Thomas Ash (Oxford, OK): At the start of this week, the Guardian published a number of internal memos from Barclays detailing the ways in which the Structured Capital Markets division of the firm systematically evaded British taxation through a series of staggeringly artificial manouevres. The memos had been leaked to Vince Cable by an anonymous whistleblower inside the company, allowing Barclays' lawyers to convince a judge to order their removal from the Guardian's website on the grounds that they had been obtained in breach of confidentiality agreements.
But in the age of the internet information that has been published once is like a genie which cannot be put back in its bottle; a court order may succeed in forcing a newspaper to take it down, but it will already have been saved on dozens of computers and cached by Google's crawlers. From there, it is a short step to a site like WikiLeaks, where those interested can now read the Barclays memos. Links to them have spread across the British blogosphere, to the extent that WikiLeaks is now overwhelmed by the traffic it is attracting.
This renders the order obtained by Barclays' lawyers almost pointless - the media may be too afraid to publish the leaked documents themselves, but I cannot imagine they could be prevented from referring readers to material readily available on the internet. If they are wise, Barclays will learn to accept that the genie has escaped, and that even the best lawyers cannot return it to its bottle...