- Padraig Reidy is news editor at Index on Censorship. The opinions expressed are his own.-
Solicitors Carter-Ruck have withdrawn the terms of an injunction preventing the Guardian from reporting a parliamentary question by Newcastle-under-Lyme Labour MP and former journalist Paul Farrelly.
This has been seen - rightly - as a victory for free expression, and a demonstration of the amazing power of the web in the face of attempted censorship.
Once the Guardian had published its slightly cryptic story on its website last night, containing such tantalising phrases as: “Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret”, it was inevitable that people would go searching.
Within hours, the Internet was alive with speculation, links to leaked documents, and republication of cached articles. At one point on Tuesday morning, phrases relating to the case constituted four of Twitter’s top ten “trending topics” --- a scarcely believable profile for a story that, technically, no one was supposed to be talking about.
