I think it is extremely bad form when people publish name and address information of others. Russell Brown, left wing journalist recently "discovered" WhaleOil was hosting Andy Moore's web site "Don't Vote Labour". To prove the connection he published WhaleOil's real name and address. It was unnecessary, as I'll explain.
Furthermore, Russell's comment encouraged another on the thread - this person took the opportunity to denigrate Andy and published Andy's home address. The 'connection' between WhaleOil was implied as sinister because it (supposedly) hadn't been publicly disclosed. I'll say it again - bad form!
This harkens back to a recent post about how publishing an address, like when signing a petition, can make people uncomfortable. Especially when some nutter tries to steal the petition and get the addresses. Another case recently was a Police Officer looking up the address of a rape victim he had a connection with. Understandably, the victim has every right to feel that there was no good reason for this man to access this information.
Another despicable tactic is for a commenter to "take" the name of another and pose as them. I've also been threatened and abused when some-one misread the comment names and attributed the previous comment to me, rather than the actual idiot who said it (I was the next idiot to comment). Also, as an ex-member of Sir Humphrey's, I got used to wingnuts, nutters and Che Tibby accusing me of having the same opinions as my colleagues. I think I spoke for all of them when I said that we didn't speak for each other.
Now the connection between WhaleOil and Andy came about because Andy respected a request by his father not to publish their home address on his website. His father wanted to ensure some Labour nutter didn't lob a brick through the window and endanger the rest of the family. WhaleOil stepped in and offered Andy space on his web account so that Andy didn't have an easily discoverable name and address. The connection was no more suspicious than that. A simple charitable act.
Meanwhile Andy still has to deal with the Electoral Commission and a possible court case for not publishing his address on his non-commercial website. Such are the requirements under the Electoral Finance Act.
I finally come to the point of my post. I was chatting to Crusader Rabbit recently and I've promised to write a post on how to properly anonymise yourself on the internet. I'll include how to set up masked web sites. I'll get this post done over the next week (I hope).
The techniques I will put forward are beyond what I've personally bothered to do, but in an environment where your relationship to political people can affect your job prospects (the two recent high profile cases were where M. Setchell lost her job and Clare Curran got one uncontested); or where some nutter can decide to hunt you down and commit acts of violence (as has happened), and perhaps even to combat lefties that like to keep lists. Like that would ever happen in New Zealand?
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