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Indymedia Seizures Initiated In Europe
daveschroeder continues: "Rackspace's statement reads, 'In the present matter regarding Indymedia, Rackspace Managed Hosting, a U.S. based company with offices in London, is acting in compliance with a court order pursuant to a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT), which establishes procedures for countries to assist each other in investigations such as international terrorism, kidnapping and money laundering. Rackspace responded to a Commissioner's subpoena, duly issued under Title 28, United States Code, Section 1782 in an investigation that did not arise in the United States. Rackspace is acting as a good corporate citizen and is cooperating with international law enforcement authorities. The court prohibits Rackspace from commenting further on this matter.'"
How far does this MLAT extend? I'm wondering whether it would obligate nations to assist in cases where based on their own laws, the suspected crime wouldn't have been a crime at all. This is pretty relevant since the USA has significantly more anal-retentive IP laws right now, and Europe has significantly fewer protections on freedom of speech. Might a country that doesn't have anything like a DMCA be forced to help the FBI take down some infringing code? Would the FBI be forced to help some EU nation take down a website promoting "hate speech"?
I guess I realize why this sort of treaty is useful, but I'm having a hard time understanding how it avoids trampling on the local legal rules of each nation.
The court prohibits Rackspace from commenting further on this matter.
which court , a US one ? French, Swiss ?
its almost a human rights issue if the suspect has been bound over from discussing the charges or suspected charges with anyone
then again USA and human rights never did get on well
You're right. It wasn't the FBI's fault. It was the US/CIA's fault.
The FBI doesn't sign the treaties. And, if you were the victim of a crime, wouldn't you be a bit upset if the guilty party fled to another country and couldn't be apprehended?
Try telling that to the inmates of Belmarsh Prison who have been imprisoned under our shiny new anti-terrorism laws here in the UK. True, maybe some or even all of them should be in there and the evidence really is truly sensitive and could, for instance, compromise an undercover asset if made public. Even so, they are still being held without being formally charged with anything at all in many cases.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
The funny thing here is that the sort of "everyone is judged by the standards of the least free country" treaties that turn out to have resulted in this shutdown are the exact sort of thing that the Indymedia crowd has been trying to oppose with their "anti-globalization" tirades all along.
Now it turns out they're the first to be targetted by these treaties.
Go figure.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
"as international terrorism, kidnapping and money laundering."
It should be noted that Indymedia is a big supporter of the PLO, which is into those things. It's not beyond the realms of possibility that terrorists were using Indymedia's forums to communicate (or course the same could be said of any site that lets people post random stuff).
Hmm. Belmarsh - the Guantanamo bay of the UK?
Get your own free personal location tracker
I guess this undercover cop was particularly inept then huh? How the hell did anybody know he was an undercover cop?
BTW what was an uncover cop from switzerland doing in NY during a convention? Was he participiating in the protests? Was he there as an agitator? Was he there as an observer and if so why?
I hope to god somebody follows up on this. I am very curious to know what switzerland is so interested in US political converntions and what role they have played in the protests.
evil is as evil does
The way to deal with an overextended empire, as you write that the USA is becoming, is to get it bogged down in highly symbolic but strategically worthless wars that comsume all of its energy and resources.
Naturally, no one in their right mind would want to take on the empire directly. But it might be worthwhile to provoke some of one's annoying hot-headed neighbors to do so. That way you keep your neighbors too busy fighting the empire to bother you.
This world is not really a good place to run a totalitarian empire. There is a giant surplus of young people without jobs who can be easily convinced that all their troubles are caused by the empire, and that some god will solve all of their troubles if they just kill enough of the empire's citizens and solders. The empire spends billions each year on high tech weapons but only has a million or so solders up against two billion young people willing to fight it. Globally they get spread pretty thin.
The USA is in deep debt. Each year its government spends far more than it takes in through taxes. It finances itself by issuing bonds. People outside the USA buy its bonds because they believe that the USA will always make good on its bonds. The USA believes that whenever its bonds come due it can cover them by just selling more bonds. The empire finances itself not through looting and pillage but with a giant Ponzi scheme.
Want to stop the growth of the empire. Stop buying its government bonds. Today the largest buyer of USA government bonds is the government of People's Republic of China. Fifteen years ago it was the the various banks of Japan. Thirty years ago it was Saudi Arabia.
It's best for everyone if the empire occupies itself with endless expensive wars in worthless little hellholes. Let's hope that they continue to do so and leave the rest of us alone.
I think that some of the non-IndyMedia-affiliated groups whose data was affected by this need to file complaints with the relevant courts/agencies about their data being confiscated without a valid warrant, and file legal action against Rackspace for having turned over their data without a valid warrant for their data being presented. Don't bring IndyMedia into it, don't let the FBI or Rackspace bring them in, make the authorities explain in public why they're seizing the property of people not named in the warrants.
Sure, it might be uncomfortable for a while, but it would be worth it.
Pal, you have *no* idea what you're talking about.
The Nazis were backed by corporate interests and were good Fascists. The Socialist tag was just a bit of Orwellian Newspeak thrown in to confuse the common worker who thought socialism was probably a Good Idea given how the Weimar Republic had worked them over.
Classifying them as leftist is buying into their Newspeak. Like all Fascist regimes, the name tag on their politics have little or nothing to do with their actual politics - which was pretty ordinary Corporate/Statist Fascism. Now, both the extreme Right and the Extreme left converge on dictatorships, but that doesn't mean that all dictatorships are extreme left.
Your assumptions are blinding you to the effect of Corporate Fascism and right-wing rethoric though, which is the point from the PoV of the current NewSpeak propagandists. I think a little rechecking of your assumptions might be in order.
Look, I'm from Texas. Around here, we call Bush "The Texas Twit" or just plain ol' "Shrub." I have no respect for the guy.
But...
You characterized him as "a religious extremist." That's just flat wrong. If he was anything close to well-immersed in Christianity he would have understood the need to stay out of wars in the Middle East. He'd certainly have known better than to have started one. He would have understood the religious motivations that have produced conflict in the region for thousands of years and he wouldn't have seriously considered for more than a nano-second sticking his nose into that quagmire.
If he were a religious extremist, he would have just kept up support for Israel, made a few peace gestures that would produce good photo ops, and prayed that nobody over there chose to nuke anybody else until he was out of office.
A real Christian, someone who understands the history of his religion, would have known better.
Bush says he's a Christian. This gets him votes and, in this country, makes him seem like a nicer, more principled person. However, the evidence that he really gives a rat's ass about his faith is feeble to non-existent.
Believed by who? The quasi-"official" article at indymedia.org and the AFP report both say that the request initiated with the Swiss and Italian government. Why are you not asking questions of the Swiss and the Italian authorities? You and I both know that the only reason the US was involved is because Rackspace is a US company. Also, the FBI does not have jurisdiction in the UK, no matter how much people might like to imagine it might. Rackspace, a US company, complied with a US federal order in offices it operates in a different country. The FBI itself says it's not an FBI operation. Now I realize that's laughable to many on slashdot: believing the FBI when it says it's not an FBI operation. But the FBI proudly talks about its own investigations; if this was an FBI investigation, it would have already said so. But the fact is, the request initiated in Switzerland and Italy, and probably focused on very specific content.
You say the US had absolutely nothing to do with it? How about the Federal Order? Do you have info I don't have?
I didn't say the US had nothing to do with anything relating to this; I said they had nothing to do with initiating the request, or the actual physical seizure of the drives/servers, since that would have to have been done by UK authorities, even if accompanied by the FBI.
Sounds very much like US agents are involved...
Yes. Acting as agents for Italy and France under an MLA treaty.
And if the "State Department" was involved, it's only because it had to be involved for the mechanics of the MLA treaty.
We do not know for certain whether it is related to Italy or Switzerland or somewhere else. It is a good guess, but still a guess. All we know is that it was a Federal Order from the U. S. of A.
Because Rackspace is a US company. All of this obscures the real issue here: the fact they were physically on UK soil is irrelevant, because they weren't violating any UK laws. They probably weren't even violating any US laws. But the evidence from the third party, the third nation, must have been compelling enough under the guidelines of the MLA treaty for the US to act as an intermediary, and to generate a US subpoena.
At least admit than more than just the US is involved here. Of course, plenty here will believe this was 100% orchestrated by the US for purely political reasons. But the US can't execute search warrants or seizures in foreign countries, therefore at a minimum the UK was involved in an enforcement action. But it sounds like Rackspace chose to comply voluntarily.
Listen: nowhere did I say the situation was a good thing. Just that the US official story, take it or leave it, is that it is NOT a US operation, and that it was merely handling a request for a "third nation", and specifically names Swiss and Italian authorities, who have also not denied such a request. Now, even if all that is true, you can berate the FBI for throwing around its weight with a US corporation who clearly doesn't want to get on the "wrong side", as it were, of the authorities. You can chastise Rackspace for rolling over. But the bottom line here is that this all took place on UK soil, and ostensibly had it not been for the Italian/Swiss request, whatever it was, we wouldn't be here talking about this right now.
I understand that all you know for certain is that it was a US federal order, but that somewhat glosses over the fact that the reason it's so is because Rackspace is a US company, which is probably why the request got channeled to the US in the first place. I'm not saying it's right, just saying that all the blame doesn't exclusively rest on the US here. The US was but one part of this puzz
1. THERE WERE NO PALESTINIANS IN 1948. None. There were Arabs living in the British Mandate of Palestine, but they have absolutely nothing in common with the Palestinians of today, who are Egyptians and Jordanians who were refused return to their own countries.
After the fall of the Ottoman Empire the area was in disarray. NO ONE owned it, where do you get that there Arabs were living under British Mandate? The whole area was void of any one countries control until after World War 1. Where the Allies decided to carve the area up into pieces. This didn't work too well.
2. Your vicious anti-semitism here is noted. The Jewish settlers were not terrorists. They bought the land they lived on. Bought it.
They did not buy the land, the land simply was not up for sale. The jews who settled in the middle east emigrated from Northern Europe. All the facts and history point to that. Jews constantly site that they bought the land but that's in their religious text and isn't bound by any historical document or trade of land that I know of to date. The jews who claim to have bought private land from private land owners have no record of this and what private land owners are they speaking of? The British who summarily gave up control of their respective areas? There is no record or proof of this at all, anywhere. Show me some proof and I'll be willing to update that idea. As for history any sale of land in the past has been documented with buyers and purchases. There is NOTHING like that, i'm aware of for the land the Jews claim to own. Not withstanding that some of the areas they moved into were clearly already occupied. Of course I'm not being anti-semetic when I say that the original jewish "settlers" were terrorists. These weren't the jews who were living in the vicinity but people who started killing others in the name of a biblical state.
It's not hard to understand the situation:
The Israelies want to live in peace.
The Palestinians want to murder the entire population of Israel.
Wow so the palestinians want to murder the entire population of Israel. For no reason? They just don't like you right? Let me guess, you're Israeli?
No they don't. Very simply, no they don't. The Israelis simply and absolutely do not target non-combatants, regardless of gender or age. Sometimes a sad accident will happen, as the Palestinians do use children as human shields.
All those children that die are being used as human shields? Do you realize that most of the children killed by Israeli's are killed in house raids? Children throwing rocks at tanks and a couple of rounds go off, dead child. It's not new.
My conclusion is that you are a complete idiot. The Palestinians have been offered a state twice , giving them more than 90% of what they had asked for, and both times they rejected it in favour of continued murder.
They rejected it because it came with stipulations and lands they weren't willing to concede to Israel. You neglect to mention that fact, then you throw in the mix that you aren't dealing with one people but many other different sects of people.
On the other hand, the Palestinians do deliberately target women and children, and always target non-combatants when they can find them. Not long ago, they shot and killed a pregnant woman in her car along with her three daughters. The blow up crowded cafes and packed buses. They send teenagers to their deaths just so as to kill a few more Israelis.
Violence begets violence? What would you like me to say? The truth is, you are killing one another.
You can't blame the entire situation on the Palestinians; the Israelis aren't perfect angels. And the other Arab nations have been carefully fostering the situation for decades, after they realised that they couldn't hope to defeat Israel militarily.
Because the Israel military has such great might a strength fostered on their own?
No, only 99% or so of the blame ca
So much for "you can't police/censor the Internet - it's international, it's impossible, we'll just route around it". The FBI has figured out how to handle that, at least when it means stomping out troublsome independent media. Until all content is available through URIs that, unlike URLs, are not coupled to a single physical location, but rather in a distributed, redundant, semantic space, physical access to the machines will still trump any security regime.
--
make install -not war
In July, the CIA pressured the govt of Cyprus to investigate Cyprus Indymedia in July. When the Cyprus govt finally admitted this publicly, it made front page news there.
In August, the US Secret Service harassed NY Indymedia's ISP Calyx during the Republican National Convention, making intimidating requests to the ISP, demanding home contact details of Indymedia server admins, etc.
Now it's the FBI's turn.
What does the US govt plan to do to Indymedia in November, I wonder?
Here's some background on what the Italian govt had in mind when they requested the "assistance" of the US Feds. A federal prosecutor in Italy, Marina Plazzi, has stated that she is investigating Indymedia because of possible "support of terrorism". Apparently this is about supposedly positive postings after an attack on Italian soldiers in the Iraqi city of Nassiriya last November. "We asked the FBI for help alongside the Italian Department of Justice", federal prosecutor Plazzi said. The Italian Minister of Justice, Roberto Castelli, has so far refused to speak out on the proceedings of the FBI.
The parliamentary representatives of the Italian government parties are clearly less reticent. On Sunday, Mario Landolfi, spokesman of the neo-fascist party "Alleanza Nazionale" (AN), announced the seizure of the computers served "the enforcement of the law".
Note that the AN are coalition partners in the current Italian government of Silvio Berlusconi, our Partner In The War On Terror(tm).
Last November, 17 AN delegates, including the granddaughter of Benito Mussolini, demanded the shut-down of Indymedia in a joint statement. Back then, Paolo Valentino, state secretary in the Italian Department of Justice and also a member of AN, had announced possible cooperation with the USA.
This week's seizure of Indymedia servers appears to be what he was hoping for.
Hussein did have ties to al Qaida: the administration is correct to point this out. It does not appear at the moment that they had ties to the 11 September operation, but I do not recall any official source stating that. The reputed Prague meeting is still up in the air: last I heard, Czech intelligence stood behind their report while the CIA (the same CIA which misreported the location of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and the same CIA which was close to 100% certain that Iraq had WMDs) flat-out denies it.
As I noted, every intelligence agency in the world believed that Hussein had WMDs. At the moment it appears that they were all incorrect. Why that is so is an interesting question. Were Hussein's underlings reporting progress they weren't making, in order to line their own pockets with weapons money? Were the intelligence agencies afraid to report things were safe, in case they were wrong? Were the intelligence agencies exaggerating the likelihood of Iraqi WMD programmes in order to increase their own funding?
Lastly, I don't see how you can fault the administration for believing its intelligence apparatus. Clinton believed in Iraqi WMDs for the exact same reason that Bush believed in them: the CIA and every single other major intelligence agency agreed that he had them. Why is a Republican administration supposed to be omniscient when a Democratic administration gets a free pass?
Nice job of clipping the bit where I demonstrated that it's exactly not that. But of course, I should know not to expect intellectual honesty from a leftist.
I'm still waiting for the source of your supposed quote, and am still waiting for the context of the quote (that is, the full text of the remarks).
Rumsfeld said he "knew" where the WMD's were. Its pretty obvious he didn't since there weren't any and if he "knew" where they were he would have found them.
He had intelligence which specified that they were at X, Y and Z. The intel was incorrect. This isn't rocket science.
Or do you expect him to have personally verified the locations, but visiting them and perhaps scrawling 'Rummy wuz here' thereon? C'mon! All the evidence says that he did believe that he knew where WMDs were.
Clinton launched more missiles into Iraq than George H.W. Bush did!
More to the point, WMDs were not the sole reason for the invasion of Iraq. There were multiple, mutually-supporting reasons. At the time, we focused on WMDs because the evidence was so compelling, and because it was something the world agreed on (we didn't need to convince Putin that Iraq had WMDs; trying to convince him that dictators are Bad News would have been somewhat futile...). Executive decisions are made on the basis of partial, sometimes flawed intelligence. I have seen nothing to date which leads me to believe that the current administration were anything but correct to act as they did based on the information they had at the time.
My personal read on the situation is that Iraq was the one Middle East state wherein we were able to go to war and effect regime change with a sold casus belli. We need to go to war and effect regime change somewhere in the Middle East in order to indicate to Libya, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Pakistan et al. that we're serious, and that if they continue to support terrorism we will destroy them. Since we were already at war with Iraq; since Iraq had violated the terms of the cease-fire; since it did not fully comply with its international obligations; since it was a monstrous and tyrannical regime; since we believed it to be a clear danger to the stability of the region; since we believed it to posess weapons of mass destruction; since Iraq had dealt with al Qaida; since we had international backing--for all those reasons we were able to re-open hostilities. But the underlying reason was a pressing need to demonstrate our serious intent.
Which has worked--note how Qaddafi has surrendered his program; note how Pakistan is co-operating pretty well in the hunt; note how the typical state sponsors of terrorism are behaving in a much more circumspect manner than before.
Bush and Blair did, big, big difference. The rest of the world was telling them not to.
Rest of the world?!? Um, there are dozens of other nations in this with us. Yes, France, Germany and Russia opposed us--but given that they were in Hussein's pocket, wouldn't one have expected that? Given that they profited quite well from him, wouldn't one have expected that? Yes, a motley collection of tinpot dictators across the world opposed our toppling of a tinpot dictator on the other side of the world: somehow I'm unopposed.
Besides the US and UK, we are backed by Austrialia, New Zealand, Kuwait, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, Angola, Portugal, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Iceland, Italy, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Albania, Macedonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Ukraine, Moldova, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Philippines, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Solomon Islands, Mongolia, Palau, Tonga, Thailand, El Salvador, Colom