The Valley of the Squinting Websites

Two seemingly unrelated articles in the (London) Sunday Times draw our attention. First, somewhere in the intersection of tragedy, comedy, and farce is the latest twist in the paternity issues surrounding the children born to Kimberly Quinn, publisher of the Spectator magazine. The Times reports that while former Home Secretary David Blunkett has been ruled out as the biological father of her baby by a paternity test, it's still not entirely clear who the biological father is, with an unnamed "Indian media tycoon" emerging as a candidate. However, Quinn's husband, Kilkenny man Stephen Quinn, seems to want it to be understood that he is the father, although we wonder if he'd like his specific choice of words back:

"no further testing is required: Lorcan is our son." He added that it was "totally absurd" to suggest the boy looked Asian, "he looks like an Irish rugby player."

Given Mrs Quinn's reputation for affairs, such a phrasing easily lends itself to the question: an Irish rugby player -- which one?

Anyway, one aspect which has driven the continued media interest in this saga is the willingness of the principals in it to speak to their preferred sources in the media as each new twist emerges. Which brings us to Andrew Sullivan's column in the same paper. Sully tries to develop a half-baked neo-Orwellian theme that technological progress is leading to greater intrusions on privacy, but in doing so, presents a very selective set of anecdotes to support his case.

Strangely for someone with libertarian pretensions, missing from his analysis is the role of choice. His first privacy victim is, of all people, Dubya, via the taping of his off-the-record conversations as candidate Bush with a family associate in 1999. Note here Sully's ability to explain the injustice done to Dubya without mention of what Linda Tripp did to Monica Lewinsky, and likewise his discussion of White House avoidance of electronic paper trails without mentioning Inquisitor-General Ken Starr.

Sully then turns to the Web as a tool of privacy encroachment, and is now definitely relying on his British readers being less au courant with his own issues in this regard than their American counterparts. Sully's Web victim is Jeff Gannon/James Guckert, White House plant in the briefing room, and player-manager of a gay escort service. And of course any notion of the latter as a secret life goes out the window once one remembers that this information was pieced together from publicly accessible websites. So Gannon in fact becomes a proxy for Sully's own Internet visibility, an issue recurringly documented by Sullywatch, with the Gannon-Sully commonality tied together here.

So the Quinns and Gannon and Sully have all chosen in different ways to air their private lives; the rationality of those choices is a different question. Then there's the role of political choices in eroding personal space, something Sully never mentions at all, because it's too tied in with his pro-life, pro-War on Terror policy positions; for him it's technology per se that's at fault:

The technology that has liberated us in so many ways is also capable of suffocating that inviolable personal space that once had another name. That name was freedom.

But long before there were webcams, there were curtains for Polonius to hide behind and for Westmeath gossipers to peek from. And if things have gotten more Orwellian over the years, it's in the ability of the State to use a person's state of mind to place them in legal peril. We mention Bill Clinton, his impeachment set in motion by his sense of having wronged his family. And Martha Stewart, five months in Club Fed for having believed she might have done something wrong. It's in instances like this, not in iPods or blogs, that today's real thought police are to be found.