It seemed the killer question to the tidy-minded. But in reality the explosion of the internet allows double-standards to flourish. Instead of a full surveillance state, it is producing asymmetric authoritarianism in democratic countries. Lord Justice Leveson wants different punishments for different publishers. Meanwhile the authorities punish citizens almost at random. That they are behaving hypocritically by focusing on one alleged miscreant while ignoring thousands of others who behave in a similar fashion does not concern them in the least. And as they seize on tiny misdemeanors of their chosen targets, they reveal that the web is making a nonsense of the standard distinction between "public" and the "private".

In the past, many public events were so hard to find they might as well have been private. To understand what I mean, imagine students getting drunk after finishing their exams. Suppose friends take pictures of their debauchery, and they then become so wild the police take them to a magistrate. In the 20th century, there would be records of their drunken disorder. But they would be almost untraceable: photographs lost in someone's attic; criminal records and cuttings from a local newspaper buried in dusty filing cabinets. Now pictures are on Facebook or websites, and any mention of a misdemeanour online is in cyberspace forever — visible and ineradicable.

Before the invention of the internet, the courts convicted a friend of mine, the son of famous parents, for a minor drug offence. Because of his family, the story made the national press. My friend left university and became a freelance journalist. Every time he went into a new Fleet Street office, he would sneak into the library and tear up every cutting that mentioned his conviction. By the time he had finished, it was as if it had never happened. A few years later, the courts convicted another journalist friend for an equally minor drug offence. The most malicious man on the paper was, inevitably, the religious affairs correspondent. After they had both left, he wrote about my friend on a small website. Its obscurity did not matter because he wrote on the web rather than on paper. My friend has an unusual name. She went to work for an international agency. It denied her promotion because every time managers Googled her name, they found the damning blog post.

What applies to minor crimes applies equally to trivial indiscretions. Six years ago, in one of the first cases to reveal the perils of the internet age, Stacy Snyder, a trainee teacher, posted a picture of herself on her MySpace page. She headlined it "drunken pirate", because she was wearing a pirate hat while drinking from a plastic cup. (She did not look remotely drunk, I should add.) Students drinking at a party is hardly a scandal. But the ineradicable evidence was there in front of the college authorities' eyes. They said she was promoting drinking in virtual view of under-age pupils, and denied her a teaching qualification.