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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
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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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.
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
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.
Why do you say it appears to be a legitimate gag order? Do you have ANY evidence except that RackSpace said so? Did they file any legal protest? If so, where can I find record of it?
I have sympathy for RackSpace, and realize that this put them in a tough spot. But the fact remains that as far as we can tell they just rolled over, and didn't do anything to even try to protect their customer's privacy. Something to consider when next you are looking for a host.
You rate your business the way you rate yours. (I notice, however, that you didn't name it.) Possibly if they were one of several different colocation providers that I used, I'd still trust them to maintain a mirror. If they were 10% cheaper than the competition. For a primary host they'd need to be 30-40% cheaper. (I haven't decided yet...much information about this is still missing, so even that's a rough estimate.)
I don't consider laws to me more important than ethics or morals. Laws have become what one obeys because it's too dangerous to do otherwise. Morals and ethics are what one does because it's proper. Laws seem to rarely have anything to do with morals or ethics any more.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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.