The public and the personal

Public life should not come at the price of having one’s personal life laid out in every detail for the entertainment of one’s critics. But public life has never come with guarantees of an absolute shield of anonymity. If you participate in Canadian politics, it’s fair for Canadians to ask, at the very least, who you are.

The Twitter account @ Vikileaks30 began tweeting information about Public Safety Minister Vic Toews’ divorce this week, in response to Toews’ championing of a badly flawed online access bill. Toews himself bears some responsibility for lowering the level of the debate around the bill, most notoriously in his declaration in the House of Commons that the opposition could either stand with the government or with the child pornographers.

But Vikileaks kept lowering the bar. While the information that has been plastered all over Twitter this week seemed to have been in the public domain, the political culture in Canada tends not to dwell on politicians’ personal lives. That doesn’t mean there should be a ban on any publication of such information — far from it. But it does mean that the political discourse is served when everyone tries to maintain some standards of civility, decency and good judgment.

Vikileaks significantly changed the discussion about Toews, about the proposed legislation, and about politics in Canada generally. Information about the identity and affiliation of the account holder is therefore very much in the public interest.

Once the Citizen determined that someone using the email address associated with @ Vikileaks30 was also using an IP address associated with the House of Commons, the public interest in publishing that information became even stronger. The Speaker has been asked to investigate.

Undercover techniques have always been used, where warranted, in investigative journalism — in recent Canadian history, journalists have posed as maids, as customers, as panhandlers. Ethical standards demand that the information be difficult or impossible to obtain through other means, and in the public interest, and that the journalists ultimately disclose their methods when publishing the information.

The Citizen did not name an employee it found who has sometimes used the IP address for other purposes, and it did not accuse any organization or political party of being responsible for the Twitter account.

If you want to use your platform to participate in Canadian political life, whether that platform is the House of Commons or a Twitter account, you can expect that people will want to know your identity. It’s a long walk from that standard of openness to a culture in which everyone’s family life is fodder for a sustained public attack.