The rapid growth of the internet and social media are causing major legal headaches globally, with no clear-cut agreement on how to control content, a law lecturer says.

A military judge has refused to dismiss the charges against a US Army private accused in the biggest leak of government secrets in the country's history.

In the aftermath of the embarrassing leak of hundreds of thousands of sensitive government and military documents to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks, the Obama administration formed an interagency task force to refine the government's defenses against insider threats.

US authorities' treatment of WikiLeaks suspect Private Bradley Manning is "cruel and degrading", the UN special rapporteur on torture, Juan Ernesto Mendez, says.

Whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has begun publishing more than five million confidential emails from US-based intelligence firm Stratfor, the anti-secrecy group says.

It's been All WikiLeaks, All the Time here in Cringeville lately. And why not? As I noted last time out, this is the biggest thing to hit the WebberNets since Tim Berners Lee dreamed it up 20 years ago. We're still unraveling the implications and probably will continue to do so for months if not years.

It's not an exaggeration to say that the recent Wikileaks scandal has shaken the Internet to its core. Regardless of where you stand on the debate, various services have simply refused to handle Wikileaks' business -- everything from domain-name providers to payment services -- and this has led to many questioning how robust the Internet actually is.

In recent weeks WikiLeaks has been targeted by denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, had its hosting service shutdown, been bounced off of Amazon hosting, had its funding through PayPal, MasterCard and other sources shut down, and its leader arrested on sexual assault-related charges. The fact that WikiLeaks remains stubbornly and defiantly online holds some lessons for other sites when it comes to resilience and survivability.