevisitor.co.uk/). We circulated in Morecambe, a small Lancashire town – seaside resort with a bit of fishing – and the adjacent, even smaller town of Heysham – Irish ferries, nuclear power station. There were also some readers two miles down the road in Lancaster but that was mainly the territory of the Lancaster Guardian. If you appeared before the Morecambe magistrates on any charge more serious than a parking offence this was reported. With, officious data privacy not having been invented yet, your name and address in full. If your case came up before the Lancaster magistrates a reporter from the Visitor (for two years, me) would be there with specific instructions not to miss any Morecambe cases. I could do Lancaster ones if they were interesting and spend the rest of my time distracting, or helping, the man from the Lancaster Guardian. If you were involved in something more serious it would be heard in Preston, where a freelance would cover it for us. Bankruptcy proceedings were held in a lovely mediaeval hall behind Lancaster Castle and were also covered by me. Nothing was made available by government authorities. These were public proceedings and the public had the right to attend or read about them.

Lawyers will tell you that this is so that justice can be seen to be done. Well perhaps. Lawyers are a self-important lot and for them, everything is about them. But clearly this time-honoured system also had the merit of allowing the population generally to know who had been accused or convicted of what. This allowed them to take appropriate precautions. I have no doubt also that for many defendants the attendant publicity was so acutely embarrassing as to be part of the punishment. This point was often offered in mitigation. And this is as it should be. A person is not entitled to a good reputation; he is entitled to an accurate one.

It must be conceded that this is not really the way things work now. Unless you commit a spectacular offence it is unlikely to be reported unless there is some additional newsworthy feature like a famous victim or sex. Crime and bankruptcy are copious, newspapers smaller and readers less interested. But the idea that people who are interested should be deprived of the information because it was only made available for some mysterious official purpose is an error. Mr Chiang would do well to avoid the appearance that he is a participant in the administration’s ongoing war on journalism.

Talking about things which should be public brings me to that curious enterprise, the Silent Majority, which this week splashed out on a second wave of ads in the Chinese press attacking the idea of Occupying Central. Although one of the four known members of this body is styled the Convenor, it appears to have only five members – four glove puppets and Mr Moneybags behind the scenes who wishes to remain nameless. Cynics are free to wonder whether the well-publicised foursome would be so vociferous in expressing their views if they had not met the nameless millionaire. I think this person needs to emerge from behind the curtain and reveal who he is. After all we know there is a lot of money there but our views of its owner will depend somewhat on where it came from, and what interests its owner may share with people who do not approve of civil disobedience. While he or she remains nameless we are free to infer that the person is a contemptible coward trying to manipulate public opinion with his money and ingratiate himself.