Andy Coulson is serving an 18-month prison sentence for phone hacking. That is the sort of a sentence one could expect for child cruelty, residential burglary or serious non-sexual assault. I am not convinced that what he did was equally bad, and therefore deserves similar punishment. True, he came to symbolise the worst journalistic practices of the least reputable newspapers. He wasn’t punished for working for Rupert Murdoch, however, but for the technical offence of interfering with other people’s phone messages. This statutory offence, a relatively new one, exists to protect privacy. But what exactly is privacy, and how much does it matter? This much?Most invasions of privacy that we are aware of are not crimes in themselves. Had these phone conversations been overheard on