Years ago, when I first started to write a novel, I decided that the only way to do it was under a pseudonym. Writing without the veil of anonymity just seemed unthinkable. It was akin to walking in Riyadh without the protection of my abaya.

This enraged a few friends who thought it not only cowardly but pretentious. At first I disagreed, later I came round to the view that you must not publish anything that you are not willing to own up to.

This week in London, a judge has ruled just that. It is the case of a blogger called NightJack who wrote about daily life in a British police force. The blog not only was immensely popular, being read by as many as half a million people a week, but also won the rather prestigious Orwell prize. The writer had penned the blog anonymously for 18 months, and then The Times newspaper unmasked him.

Richard Norton, as we all now know his identity, went to court to seek an injunction against his identity being revealed. The court ruled no, with the judge pointing out that publishing is a public act and that someone writing a blog cannot expect to have his identity protected.

Journalists have the right to protect their sources. Had a journalist wanted to write a piece about the daily life of a policeman, they could have interviewed Norton and then protected his identity. The law would have enabled them to do that. They could have made the same revelations and argued that it was in the public interest to reveal what goes on within the ranks of the police. Interesting, isn’t it?

What is even more interesting is that it is a newspaper that outed him, a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch. Were they acting in the public interest as they claimed by revealing his identity or were they protecting their own vested interest? For a newspaper like The Times would quite happily have published a piece about the dirty work of policing from an “undercover” source in the police. Could it be they object to being cut out of the deal? People can now publish blogs directly on the Net and be read by more people than read The Times. Moreover, the most popular blogs are often anonymous blogs.

The popularity of NightJack was largely due to the candid nature of Norton’s writing. He was indiscreet. He revealed details about cases he was working on, criticized politicians and other policemen, and generally said things which would have been inappropriate for a policeman to say in public. And that is what it is all about. Anonymous blogs often flourish because they allow their writers to be indiscreet. But it would be wrong to consider this titillation. What makes these blogs so compelling is that they give us a firsthand account of a world we would otherwise not have the means to enter. They open closed doors.

Sometimes this is for the public good. Sometimes it is no more than well-written gossip. The difficulty is in finding the right line between the genuine need for anonymity that protects people from being attacked for revealing something which should be made public, and the lack of accountability of people who can publish anything they want, about anybody they like, without having to show any credentials.

Recent events in Iran have shown the importance of both blogging and anonymity. In countries where the right to free speech does not exist, anonymity becomes a necessity. How else could we possibly know what is really going on? By giving us the opportunity to be a fly on the wall of ordinary people going about their business, blogs have opened up a whole sphere of experience to readers that would have once been the preserve of novels and documentaries. However, one does not replace the other. Anonymity is powerful and must come with a health warning. It must be treated very cautiously by both writer and reader. At the end of the day, there must be a darn good reason for someone not to want to reveal his or her identity. In Norton’s case, he was breaching police regulations and now faces disciplinary action. The blog has now been deleted in its entirety.