Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, the killers of Jamie Bulger, must be the most hated and feared teenagers in the UK. Given their exceptional notoriety and the threats made against their lives, it has been necessary to give them new identities and prohibit the publication of those new identities in the British media.
But preserving anonymity in the age of the Internet may be impossible, a fact the English courts accepted earlier this month when they held that English Internet service providers (ISPs) will only be liable if they actually know that Thompson and Venables' new identities were being published on their services and fail to take reasonable steps to prevent this.
It is not unusual for the law to try and control the identification of individuals. The Constitution recognises that everybody has a right to control their identity and so remain anonymous, but this is a weak right and it may be displaced by the rights of others, such as the right of an adopted child to know the identity of his or her mother, or the right of a garda to demand a suspect's name and address under the Criminal Justice (Public Order) Act 1994.
On its own, this right would probably be insufficient to force an ISP to go to the expense of monitoring and controlling the contents of its sites and systems to prevent an individual's identity being revealed. But it might happen where the identity of a child was being protected, or in the case of a victim of a sexual offence.
The Irish courts treat the consequences of such identification very seriously; in 1999 the BBC was ordered to pay £75,500 in damages after it disregarded the wishes of a victim and identified him in a documentary about child abuse.
Even if an order did issue, its effectiveness is very much open to question. The decision in the Thompson and Venables case may not help ISPs as much as they might like to believe. What may appear to be "reasonable measures" to a court or the public may appear draconian to an ISP.
Last year, a French court ordered a study to see if it would be possible for Yahoo! to prevent Web-users in France from accessing auctions of Nazi memorabilia on its US site.
The study suggested that such a ban would only be 90 per cent successful, but the court issued the ban anyway.
Following this, Yahoo! banned all such material from its sites, as did eBay.
One of the problems with such bans is that they can be too broad in their effects. Child protection software filters out pornographic sites on many home and school computers, but may also exclude sites that deal with health issues.
At present, the US is conducting what amounts to an experiment into the ability of ISPs to control the material on their sites as a result of A&M vs Napster.
Napster has been ordered to remove all songs that violate copyright from its site, but it pleads that although it can remove up to 99 per cent of them, it cannot guarantee that 100 per cent will be excluded - and so is threatened with closure.
The site shut down this month in an effort to fix its software. It has been allowed to reopen pending an appeal. Napster has also announced that it intends to carry only songs in its own proprietary ".nap" format and not the universally popular MP3.
These examples suggest that ISPs can be forced to control the publication of content on their sites, but only by taking extreme measures such as closing or removing particular services.
One reason for not forcing an Irish ISP to monitor its content is that this would seriously damage Ireland's image and prospects as a hub for e-commerce and all activities related to the Internet. Also, the cost of monitoring might well put the ISP out of business.
An acceptance that Ireland may be unable or unwilling to control disclosures of this sort of information in the future may be found in the Sexual Offender Bill 2000.
This will require those convicted of sexual offences to register their names and addresses with the garda∅, which will enable the garda∅ to monitor them and get court orders restraining their conduct if necessary.
But it will not mandate the creation of a register, which could be hacked into or discovered in the course of litigation, or which can be queried by schools or sports clubs to ensure they are not employing sex offenders. Instead, it will be an offence for sex offenders to apply for certain jobs without informing the potential employers that he or she has such a conviction. So the identity of sex offenders within a community should remain within the control of the garda∅.
Revealing the identities of sexual offenders could lead to serious disorder. Following a campaign to name paedophiles in the UK last year, an illiterate mob attacked the home of a doctor, not understanding the difference between paediatrician and paedophile.
Anyone tempted to create their own private database of offenders should keep in mind that the consequences for identifying the wrong person may be severe.
In 1999, a Dublin man who, amongst other things, falsely alleged online that one of his former teachers had tried to procure child pornography, was sentenced to two and a half years in jail.
Yet, given the fear and loathing which attaches to sexual offenders of all kinds, the State may find controlling information of this type to be a serious challenge.
Denis Kelleher is a practising barrister and co-author of Information Technology Law in Ireland (Butterworths). For more information, visit http://www.ictlaw.com