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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.
I would be treating the entire computer as hacked... not just the hard drive.
Who knows what kind of traffic / key loggers have been installed.
(And yes, I realize that a hardware key logger is next to useless on a headless server.)
Who knows what is going on at Rackspace as they aren't talking. I'd be finding a new hardware host ASAP.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
I've never heard of someone getting back confiscated items.
Is there any obligation for them to do this, or is it media exposure at this point?
I wonder what was on the disks. I imagine the FBI could have gotten ip logs, password lists, email lists archives...there's a heap of things that could have been on there that points to names and addresses of people who the state would like to harrass..
We all know that the current world order is tending towards fascism, this incident is just another step along that path.
Well, makes sense.
If some of them were undercover agents, their lives might be in danger for all you know.
If I were an undercover agent and if photographs of me were on the web showing me in places where I ought not to be, it's quite understandable.
But what I do not understandable is why they would do this in a way that gets them so much attention. I mean, now all those pictures would be all over the place and would be quite uncontrollable. It would have the opposite effect of what they intended.
Weird. Or maybe I'm missing something. Or maybe I just need more coffee.
This is a fairly complicated international connect-the-dots scenario. Just goes to show that immunity from prosecution and/or seizure and the supposed boundaries of jurisdiction are not exactly cut and dry issues. I suspect this type of multinational effort will be seen more in the near future.
What kind of Justice System raids people property and keeps silent?! I can hardly imagine that the indy-servers are a threat to anyones national security? Whatever happend to the freedom of expression or the freedom of the press?!
This posting seems rather silly. The FBI never seized the hard drives to begin with, but accompanied the British authorities on the raid to sieze the drives, apparently to be passed onto to Swiss authorities.
And second of all, why was IndyMedia waiting for the return of the drives before restoring sites? Didn't they have backups? Now they make a big deal about how they are treating the drives as "compromised". Whey they didn't just buy new drives the day of raid, and restore the backup? Clearly, they don't have a backup, because now they have to do a selective copy of sites from "compromised" disks onto presumable new disks.
However, the FBI appears to be acting mainly as a mediary in this case, principally because the ISP hosting the hardware is an American company and therefore is more under American jurisdiction that British, Italian, Swiss, or any other jurisdiction. Whatever qualms may be had with the FBI, their involvement I believe likely simplified matters for Rackspace at least by providing a familiar law enforcement interface (as opposed to Rackspace having to deal directly with one or more sets of European law enforcement agencies).
Is it just me, or is this the fastest turn around from the FBI of all time? I remember past articles about hardware being gone for YEARS at a time. It seems like the article about their equipment being seized was posted only a week or so ago. Did they really do an investigation or were the just attempting to scare everyone?
Indymedia wouldn't know. They'd obtain a wiretap warrant, and then tap what they wanted (be it a keyboard, the network connection, etc). Works just like a phone tap in that the party being tapped never knows about it. That's the idea, really. You want them going about their normal bussiness, unaware they are being watched so you can catch them doing something illegal. If they susprect you are watching them, it doesn't do much good. A mobster isn't going to call in a hit on someone on a phone they suspect to be tapped.
It would seem that what they wanted was the data on the disks. I'm not saying they shouldn't give it a once over but really, if that was the case, it would be done in secret. They don't raid the house of a mafia member, take all their phones, and then hand them back a couple days later with bugs in them. They stick a bug on the line when no one is looking.
And will probabably be modded down... so I dont care...
But the more I read about stuff like this, the more that I realise that we need to change the way our governments operate. They have TOO much power, and the do things that sould be illegal under the guise of saftey
I truely think that there needs to be a shift in world power, I think that if given enough room to breathe people would make the right decision, and if we (americans) would quit putting our nose where it doesn't belong, that 9/11 would not have happened.
My understanding from the original article is that a court order was presented in the US to an international firm, which then complied and turned over servers in another country, to officials in that country.
Does this scare anyone else?
Could firms use this precident setting situation & other crazy recent laws (DMCA for example) to force hosting companies to turn over servers located in other countries?
Wasn't there a law passed not too long ago that gave the government the power to request information contained within many types of corporate databases (banking, insurance, car loan, etc)? Leverage that law with this case, and the current level of internationalization of many firms, and the government can get information about anyone, from just about anywhere.
Or perhapps I am wearing the tinfoil hat too tightly...
paul reinheimer
So, err, did they name these people as undercover agents, or for all anyone who was browsing the site knew they were pictures of tourists taking pictures of a protest?
Switzerland and/or Italy must be way understaffed if they have to expend their undercover agents on something as stupidly obvious as standing around in plain sight and photographing crowds.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
As emotionally convincing as that might sound, it's still censorship. "Hate" is not illegal.
It wouldn't? I would think that knowing that your provider is a law-abiding organization (whether or not you agree with the particular law is another issue) should make you feel better. What's Rackspace supposed to do? Refuse to comply because they don't agree with the FBI/Swiss/Italians/whoever or think Indymedia is a really cool organization that shouldn't be interfered with? That does them no good. Rackspace did the only thing they could do - they complied with (what appears to be) a legitimate law enforcement seizure request and gag order.
As a customer of several colocation providers, I for one could not see any reason to hold Rackspace in any shadowed view for doing what they did. I _would_ look askance at them if they were to have violated the gag order or otherwise compromised the situation.
Whether or not you agree with the situation is irrelevant. What's relevant in evaluating Rackspace's response is the level of professionalism with which they conducted themselves in the midst of what was and is not a comfortable situation.
Yea. That's a great idea. Tie up the emergency system and the cops for your little prank. There's a reason why the cops showed up - they thought someone was in trouble. But obviously, you thought your prank was more important than someone else's life.
Depends where you live...
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If this is a US government initutive, remember that they have been holding poeple in a convenient lawless zone in Cuba for three years without laying charges. Due process can be ignored in more and more situations.
you had me at #!
They always did so in the bad old days of South African apartheid, they seem to do it here in New Zealand.
The most deeply held belief of these coinops types is that all popular activism is orchestrated by enemy agitators. (After all that is what _they_ would/are do/doing...)
For them to believe otherwise is to begin to suspect that their own dastardly deeds are wrong.
Thus they are always there, on the fringes, taking photographs and trying to correlate them to spot the real ringleaders.
Sort of sad really.
You may be tempted to wear concealing sunglasses and a hat next time you protest something, but odds on that will really convince them you're the "black hat" and they will put the hard question to you on the spot.
Unless you know Swedish law (assuming Sweden did orignate the request) don't assume things. It might be perfectly legal for police to Sweden to intimidate people in this fashion, and illegal for protestors to respond by taking pictures and publishing them.
Remember that the world does NOT subscribe to the American idea of freedom and democracy. There are rights we have in the US that you do not in other free countries, and rights they have that we do not.
So don't apply an American legal viewpoint to it.
I recommend mass deployment of small cardboard boxes painted to look like cameras. If everyone had 3 or 4, and they all took TONS of pictures.... With a few real ones thrown in I guess.
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Who ever said anything about tin-foil hats? I would just call it common sense.
If someone comes storming in to your place and takes all your computers without telling you anything, and then brings them back a week later with a big smile and still doesn't tell you anything, would that not suggest that something just ain't right?
Dear Anonymous Coward,
(too chicken-hearted to post with a proper account? Well.)
"leftist" and "liberal" seem to be bad values for you per se, and your "way of life" as we've seen it in the past couple of decades has made the world a worse place to begin with. You are about 4% of the world population, and you are using more than 25% of the world's energy resources. Simply because you can (like the dog who licks its balls, ya know) by using your sheer power. From large parts of the remaining 96% of the world's population's perspective, the current U.S. foreign energy politics is worse than a locust plague in Africa. And to make sure you have free access to the remaining couple of gallons of oil, you raid other countries on obviously and provenly false accusations and lies. This country (Iraq) is now really a terrorist's haven, and whoever will be elected the next U.S. president will have a hard time getting out of this mess without losing face. America's foreign politics since the 60's was a sheer mess: Central America, Iran/Contra, Vietnam, supporting Saddam against Iran in the 80's (Rumsfeld), supporting the Taliban against the Soviet army (that wasn't much better) in Afghanistan in the 80's -- do I need to quote more? The last major good thing was liberating Europe from the Nazi terror, but that does not give the U.S. eternal credit. Bush turned a nice budget surplus into hundreds of billions of new debts within just 4 years, with very little or no positive effect on employment rates, children's education or health care. And all just for the heck of it.
Had the U.S. stayed at home and not tamper with everybody else's business without consulting international partners and organizations, you'd have one or two problems less ("international terrorism" for example). I'm not talking about joint operations like on the Balkan - just about this extremist unilateralism we see today, and I sincerely hope this will go away soon. You must not expect that the rest of the world sits still and prays to God that "America will prevail".
If that is your "way of life", I can certainly do without it. I for one prefer Indymedia style journalism over Fox TV.
open (SIG, "</dev/zero"); $sig = <SIG>; close SIG;
Realistically IF you have data you dont want hidden or read then dont put it on the net.. If you have information that you want everyone to know and see mirror it around the internet as many times as you can.. There is NO way that once information is on the internet and about that the FBI or any gov can remove it from the net.
Or even a few hundred disposable cameras. Get everybody to buy one, or have some organization distributing them widely during the protest. Would make it much harder to stop the recording.
That generally happens in places where rhetoric can build on actual negative conditions in people's lives. Remove those conditions, and the rhetoric appears quite empty and has a much smaller effect. You're using a flawed argument to show that terrorism is a reason for censorship. You were modded down because most other people on slashdot realize this.