No state has built an authoritarian cyber-city yet, although after the shock of the Arab Spring, Belarus, Iran and China are exploiting the new surveillance powers to the full. In democracies, we are seeing a halfway house between liberty and repression that no one predicted: a hypocritical response to new technology that hammers down on the perpetrators of some crimes while ignoring others. There is no consistency. Whether or not writers are punished depends on levels of official paranoia, of populist anger or of the malice of those around them. Who the authorities punish is almost a matter of chance.

Unintentionally, Lord Justice Leveson is illustrating the double standards that now abound. His inquiry was meant to be into systematic criminality by journalists. New mobile technologies made their crimes possible, and no one believes that the authorities should not prosecute them. There is not a free-speech jurisdiction in the world that allows reporters to hack phones for information. It is the modern equivalent of breaking into a target's home and reading his letters. As I have said in Standpoint before, if journalists had been after stories that were in the public interest, they might still have appealed to juries to acquit. (In a telling commentary on the morals and motives of the tabloids, not one journalist was.) As there are criminal prosecutions pending, I cannot say more about them. Nor for that matter can Leveson. He can investigate the links between politicians and the media, and his inquiry is providing gruesome accounts of the relations between Rupert Murdoch and successive governments. But perhaps for want of anything better to do, he is also playing with capricious ideas.

In a confrontation with Michael Gove, Leveson said that he wanted newspapers rigorously to separate news and comment. It is an admirable sentiment although hard to follow in practice. Gove gave the standard arguments all defenders of free societies make. Discriminating readers can tell the difference between newspapers that try to present facts objectively and those that produce propaganda. In a free society, it was up to them to decide which titles they then read. Lord Leveson was not satisfied, and from his point of view rightly so. Newspapers had agreed to abide by the Press Complaints Commission's voluntary Code of Practice, Article 1 (iii) of which states, "The Press, whilst free to be partisan, must distinguish clearly between comment, conjecture and fact". The code is an excellent guide to ethical journalism. Newspapers agreed to follow it. Yet Gove was saying that newspapers had no ethical duty to stick to the standards they endorsed. "Would you say the same about other industries and professions which are subject to regulation, that their liberty is being eroded by reason of the fact that they have to observe a higher standard?" asked Leveson. With one sentence he revealed how little he understood.

When I started in journalism in the 1980s, my colleagues told me that I was in a trade not a profession. Journalists were just citizens with typewriters, exercising the same freedom to write everyone else possessed. Writing was not and could not be a profession because you could not professionalise every literate citizen. The theory was fine, but the practice was different. Although everyone could be a journalist, in reality the only people who were journalists were the employees of private or state funded companies and corporations in the media industries.