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Indymedia Servers Given Back
NW writes "According to a post on Indymedia Argentina the two Indymedia servers seized earlier by the FBI are in the process of being returned: "A Rackspace employee stated, "I was just told that the court order is being complied with and your servers in London will be online at 5pm GMT. I will pass along anymore information that becomes available and that I am allowed to." It has been verified that the returned hard-drives are the originals, but the circumstances of the seizure still remain unclear: who took them, why were they taken, and under which court order? Indymedia is not aware as to whether Rackspace is still under gag order.
The hard-drives will be treated as "hacked" (compromised) and as a result there will be delays in restoring the sites that are still down."" Here's our previous coverage on this.
The wire reports last week (sorry, no link at the moment) had an FBI spokesperson who said they were acting at the request of the Swiss and Italian governments, under the terms of a law-enforcement-cooperation treaty. Apparently the FBI was involved because Rackspace is a US company.
The only likely explanation for why those governments would be interested that has surfaced so far is that Indymedia posted some photographs that were taken of undercover police officers who were photographing demonstrators (the demonstrators photographed their photographers, as it were). Apparently this is illegal in Europe?
It's all very murky, in any case.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
...according to this and this, there was a request from the Italian and Swiss governments under a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty to the United States (since the hosting provider was a US company). The "FBI" did not physically "seize" the drives, since the FBI does not have jurisdiction in the UK, though it appears that Rackspace voluntarily responded to the US subpoena, which was generated as a matter of course under the MLA treaty.
Jebba, the guy with the contract with Rackspace has a load more info about this whole affair in his blog.
I'm not speaking from personal experience here, but I've read of FBI confiscation of hard drives before. Apparently, the "we're seizing all your servers' hard drives" tactic isn't new.
They try to get the disks back in a timely fashion, when they're through with their analysis. It's completely different than, say, having your car impounded as you're arrested selling suitcases full of coke. They're taking the drives not because they were used in the commission of a crime (necessarily), but because they want evidence off of them, possibly just incidental.
No word on legal obligations, but I can say, based on what I've read (again, no personal experience here), the FBI does make a reasonable attempt to not inconvenience you *too* horribly if they have to take your disks.
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suwain_2
A) Freedom of the press is a more predominant issue in the US than in Europe. The press has very different rights in Europe than in the US. B) If the FBI was indeed acting as a go-between in this case, your beef should be more with the originators of the seizure order than the FBI. C) If indeed undercover officers or other covert LEOs were potentially exposed, the general position, IMO, is that the freedom of the press takes somewhat of a back seat to maintaining the security of those individuals and the operations to which they are attached.
Translated (roughly, so pardon any mistakes) from the News section of the Indymedia homepage:
"In the morning of Thursday 7 of October, American autorities delivered a federal order to Rackspace (Indymedias' provider, with offices in London and USA), requiring the surrender off Indymedias' web servers to the demmanding agency. According to what was said to Indymedia volunteers, Rackspace stated that "they couldn't give Indymedia more information respecting the order". ISPs have received orders to stand quiet in similar situtations in which orders were given not to keep the involved parts informed on what was going on.
Indymedia has not clear how and why a server outside American jurisdiction no can be requised by American autorithies.
At the same time, an aditional server was disconnected at Rackspace; that server provided streaming radio for some emitters, BLAG (linux distribution), and quite a few more sites.
In the last months numerous attacks to independant media have been seen being perpetrated by the USA federal government. In August, the secret service used a jurisdictional requirement in an attempt to disband New Yorks' CMI before the RNC, attempting to obtain IP registers in USA and Holland. The past month the FCC dismantled several American radio emtitters. Two weeks earlier the FBI requested that Indymedia deleted a story on the Nantes CMI who had the picture of some Swedish secret police officer and CMI volunteers were visited by the FBI to inquire on the same issue. Meanwhile, Indymedia and other organizations had success with their victories against, f.ex., Diebold and the Patriot Act. Today, nevertheless, American authorities have disconnected CMIs all oer the world.
The list of affected CMIs include:
Italy, Brasil, Uruguay, England, Andorra, Polonia, Western Massachusetts, Nice, Nantes, Lilles, Marseille , Euskal Herria (País vasco), Liege, East and West Vlaanderen, Antwerpen Belgrado, Portugal, Praga, Galicia..."
http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2004_10.php#00200 6
Indymedia Servers Mysteriously Reappear, But Questions RemainSan Francisco, CA - Rackspace Managed Hosting, the San Antonio-based company that manages two Indymedia servers seized by the US government last Thursday, said yesterday that the servers have been returned and are now available to go back online. Immediate access to the servers, which host Indymedia's Internet radio station and more than 20 Indymedia websites, will be delayed so that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) can ensure that the servers are secure and take steps to preserve evidence for future legal action.
Now that the servers have been returned, the question still remains: who took them, and under what authority? Citing a gag order, Rackspace would not comment on what had happened both in the original seizure of the servers or their return. All that is known at this point is that the subpoena that resulted in the seizure was issued at the request of a foreign government, most likely with the assistance of the United States Attorney's Office in San Antonio. Although initial reports suggested that the FBI had taken the servers, the FBI has now denied any involvement.
The seizure, which silenced numerous political news websites for several days, is clearly a violation of the First Amendment. "Secret orders silencing US media should be beyond the realm of possibility in a country that believes in freedom of speech," said EFF staff attorney Kurt Opsahl. "EFF was founded with the Steve Jackson Games case fourteen years ago, and at that time we established that seizing entire servers because of a claim about some pieces of information on them is blatantly illegal and improper. It appears the government forgot this basic rule, and we will need to remind them."
EFF will take legal action to find out what really happened to Indymedia's servers and ensure that Internet media are protected from egregious First Amendment violations like this in the future.
In 1998 I had a machine seized by the AFP (Australian Federal Police), I wasn't charged and was never informed as to why my equipment was being seized.
However, 3 months after the incident they offered to return the data to me if i supplied a hard disk, I did this and the information was returned as promised.
Another 6 months later, with much pressuring from an attounry provided by legal aid (the government paid for my lawyer because im a poor student), the rest of my equipment was returned along with the original hard disks and data.
I'm really not sure why any of this happened, however it is an example of law enforcement returning confiscated items.
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty, to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"
They have made a pigs breakfast at everything from The economy, environment, egual rights, Civil Liberties.
Not one fucking thing have they managed to succed in. Not ONE.
Help fight continental drift.
In return, we spy on Canada's, England's, Australia, and New Zealand's citizens, and turn the information over to them.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Long afterwards, a judge found the entire raid on the IMC headquarters had been a complete fabrication. The police had planted Molotov cocktails, a sledgehammer, knives etc. in the building. As for agent provocateurs, there is no doubt these were operating in Italy--though they were probably oldtime fascist sympathizers, not undercover cops (though in Italy, the line is blurred).
When you say how many stories has IMC broken, I think you miss the point. How many stories has Slashdot "broken"--and by this I think you mean stories that have made it into national and international media? IMC, like Slashdot, is community media, and serves to communicate information and build connections between those who use it. Thanks to IMC, I was in North America yet I knew what was happening to comrades in Italy.
IMC keeps the flow of information open because it has an open posting policy. With more and more online newspapers disappearing behind subscription walls, often times the only way an important article can released into the wild is by posting on IMC. More "legit" sites won't post entire articles that covered by copyright, say stories on E-Voting from the New York Times or Washington Post. Google hits an IMC site once, and that article is forever cached in its entirety.
This also begs the question, what important stories has the New York Times broken recently? It all seems to be happening at the New Yorker with Seymour Hersh...
The FBI never seized the hard drives to begin with, but accompanied the British authorities on the raid to seize the drives
How do you know this? You don't. The various Brit cops that have been contacted have either said "no comment" or "we weren't there". We HAVE NO IDEA WHICH GOVERNMENT'S AGENTS WERE THERE. Oh, I'm sorry, I must be shouting this because I'm saying it over & over...
AC says:
why was IndyMedia waiting for the return of the drives before restoring sites?
Um, have you been to http://www.indymedia.org lately? http://uk.indymedia.org or a whole ton of other sites that were hosted on AHIMSA but are up & running? They were back online very quickly. How fast would slashdot come back online if the gubmint stole their kit?
There were backups of most things, but not of everything. Each indy was responsible for their own backups & some were better at it or had more resources than others. Some sites had newer software that allowed for easier mirroring, for others it's way more messy.
Sorry if I'm sounding a bit edgy here... :)
-Jeff
What major stories has indymedia broken?
1. Go to any demonstration or social forum
2. Listen to what the folks there have to say
3. Read the corporate coverage of it. Check the national news, likely there will be nothing. Read your "local" (e.g. Gannett owned) newspaper and see what they say. Listen to the "local" TV (e.g. one of a few companies) coverage, if any. Listen to the "local" (e.g. Clear Channel) radio coverage, if any.
4. Go to your local Indymedia and see the coverage of the issues and what really happened at the demo.
5. Compare what you saw at the demo/social forum with what's in the corporate press.
This is one example, but is probably where Indymedia shows the most glaring difference between what really is happening and what you're supposed to hear.
On July 20th, 2001 Carlos Guiliani was shot and killed by Italian police forces during the G8 summit demonstrations in Genoa, Italy. I've always been into the news & politics so I was reading it on fucking cnn.com and they were saying "uh, some guy was shot, we dunno what happened". I mentioned it to a friend and he said, "dude, go to indymedia". Indymedia, of course, had like a dozen photos of exactly what happened. Had it not been for indymedia, the story probably would have disappeared.
At that time, I had never heard of the massive demonstrations that happened in Seattle in 1999. I had been reading the corporate press. How would I know? How would I know the issues that they were raising? If I kept reading the corporate news, I'd still be clueless as to what's going on in other parts of the word. The corporate press in other nations have their own $agenda too.
Indymedia certainly has it's share of junk, but I notice you're still reading slashdot. ;)
-Jeff
The best-documented federal seizure of HDDs that I know of (it's referred to in many court cases) is the Secret Service's raid on Steve Jackson Games.
When I first heard of the story, I looked for mirrors of what is supposed to be the incriminating site.
It contains four pictures of two guys who are supposedly undercover policemen. The photos have _not_ been redacted.
I guess it doesn't hurt to post the short text that came with it. But my french is a little rusty and the automatic tranlators do a poor job on this:
GENÈVE post-G8 : Vidéos, photos et témoignages ; tout est bon pour remonter la piste des casseurs. Un travail minutieux poursuivi aujourd'hui par deux inspecteurs, et qui a conduit à 200 arrestations à ce jour.
La cellule G8 avait pourtant été dissoute en décembre 2003. Elle a repris du service, en plus petit : deux inspecteurs.
Ces inspecteurs visionnent des films et photos reçu par des balancent et des collègues.
Ils viennent aux manifs sur Genève où ils pensent retrouver des "casseurs"
De plus ils prennent de nouvelles photos afin peut être de constituer une bande de données de photos d'activistes suceptibles d'être les futures casseurs des futures émeutes Genevoises.
Comme le dit l'un des 2 inspecteurs : J'ai vu deux de mes collègues se faire lyncher pendant les manifs anti-OMC, en 1998, raconte un inspecteur. Je ne l'oublierai jamais.
Peut etre qu'il y a d'autres choses que cet inspecteur n'obliera jamais ! Car il n'y a pas que le Carpacio comme plat qui se mange froid !