May 22, 2011
Superinjunction futility
Alice works on a national newspaper. She’s always looking for tasty things to write about. Then one day she gets a very secret notification about a top footballer who’s having an affair with a TV presenter. But she can’t write about that.
She’s only being told so that she knows she can’t write about it, were she to hear any rumours. That’s the injunction bit. She’s also being told that she can’t tell anyone she’s been told. That’s the superinjunction bit.
So she tells Bob anyway, in the pub. Face-to-face, with no records kept.
Bob pops next door to the internet cafe for ten minutes, pays in cash, sets up a Hotmail account in a false name, and uses that to create a Twitter account. He tweets what Alice has told him, mentioning a few people he knows will be tempted to spread the story, and including a few terms he reckons people will be likely to search for.
And never uses the account or the internet cafe again. He is utterly untraceable. No amount of pestering Twitter will reveal anything more than an IP address relating to an internet cafe used by random strangers, and a Hotmail address that means nothing.
Back in the pub, he tells Alice what he’s done. Who now has a great article to write, based on the story that everyone can now see proliferating around the internet.
That was difficult, wasn’t it?
Is it just me, or is there something very odd about the seriousness with which the media are treating this “demanding Twitter for details” story?
Good luck with that.
I suspect that’s just how it was done, but it’s always possible that Alice did it herself from a work computer thinking it ‘untraceable’ or that the hotmail account has a secondary email address associated with that Bob forgot about… if Twitter hand over the account details it may well be worth chasing the email provider, simply because the impact of having a mainstream media org associated with the publication would have such an enormous impact. And, of course, ensure that every journalist received some basic net security training so it doesn’t happen next time…
Hi Paul,
I am interested in the interaction between law and ethics in cases like this. Central to civil disobedience is that you own up to breaking the law and only avoid punishment because enough other people do the same to make it impractical to impose sanctions (within the rule of law). This makes the RE-tweeting of the name look like civil disobedience. But what of the original tweeting, if it happened in the way you describe? That doesn’t look like civil disobedience, since Bob only avoids the law by hiding under a cloak of anonymity. That looks much more like ordinary law-breaking.If this is right (and I am far from sure it is), then there is something odd about the use of Twitter as a medium for civil disobedience: it is never pure. It always starts with an ordinary criminal act and – assuming the perpetrator wishes to avoid sanctions – the methods a criminal might use to avoid the law.
Do you know if there are any other cases of Twitter being used for acts of civil disobedience (rather than being used to organise such acts, which is common)? It would be fun to explore the possibilities of civil disobedience in cyberspace.
Tom