Over the last two days, James Nixon, Journalist for Net Communities' website thinq.co.uk, has appeared on ITV News, Channel 4 News, the Breakfast Time Daybreak programme, Radio 4, Radio 5, BBC London, and has been quoted in the Daily Mirror, The Times, Metro and on the front page of The Sun. 

This was a result of him being the only journalist to have interviewed Ryan Cleary, the teenager arrested by police in Essex last Tuesday, accused of carrying out cyber-attacks from his bedroom.

After just 18 months of publishing Thinq_ we are immensely proud of our team and the influence we’ve managed to make on the media landscape.

Here he discusses the repercussions that this arrest could have in shaping the laws on cybercrime.

Tell me about you background and how did you get to Net Communities.

I have been involved with Net Communities for about a year, seven months of which I have been full time. I started off as a consultant for Thinq.co.uk, and since then I have been involved in editorial for ITReview.com and Thinq_. I have been doing tech journalism for fourteen years.

How did you get in contact with Ryan Cleary?

I have written extensively about Anonymous, and I’ve tended to take a non-judgemental attitude towards certain issues. This earned me some trust within the membership. When the big split with Anonymous occurred, Ryan decided that he wanted to put his case across. So I talked to him quite lengthily and gave him a platform to explain himself. I also did that for the people who were on the other side of the story. Between these two points of view I began to understand something of the dynamics of how that group and that online society operates.

As a journalist, what do you make of the UK media’s approach to his arrest?

I was particularly impressed with the discussion I was involved with in Radio 5. There was also a former hacker and a security consultant. They tried to place the situation in context, and referred to the tendency of a lot of the media to turn this into something much more sensational, sexier than it really is.

There was also a great deal of speculation by some of the media. At that point all we knew was that a nineteen year old had been arrested. He hadn’t been charged with anything and I think the media treatment was sensational to the point of being misleading. I felt like I needed to give it some context; try to explain that at certain levels, this was just an ordinary teenager who got himself caught in something extraordinary.

How do you think these continuous hacking attacks will shape the law in relation to cybercrime?

The legal framework to prosecute offenders is adequate and in place, within the UK and in places like America. In some other countries they are well behind the times. Japan, for instance, has only just passed the legislation which makes writing computer viruses illegal. So the law is there, what’s lacking is coherent law enforcement, there is a gap between the skills of the people perpetrating the offence and the authorities who are attempting to catch them.