The death of the super injunction and a triumph of common sense

This blog is so pleased with Mr Justice Tugendhat who yesterday stemmed the tide of creeping unofficial privacy law in our courts by ruling there were no grounds for a gagging order that preventing the disclosure of John Terry's affair with a former team-mate’s girlfriend.

Earlier in the week,a so called super injunction had prevented the press from reporting anything of the case,although as is always the situation now there were rumours flying around of the individuals concerned.

Now the England Captain gets his comeuppance with his picture plastered all over the front pages and no doubt his England captaincy under scrutiny.

The ruling comes after a succession of wealthy and powerful figures have used the Human Rights Act to prevent the publication of damaging allegations on the basis that it breached their right to privacy.

As Ian Burrell writes in the Independent,

In rushing to the courts to gag the News of the World from publishing allegations of his extra-marital affair with the ex-girlfriend of former team-mate Wayne Bridge, Terry has inadvertently gifted a victory to media organisations fighting the growing tendency of the rich and powerful to hide behind super-injunctions.

However this ruling puts the public interest firmly to the fore with the judge saying that Terry’s motivation in trying to prevent publication was not “personal distress” but the impact of adverse publicity on his earning power.

Measures to protect your social media security

Social media remains for the moment an area in which the individual lays him or herself open to abuses of privacy.

Internet Security Analyst Robert Siciliano gives some tips over at the Huffington Post

1. Strengthen your passwords; use upper/lower case, numbers and characters. Don't use easily guessed words from the dictionary or pets, kids, birthdates etc.

2.Don't access social media from libraries, internet cafes or any public computers that could have spyware.

3.Make sure your own PC has updated virus definitions and security patches. Don't bother with all the 3rd party apps in social media. Many are risky.

4.Don't click on links in emails from "friends" asking you to download a video or see pictures. This is becoming a common ruse in social media.

Marr-the verdict

On question time last night,the Andrew Marr interview came up and Ben Bradshaw for the Labour party said that it demonstrated "part of the trivialisation and degradation of our political discourse".

Strong words from the culture secretary.

I have to say that I am torn between the rights of the electorate to know if their leaders are suffering medically with the intrusion of privacy for the Brown family.

One must also question Marr's motivations behind a question that had its roots in right wing blogging's rumour mill.

Marr has gone down in my estimation,I have to say.

I think that this piece from the Economist's Bagehot may sum up the issues

I THINK Andrew Marr was wrong to ask Gordon Brown about the rumours concerning his use of anti-depressants.

Yes, the prime minister's health is a matter of legitimate public concern. And Mr Marr would have been right to raise the subject had there been serious grounds to believe the rumours were true—a briefing from a Number 10 official, say, or some mysteriously cancelled prime ministerial engagements. But the basis for the question seems to have been bloggers' speculation. Now Mr Marr has asked it, it will never go away. I think it was a mistake, and maybe a worrying sign of a new kind of lowest-common-denominator journalism.

To tweet or not to tweet?

There are some interesting perspectives on the grey area between private and public consumption as regards our continued use of social media over at the New York Times.

I particually liked this piece from Susan Mernit ,former AOL vice president who writes

Is there such a thing as the overuse of social networking tools? Absolutely! The acquaintance who twittered one hour after her baby was born and the woman who twittered during her gynecological exam during a recent earthquake give a whole new meaning to crossing the public-private divide.