[Bumping to the top with lots of updates. Make sure to catch up on all the latest below. This is one of the biggest stories on the 'Net and of vital interest to bloggers and whistleblowers on both sides of the border. Stay informed.]

Captain Ed, always ahead of the curve, is all over an explosive corruption scandal in Canada, where citizens are hungering for news because of a government publication ban related to the story. Go visit and keep scrolling down.

Here’s the CBC’s story on how American weblogs scooped our neighbors to the north. Globe and Mail article here. Captain Ed notes that a Canadian site that simply linked to his blog may be under threat of legal action. Unbelievable.

See also Joe Katzman at Winds of Change, Small Dead Animals (keep scrolling), Stephen Taylor and Greg Staples for background.

Bound for Gravity has a top-notch link round-up. (Update: He’s taken his posts down out of fear of government retribution.) Wizbang’s on it, too.

Reader John M. says there will be a live webcast here on CPAC (Canada’s version of C-SPAN) related to the scandal.

Update: Tim Worstall’s analysis of the thorny legal questions this case raises is must-read for every blogger. Here’s the nub:

Are we liable for what we write where we write it? Or where people read it?

At the moment we are liable where people read it and it might just be that the US courts won’t like the long term implications of that and will refuse to implement it.

I’m not sure if Captain Ed is going to like the medium term implications of that, but he might find himself at the centre of the first Supreme Court case involving blogging.

Update II: More from Colby Cosh on the blogger-related consequences of Canada’s publication ban on Jean Brault’s testimony published by Captain Ed:

Any action taken against a webmaster who posted the content of Brault’s testimony, or linked to it, or linked to a page that linked to it, would presumably be subject to a later judicial review with an unforeseeable outcome. I believe that this entry complies with the ban–but does it? On Saturday Instapundit linked to “Captain” Ed Morrissey’s posting (which is the top hit returned by a Google search for “brault liberal”) about the Brault testimony. Is it legal for me to tell you that if I don’t link to Morrissey’s site itself?

What about my three-year-old link to Instapundit.com–am I now obliged by the ban to remove it from my sidebar? If so, for how long? Must I monitor every site on the sidebar for content whose publication by me would constitute contempt of court? I don’t believe any legally solid answer is available to these questions; the nature of a hyperlink as a “publication” just hasn’t been nailed down.

Cosh has a request for bloggers outside Canada:

With due respect to the ban, which I consider myself to have observed herein, it would actively help free the hands of Canadian webloggers and reporters if our foreign cousins were to be aggressive about “publishing” the substance of the Brault testimony outside the reach of Canadian law.

More legal analysis at Mader Blog on whether and how the ban will affect the Canadian site, NealeNews, which first linked to Captain’s Ed post.

More Canadian blogger commentary: Mike Brock, Norman’s Spectator

Slashdot is covering the story, with some commenters defending the ban.

The Politicker and The Interocitor discuss the potential of blogs to bring down the Canadian government. Says Kevin Murphy at The Interocitor:

When the dam breaks, and it will, the Canadian Government may fall as completely as the Mulroney Conservatives did. Maybe worse, if the Quebec nationalists have their way — Canada without Quebec would be a far different place.

The pen is mightier than the sword.

Ditto that.

Angry in the Great White North steps up and defies the ban.

Meanwhile, Captain Ed’s original post reporting Brault’s testimony is currently (as of 601pm EST) the top politics link on Technorati and the second-ranked link on BlogsNow (behind a quite related story on San Francisco’s attempt to regulate blogging).

More coming from Ed tonight, he says. Stay tuned.

Update III: Just a quick thought. Remember when Jeff Jarvis noted during the Eason Jordan debacle that the “off the record” gate has fallen? Looks like the blogosphere might be threatening Canada’s publication ban in the very same way.

Trenchant as always, Wretchard at The Belmont Club weighs in:

Like the Rathergate and Swiftvets story, the scene seems set for an invisible and unacknowledged meme to exert a powerful influence on mainstream news. One poster at Free Dominion said Canada was about to experience the power of the American blogosphere.

The idea of an ‘American blogosphere’ is a curious concept. One Canadian poster, who balked at relating what he knew about the Liberal Party scandal on the Free Dominion because of the publication ban, suggested he and his buddies continue their conversation at the FreeRepublic, like they were crossing the border and going from Windsor to Detroit. Whether that made it all nice and legal I’ll leave to the lawyers but a certain amount of absurdity suggested itself in the situation.

This highlights the impact that Internet self-publishing has had in breaking down political systems, whether peaceably (as in the case of Canada and the US) or not-so-peaceably as exemplified by Iran. Because the exercise of authority consists largely of information control (rather than physical control) by the State, Internet self-publishing has effectively weakened large areas of state power by weakening those controls. As a practical matter, there is not a judge in the world that can realistically enforce a gag order unless he can a) prevent the source leak or b) force compliance on all continents and seas of the planet earth.

Update IV: Captain Ed’s latest report on Brault’s testimony is up.

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