Rus: I think there are other considerations here as well. Given the relative newness of blogging and the widespread reach of the ‘net, you can create invasion of privacy issues without the intent of doing so.
If the information that OCR relayed was in the public domain, the person in question really didn’t have an expectation of privacy, legally speaking. But the larger issue now is that, prior to this, no one really contemplated how far and wide that information would be spread and what sort of damage it might potentially do.
OCR mentions that his post on Trojan4Life was written in anger and deleted some five minutes later. But in those five minutes it was picked up by others and went God knows where. So after feeling bad about penning it, he took it down, but it was arguably too late as evidenced by it’s reappearance here and now. On top of that, it also appears that we haven’t gotten the whole story, as Trojan asserts the complete post was not shown and thus we don’t have the complete or proper context.
So you have something of a mess, but without the apparent intention of creating one. We lose an excellent resource in BMIT’s closure, OCR’s privacy (and potential family safety) is compromised and the threat of litigation now hovers over him and through no fault of his own.
