No doubt you've heard about this story.

Welll.....it seems that the Rt Hon Justice Eady should have included Wikipedia in his idiotic, unenforceable-outside-the-UK superinjunction.

Because the Wikipedia article about it unmasks "CTB" for us.


Yes, it's also on his BLP.

And that's the only place I have seen "CTB" named.
All of the media--even the American media--have "respected" the order.
(Except for commenters, like under this Time article.)

(Whups, that Ars Technica article just got an addendum....)

Seriously, is the United Kingdom in a state of total legal chaos?
Why does Eady keep his silly wig?

Because they tried total illegal chaos, and decided it was too unsophisticated?


Those things are pretty expensive, the real ones at least - supposedly they can cost upwards of 500 quid. And I doubt he'd get even a fraction of that if he tried to sell it on eBay, even with his own personal notoriety. (There could be head-lice! )

As for the super-injunctions, I guess they have to at least try, or it would look like, well, they're just not trying. Most people in the media want to respect the super-injunctions because they're actually quite fearful of people raising the specter of one-world-government, which is what would be required to actually enforce such things. Presumably, having just one government for the whole world would mean a serious contraction of national media outlets, so, fewer jobs. Wikipedians don't care about such things, unless for some reason it gets in the way of their own entertainment.

My understanding is that CTB claims he was being blackmailed and applied for the injunction to stop the blackmailer getting money. That seems a perfectly reasonable excuse for an injunction, if the blackmail really took place.

"Footballer has extra-marital affair" is, of course, not a terribly shocking headline and should only be of interest to the footballer's wife. The right to be prurient is not a major element of press freedom unless the subject of the prurience is the leader of a political party that demands a return to family values when he has only recently dumped his mistress or is a major world religion that has attempted to suppress information about child sexual abuse within his organisation while simultaneously denouncing sexual relationships between consenting adults.

It took me (in the UK) about 5 seconds on Twitter searching on the name "Imogen Thomas" to find out the identity of CTB.



The considered opinion of many Brits is that the UK has never been OUT of a state of total legal chaos.



It does seem reasonable. But an injunction should only be granted after the allegation has been shown to be unlikely to be true, in my humble legal opinion.