Canadian Corruption Publicized By An American Blog

Bear with me, because I haven't followed this story much, and I'm putting up these links half-read. But it seems interesting and important. (Not interesting enough for me to really read, however, as it deals with Canada, which is just a snoozer of a topic.)

Captain's Quarters defied the "Publication Ban" imposed by Canada on a corruption inquiry and posted transcripts and other banned information.

Then he got linked by a Canadian newssite. And now the Canadian government is warning about possible prosecutions for even mentioning the name "Captain's Quarters."

Right Thinking People ponders the implications of all this:

What does a publication ban mean when anyone with internet access can click on a hotlink or perform a Google search, and find the information they want in a heartbeat? If Justice Gomery – or Paul Martin – have to start plugging holes in the infodike they’ve built, they’re going to find themselves running out of fingers faster than a guild-scale extra in a Tarantino flick.

The best paradigm I can come up with here is to posit a form of “energy� of information. Kinetic energy is the product of one-half the mass of a moving object times the square of its velocity; the equation reflects the fact that the speed of an object is far more important to its impact than its absolute mass. So it is with the blogosphere – it wasn’t the fact that the Rathergate memos were faked that took the story down, it was how fast the facts could be marshaled and distributed that overwhelmed the MSM’s ability to respond.

...

If the bloggers overwhelm the ramparts of the publication ban, and Martin et al. can’t stem the tide, could the result be a snap election? People seem to think so. This could be the first time that bloggers, by feeding the insatiable demand for information of an outraged polity, contributed to actually bringing down a government.

Read it all. As I'm about to myself.

Thanks to NickS for all of this.

posted by Ace at 12:56 PM

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