While the UK’s Channel 4 didn’t release the full name of Shami Witness, one of the most prolific tweeters of ISIS propaganda, when they reported on his identity last Thursday, they might as well have.
“He says exposure will endanger his life and we have no way of knowing how true that may be,” said correspondent Simon Israel in the report. Yet Biswas’ first name, Mehdi, was aired. So were several of his Facebook photos with part of his face blurred out but clear backgrounds showing restaurants or the back seat of a car. A phone interview was played without disguising his voice. Most revealingly, the report broke down each step Channel 4 used to find Biswas’ real identity online—a process called doxing—by finding an old Twitter account, running the username through other social networking sites, and eventually finding his current Facebook page.
With Channel 4 leaving a hearty trail of breadcrumbs, Biswas’ full name and photo began circulating on Twitter less than two hours after the newscast aired. Several Indian media outlets started reporting his name, citing “unverified reports.” In less than 36 hours, Biswas was in custody, on suspicion of crimes against the state and online terrorism.
The story of his arrest was picked up by The New York Times, The Guardian, and Reuters: One of the most prolific tweeters of ISIS propaganda—with nearly 18,000 followers, including over two-thirds of foreign fighters on Twitter—who turned out to be a 24-year-old marketing executive in Bangalore.
Channel 4’s claims for anonymity, then, were for naught. They appeared to shield their subject while slyly dropping all the information internet denizens would possibly need to dox him.
They needn’t have made the appearance of keeping him anonymous. It’s in the public interest to identify an influential voice operating under a veil of secrecy; the station could have revealed his identity themselves.
“Given the prominence of the social media activity and the outrageousness of some of that activity, I think there clearly is news value in trying to figure out who this person is, where he’s located, and what the agenda might be,” said Kathleen Culver, associate director at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center of Journalism Ethics.
Either way, the station should have made a clear decision: conceal Biswas’ identity, or go all the way by outing him, perhaps buttressing its decision by explaining the underlying legal and ethical debate to viewers, and informing authorities beforehand that he may need protection. Instead, the channel essentially outed its target while trying to retain plausible deniability that it did not, putting a tough ethical choice aside and passing the buck to the anonymous, unchecked internet. Online, where most anyone can discover the real-life identity of anyone else with enough effort, news organizations must consider what others may do with their reporting. Especially when after a few outlets report confidential information, it gets easier for each subsequent publication to justify repeating it.
In a phone interview, Israel said he took responsibility for Biswas’ outing and arrest. “Yes, we did allow other people to be able to identify him. I think in hindsight that was a mistake,” he said. “But I’m not sure looking back I could make it harder to identify him and still stay accountable to the viewer.”
Indeed, too much anonymity would undermine the premise of the report. “It is difficult to justify anonymity if the whole purpose of this story was to counter the anonymity,” Israel said. He also said that Channel 4 had to comply with UK counterterrorism laws. “We had to be conscious that if we made it impossible for anyone else, the authorities included, to locate and identify this person, we would then have counter terrorism forces knocking on our door saying ‘give us all your information,’” he said.
The case illustrates the shifting ethics of source protection in an age where traditional media outlets with ethical codes sit side-by-side in Google results with unaccountable, pseudonymous, perhaps unscrupulous social media vigilantes. In another example, blogger Charles Johnson claimed earlier this month to identify the alleged rape victim from the University of Virginia featured in Rolling Stone—a revelation, unlike the Biswas case, with zero public interest.
Sources also have to know the risk of being doxed, even if that changes whether they will speak to reporters.
“Everyone who deals with sensitive topics has to be thinking very very carefully about whether their subjects truly understand the consequences of speaking with a journalist,” said Culver. “The ultimate outcome is that you are going to have people who refuse to speak because they’re so concerned about the penalties.”
Chris Ip is a CJR Delacorte Fellow. Follow him on Twitter at @chrisiptw.