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The Empires Strike Back
Alien54 writes "Back when the Internet was young - oh, say, eight years ago - there was a school of thought that held that cyberspace was its own sovereign nation. For one thing, 'The Net perceives censorship as damage, and routes around it.' What government could control what was said on the Net? [...] Maybe it's time to change that into, 'Governments perceive the Internet as damage, and gang up on it.' So says Net War columnist Wendy Grossman in an article discussing the recent raids on Indymedia. She makes an interesting case."
She should try reading Neuromaner, by Gibson, which was amazingly published in 1984.
That's 1996. Maybe the *web* was young at that point, but a whole lot of us had been using the net for more than 10 years at that point.
Hell, even AOL had been plaguing the net for years at that point.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Nobody seems to know - just different theories.
Stay tuned for new sig...
In the present matter regarding Indymedia, Rackspace Managed Hosting, a U.S. based company with offices in London, is acting in compliance with a court order pursuant to a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT), which establishes procedures for countries to assist each other in investigations such as international terrorism, kidnapping and money laundering. Rackspace responded to a Commissioner's subpoena, duly issued under Title 28, United States Code, Section 1782 in an investigation that did not arise in the United States. Rackspace is acting as a good corporate citizen and is cooperating with international law enforcement authorities. The court prohibits Rackspace from commenting further on this matter.
What's an MLAT?
Criminal Cases Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Treaties: Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Treaties (MLATs) are relatively recent development. They seek to improve the effectiveness of judicial assistance and to regularize and facilitate its procedures. Each country designates a central authority, generally the two Justice Departments, for direct communication. The treaties include the power to summon witnesses, to compel the production of documents and other real evidence, to issue search warrants, and to serve process. Generally, the remedies offered by the treaties are only available to the prosecutors. The defense must usually proceed with the methods of obtaining evidence in criminal matters under the laws of the host country which usually involve letters rogatory.
MLAT Treaties in Force:
I. The United States has nineteen Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties (MLAT) currently in force: Argentina, Bahamas, Canada, Hungary, Italy, Jamaica, Korea, Mexico, Morocco, Netherlands, Panama, Philippines, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, United Kingdom (Cayman Islands), United Kingdom, Uruguay.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
Q: What government could control what was said on the Net?
A: China.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Or even more amazingly read True Names, by Vernor Vinge, which was published a few years earlier.
Reminds me of a story I read once but can't find right now. It's the future, and some college kid reads a book from a friend he needs for his degree but can't afford to buy. Reading another person's book is illegal, and he's stressed that the government will bust him and his girlfriend. ...
10 karma points to s/he who finds this story. It's perfect for this topic.
That ones easy, and I'm sure many here knows it:
"The Right to Read" by Richard Stallman.
(No, I'm not expecting any karma)
Jedidiah
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
At the Genoa G8 summit in 2001, the Italian police shot a protester dead and assaulted a number of journalists including the Indymedia reporter Mark Covell. The Genoa police are currently defending charges brought by Covell and others.
It appears the Italian government hope that they can disrupt or compromise the case against them. Acting in concert with the Swiss, who want to get back at Indymedia for their coverage of the Evian G8, they went through the FBI (because Rackspace, Indymedia's London hosts, is a US company) under a MLAT (Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty) to ask the UK police to raid Indymedia's servers.
The UK Home Office was of course happy to comply, mainly because MLATs enable them to carry out police actions that would be judicially indefensible without the cloak of secrecy that surrounds MLATs.
It is because of things like this that we need technology like I2P and Freenet more than ever. Freenet seems to be stuck in a morass and making no progress but I2P is useful now and would have prevented Indymedia's servers from being taken down.
Someone in Europe got a court order allowing them to sieze the hard drives. The company hosting the servers was an American company (Rackspace) so the entity in Europe who instantiated the court order co-ordinated with the FBI to perform the raid and sieze the hard drives.
A subsequent court order has dicated that the drives be returned. The drives have been returned, however the people at IndyMedia consider their content compromized, and are working on getting non-compromized drives prepared and the site back online.
I leave it to others to report on whether IndyMedia is actually back online, or reporting on who the entity was who ordered the initial siezure of the hard drives to begin with.
My own suspicion is that someone in the EU's equivalent of the RIAA browsed the song selections and found a couple of file names that looked suspiciously like a song from a signed artist, and initiated court actions. However I don't know.
-Rusty
You never know...
Just why were the Indymedia hard disks seized?
Good question. It reminds me of a recent article here at slashdot (which I can't seem to find) about another set of seized computers from an ISP or hosting service. At first everyone yelled about the injustice. Then we found out the guys were being hired to do DoS attacks. Moral of the story: don't pass judgement too quickly.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
We have a lot more to worry about from the European Union then the United States. At least here we have the first admendment.
, 56294,00 .html?tw=wn_story_related
See:
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367
(qoute from article)
Specifically, the amendment bans "any written material, any image or any other representation of ideas or theories, which advocates, promotes or incites hatred, discrimination or violence, against any individual or group of individuals, based on race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin, as well as religion if used as pretext for any of these factors."
(unqoute)
So that sets up the legality and justification for filtering out huge swaths of the internet and silencing "subversive" groups. Which is something that is wholesale illegal in the US for the government to do.
All you need is the justification. We all know how political correctness works.
So apperently Europe is heading towards the same direction as many middle eastern countries and communist countris (china in particular is very heavy handed in it's methods of censorship).
Of course some guy will argue how censorship in Europe is a GOOD thing, while the US is a huge monster against human rights. Oh well.
It's like the bible says (paraphasing it a bit):
before you point out the splinter of wood in another person's eye, first remove the beam of wood from your own eye.
Firstly, there are current 152 Indymedia websites, not 50 as reported. That means that the loss of ahimsa (the server that was taken down) caused 13% of the IMC (Indymedia Centre) sites to go down, not the "more than 40 percent" quoted.
Secondly, the article makes it sound as if there has been no progress on the cypherpunk front since 1996. While progress has been annoyingly slow, the growth of peer to peer technologies over the last few years has prompted a number of experiments - TOR, I2P, Freenet, etc. (see the I2P network comparisons page for a list), some of which seem to be getting pretty mature.
Thirdly, the bigger sites on ahimsa were up again in hours/days. They would have been up even quicker if a proper backup / mirror system had been in place, and in fact Indymedia techies have now been spurred into action by the ahimsa seizure to make sure the network is more robust. Think about this: the leftie scene is not particularly filled with technologically adept people. The Indymedia network runs on a shoestring budget (in terms of money / time). Despite this, the network was *still* able to respond and repair the damage fairly rapidly.
And finally, don't overestimate the competence of the FBI in this matter. Apparently when trying to do something about the picture of Swiss undercover cops on nantes.indymedia.org, one of the people they approached was from Seattle Indymedia, which has nothing to do with running either ahimsa or nantes.indymedia.org. And anyway, the disputed picture was quickly mirrored all over the place when it became "notorious" (just like the DeCSS code).
So, while I think Grossman's article is a good counterbalance to the mystical rants of people like John Perry Barlow, she leaves out a number of facts that show that the Internet can indeed be used to "route around censorship". Its all a matter of effort - in the 1970s and 80s, the ANC got around government censorship in South Africa by planting "pamphlet bombs" to scatter leaflets at busy rail stations (the cost: activists spending several years in jail). The Internet allows the subversion of censorship with far less effort, but of course it doesn't do it "by magic".
Freedom of expression on the Internet is still possible if you understand where to go to have your controversial content well-received, or at least tolerated. Indymedia, a leftist website that's made itself a fair share of enemies among the US establishment, was absolutely stupid to have their content hosted in England, a rather staunch US ally.
For example, HAMAS and similar Islamic militant/resistance organizations have sites hosted in the Netherlands and Germany. Most anywhere else and they'd be shut down and probably packed off to a Mossad dungeon.
Iraqi Resistance publishes Albasrah.net in the Netherlands, too. They've yet to be shut down or "disappeared" to Guantanamo.
NAMBLA found hosting in Germany, after they were repeatedly harassed and shut down in the US.
If you're Iranian or Chinese, you'd have to be pretty dumb to try and set up an anti-government site in your own country, but anywhere in the west you'd be received as a hero and a freedom fighter.
A Chechen website called Kavkaz Center was hosted in Lithuania, publishing news, essays, and communiques from their resistance fighters. (Until the Beslan attacks when Russia was probably finally able to exert enough pressure on the former SSR to get the site shut down.)
Of course, Germany is far from a "free country" -- try hosting a neo-Nazi site and you'll find yourself fined and possibly in jail. Same with in France. See how far you get with "hate speech" in Canada nowadays, too. But, you can set one up in the US and no one will touch it.
Liberty in your lifetime
NO!! they did not post anything other than the Photos and some completly inocuous titles.
# of Americans killed on 9/11: 2,819
# of Iraqi civilians killed in Iraq: ~10k
Maybe these numbers are wrong, if so perhaps someone can find a better reference.
In other words, I'd like to see Bush's publicists rescue him from the whole 'killing tens of thousands of civilians to gain control of Iraq for dubious reasons' debacle.
[javac] 100 errors
There is no correlation between security and liberty
Blatantly untrue. Bruce Schneier talks about it constantly.
"The proper question to ask is whether the trade-off is worth it. Is the level of security gained worth the costs, whether in money, in liberties, in privacy or in convenience?"
from his site
Also check out this article, all about the costs of security, liberties being one of them.
I also recommend subscribing to his Crypto-Gram newsletter.
Perception is reality.
No. Perception mediates reality, but the real is not entirely out of grasp.
Kant figured that sucker out a few hundred years ago.
Assuming all is working as it should, you still have a quite capable logical aparatus between yer ears to figure out whats going on from all that jumble data coming thru your senses.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.