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The problem was discovered by Citizen court reporter Gary Dimmock, who found that a Google search of a young offender’s name linked to news articles about the youth’s case.

It's very frightening that so many people could have access to this information and it's virtually unprotected Lawyer Michael Crystal

In that case, a Barrhaven youth was found guilty of making a series of fake bomb threats and 911 calls that triggered police SWAT team responses to schools, shopping malls and personal residences across North America. He was 16 at the time and, as a result, his identity was barred from publication by provisions of the Youth Criminal Justice Act.

Dimmock asked editors to investigate the situation and ensure that the newspaper hadn’t accidentally encoded the youth’s name onto its website.

That subsequent investigation found the problem did not lie with the newspaper or its online source code.

There was also meta data to consider. Meta data includes various information fields that reporters or editors fill out to describe an article, its photos or its videos, but which is not visible to the public. Again, nowhere in the metadata did the name appear.

Further inquiries revealed a similar issue existed in at least five other high-profile Ottawa cases in which publication bans had been in effect, as well as in court cases in Montreal and Windsor.

Media outlets are privy to the names of people whose identities are protected by publication bans by virtue of having a reporter in the courtroom.

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A Google search for the name of an Ottawa-based RCMP officer convicted of confining, starving and abusing his son links to coverage of that court case. The officer’s identity is protected by a judge’s order designed to shield his son from publicity.