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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.
Does anyone know why the hell they seized them in the first place?
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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.)
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
I heard the real reason the machines were seized was because they hosted goatse.cx.
Apparently the FBI agents decided that they, and GWB had been tricked one too many times
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?
...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.
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.
The FBI loves intimidation, and it appears that is what happened here too. I wish the FBI would offer apologies and make some sort of serious restitution every time they confiscate stuff and then realize they don't want to prosecute. They need some sort of penalty for raids that prove unwarranted. It is a form of terrorism, I think. "If you run afoul of us, even maybe violate copyrights, we will raid your house, and take your stuff."
xyzzy - operation overload.
Jebba, the guy with the contract with Rackspace has a load more info about this whole affair in his blog.
If this had been your site, there probably would have been no media outcry. Your site would still be down, and your drives in an evidence locker with no likelihood of return. When people say "Free speech has consequences," this is the kind of thing they're talking about. Cast a vote against the Ashcroft administration and send a check to the EFF.
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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.
FBI: Bend over
Rackspace: *whimper* ok...
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.
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.
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.
From what I've read, yes, it's a crime under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. But the current administration doesn't appear to be doing much to track down who first leaked Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA secret agent. Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife was exposed by columnist Robert Novak when Novak wrote:
To quell the knee-jerk duopoly partisans: I'm not saying a Kerry administration would do better here. I have no idea what a Kerry administration would do about this. Speaking out against the actions of one party or one administration is not implicit support for any other party or independent candidate.
Digital Citizen
What I'd like to know is why Indymedia still trusts Rackspace with its hosting. If my colo was refusing to tell me what's going on in a situation like this, I would think about moving my servers elsewhere, preferably overseas. I realize Rackspace is probably under a gag order, but frankly that wouldn't make me feel much better.
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
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
I love it when the tinfoil hats birgade comes out on slashdot, its better than TV.
Ok, just to turn the paranoia knob down ten notches here, why would the fbi/cia/M5/etc. bother to try to install key or traffic loggers? They have already demonstraited that they can literally own the box any damn time they want it. In addition, they could just slap a copy of carnivor (or whatever passes for it in Europe) on the ISP trunks, and read anything they want, and no ammount of reformatting or scanning would detect it.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
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.
In forensices cases involving hard drives the drives are copied bit by bit to an image file. That image file is then mounted, data recovery is run, and then the drive is searched. Here are some common type Q's. (Not my company... best link I could find) http://www.dminfo.com/faqs.html
You might also want to talk to the people on irc.indymedia.org , #blag, Jebba hangs out there _ALOT_ (he's there right now). Don't forget blag linux lost data too, including their Repo's, their wiki, their bugzilla, and alot more. I hope IndyMedia and blag get their stuff back.
s.clementmonkey@sympatico.ca, remove the 'monkey'.
you had me at #!
No, there would be no first ammendment impications. The UK doesn't repsect the US constution. It's a sovering nation. The US didn't request the seizure or do the seizing, the FBI was just there as a treaty formality. It's basically in place so that if a foriegn bussiness somewhere is subject to something in their host country, they have agents there from their own police force that can explain thing to them and deal with them. If an ATi office in the US were to be raided by the FBI, the RCMP would be along for that reason, not to do the raiding, but for diplomatic reasons.
It has the side effect of helping make sure that Rackspace had their rights in the UK respected. The FBI was observing and documenting everything so had the British authorities crossed the line, they could have reported it to the US consul to try and get something done.
The alternative would be for the FBI to just stand aside, which would be seen as a slight by the UK, and let this all happen anyways.
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.
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...
This is an excerpt from a previous message he received from Rackspace, which seems to be about something different. I find the text very troubling. (The text is taken from here)
Rackspace said:
Mon Oct 4 07:30:53 2004
Hello,
I am sorry for the tone of the ticket you referenced. However, we are at the mercy of the DMCA as it is written. As a hosting provider, once we have received a DMCA notification, we are responsible for removing the offending material regardless of the merit of the complaint. In fact, we are not even to look into the merits of the complaint. We are only to act to remove the offending material as quickly as possible. If we fail to remove the material, we can be held liable for damages.
Essentially, they're saying that while he may well be correct that his material doesn't infringe any copyrights, Rackspace is legally obliged to remove it immediately.
I've long known that the DMCA was a terrible law. I didn't know it went quite this far, though.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...we've got a few clients who host with rackspace, but after this we've recommended that they find another provider.
Rackspace have come out of this with egg on their faces and I seriously hope that it hurts their business big-time. I also hope that they will be compensating indymedia and all the other sites hosted on those servers for the lost time, aggrivation and general shittyness of the whole thing.
I am NaN
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.
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 !
Let's not kid ourselves here folks. The rest of the world doesn't hate us because we stick our nose in their politics. Joe average (or Mohammad Average? whatever) doesn't give a flying rats ass so long as he's got food, family, and something to do with himself. People don't blow themselves because they're cheesed off over a little meddling. They do so because they're poor, destitute and above all hopelessly miserable (read that again, I meant it literally. These poeple have no hope).
This is largely our fault folks. Iraq has a large supply of the most valuable substance on earth (oil), and they've got a large supply of hopelessly poor in spite of it all. 9/11's what your SUVs and 50's gas guzzlers have bought you. If you don't like it, too bad. The die is cast. Yeah, we could all start using public transport and ultra fuel effecient cars. But if you think for a momement that the car/oil companies'll let that happen (or the American Public is smart enough to force it), you're just deluded. Period. Fasten up for a bumpy ride, it's gonna get a lot worse before it gets better.
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The Register covers this in more detail, stating that parliamentary questions have been tabled asking "what recent discussions [The Home Secretary] has had with US law enforcement agencies concerning the seizure of material from UK-based internet hosting providers; and if he will make a statement."
I'd expect we'll see his evasion^h^h^h^h^h^h^hanswer appearing on the excellent theyworkforyou.com
ooooooh! What does this button do? - DeeDee, Dexters Lab.
How about writing to the service providers of the politicians who voted for the DMCA in the first place alleging copyright violation. See how they like it...
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Don't worry, I'm still telling various people* that they will NOT find kangaroos in Austria. I'm currently in Switzerland (not Sweden), and Austria is often their next destination. They get all disappointed after that ...
* Who these people might be is left as an exercise for the reader.
Q:I was listening to a CD in Grip and it sounded horrible! What's up? A:Perhaps you are listening to country music
It will be interesting to see whether I get a reply, and if so what reply I get. The more MPs are asking questions of the Home Office on this issue, the better, so if you're a UK voter, write to your MP. Obviously, don't copy my letter exactly, because the objective is to get them to understand a lot of different people are upset about this one.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.