Is technology outrunning the ability of the courts to regulate it? A judge who last week reinstated the whistle-blowing site Wikileaks certainly thinks so.
Wikileaks uses a series of encrypted servers to allow people to post documents anonymously. On 15 February, judge Jeffrey White of the Federal District Court in San Francisco ordered the closure of www.wikileaks.org, the site’s US domain. But this led to an outcry from pressure groups who said the shutdown restricted free speech. Though the judge reversed his order on 29 February, he said that technology was letting some people “do some terrible things without accountability”.…
