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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.
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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.
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
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.
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.
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
Tooooot! Toooot! And it's a good thing too! We prefer real freedom (rather than all expenses-paid-holidays in Guantamo Bay), and real democracy (with more than two indistinguishable parties to chose among).
There are rights we have in the US that you do not in other free countries,...
That must be the French use of "other"...
Say no to software patents.