Never write in your blog....

....Anything you wouldn't want to see on the front page of the newspaper.

Yet another person has learned this the hard way.

Prof. Jonathan Adler and Hugh Hewitt both link to this story about a Boston pediatrician, Robert P. Lindeman, who, while a defendant in a malpractice case, blogged about his case — even during the trial. As he was undergoing cross-examination on the witness stand, the plaintiff's lawyer asked what probably sounded to the jury and everyone else in the courtroom like a pair of throw-away questions: Did he have a medical blog? Yes, he said. Did he blog under the pseudonym "Flea"? Um, well, yes. And then the plaintiff's lawyer moved on to other topics until they broke for the day.

But the very next morning, before Dr. Lindeman returned to the witness stand for further cross-examination, "he agreed to pay what members of Boston's tight-knit legal community describe as a substantial settlement — case closed."

Follow the link to Beldar's blog for "the rest of the story". There's a lot to it, much of which has been deleted from Dr. Flea's Blog.

But the point is, if you write something in a blog, expect people to read it. If it can be used against you, don't be surprised if, someday, it is. Don't expect obscurity or even privacy software to save you.

I have a blog on a forum that supports "friends locking", a device which restricts the availability of posts to a list of friends. It also allows you to make a post "private" which means only the poster can (in theory) read it. I don't rely on these restrictions to keep my posts private. If I don't want it read by everyone on the planet, I don't put it online.

Not that I don't use these features – I do post stuff as "private". These are things like confirmation numbers for room reservations. I post them in my blog so I can get at them from anywhere with an internet connection, but they're private so no one else has to wade through the clutter. But it's not something where I'm taking a huge risk by someone else getting that information.

The moral, nevertheless, is this: While cross-examination under oath may famously be the most powerful engine ever devised for the ferreting out of reluctant truths, the internet is making it a potentially more powerful engine just about every day — especially when used against the blissfully unaware (or the self-deceiving). Caveat blogger!