Slashdot Mirror
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.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
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?
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