It is getting hard to keep up. The various aspects of information and justice which I write about are developing faster than I can put quill to keyboard.

I wrote my piece An information war at the week-end and updated it when the video emerged of the policeman beating up a woman at the G20 demonstration before posting it today. This morning’s Times carries a piece to the same effect as my article’s comments about protesters turning the tables on Big Brother state, using information as their weapon. There is also an article in the Times today about policemen invoking the Terrorism Act against a man who photographed them in a park (they have been given some re-education on the subject), one about the Damian Green raid (an over-reaction, apparently, according to the Parliamentary Report of yesterday – you don’t say?), and one about the further fall-out from the Damian McBride affair, with questions being asked about searching e-mails to trace the other recipients of the offending messages. Meanwhile, the European Commission has started legal proceedings against the UK for breach of its obligations to enforce EU data privacy laws.

Pretty well every topic I wrote about has therefore been updated by events. Meanwhile, I have seen a headline about Switzerland signing up to safe harbor, a judge has written in the Times today (as I have here) about the Woolf reforms, and there is a Legal IT conference coming up in Montreal which deserves a write-up. Oh, and there is some work to do as well as all this writing.

Some, at least, of all this will warrant further comment. Mr Justice Jackson, as he then was, referred to the issues in the Wembley Stadium case as being like the Lernean Hydra. That, as I am sure you all know, was a hideous creature which would emerge from its murky swamps and terrorise the people. Every time Hercules struck off a head, two more would grow in its place, so the Hydra was a bit like our civil service (and the murky swamps increasingly a metaphor for Downing Street, come to think of it). As I look at all these multiplying stories around the world which warrant reporting, the Hydra analogy comes to mind. I will try to keep up.

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