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Am I stupid, or just hopelessly naive? Perhaps I’m both and more.

Yes, for the lurking ones have revealed themselves, and their plans. I can’t say I’m surprised, because I’ve been observing them for months, as they built their profile of me, my life and connections.

Why let it spin on for so long? Naivety, of course, thinking it to be completely benign. There could be all kinds of reasons readers might spend days or weeks or months cross referencing everything I have written, scouring the web for every backlink that points to me.

Naively, I put it down to curiosity. Or the need of someone, somewhere to reassure themselves that I am for real. Or an old friend trying to find out what happened to me. Or, well, just paranoia, once more seeing patterns where there are none.

But of course, there were indications that this was far from benign long ago. There were the amateurish phishing links, attempting to snare my account, hastily constructed and easily debunked. I dismissed them because in my line of work, brute force attacks are just a daily reality you must get used to.

Yet there was plenty more to worry me. Months ago, I responded by setting my blog to private, but then had second thoughts, writing my concerns off as unwarranted paranoia. I have toed and froed on this ever since, whenever I feel harangued by a spike in traffic on a post that ought to be of little interest to anyone, unless they happened to be mining social media, which they clearly were.

So yes, it’s true, I’m both naive and stupid, just as I have always been. You wouldn’t believe the extremely good opinion I held for many years of one who, it turned out, had once intended to cause me great harm. I suppose the present is much the same.

It may well be the generosity of my soul that I think the best of people I have no reason to think the best of, but that in any case turns out to be extremely foolhardy. Every time I feel minded to take down my blog and cease writing in public for good, a little voice from within whispers: “But maybe there is some good in something you have written that may be of benefit to others.”

That generosity is wearing thin, though. For today some of those folk to whom I gave the benefit of doubt for months on end chose to reveal themselves, by attempting to edit the electoral roll so as to associate me with relationships other than my own.

Why would somebody do that? To commit identity theft? To enable electoral fraud? To smear my reputation? Who knows? Suffice to say, I have reported it to the authorities, who will hopefully be more au fait with digital forensics than these amateurs hiding behind poorly obfuscated VPNs.

There is a lesson here for me of course: don’t be so naive and stupid. Or don’t be so trusting of the whole wide world. Or stop giving the benefit of the doubt to people who clearly want to cause you harm, be they far-right extremists, zealous activists or old acquaintances who hold a grudge.

The larger lesson: don’t share so much of your life so publicly. Don’t assume everyone is good, true and kind. Don’t expose yourself to the world. And with that in mind, I now need to take stock and think about how and what I share in public from here on. Time to investigate an alternative platform, or perhaps just cease altogether.

Honestly, I preferred it when I had no readers. I had the freedom to say whatever I wanted. Now I realise that I must be silenced. So perhaps I will choose silence once more.