Slashdot Mirror
Second Indymedia Server Seized in UK Within a Year
GarconDuMonde writes "For the second time within the past year, an Indymedia server has been siezed in the United Kingdom. This time it is the Bristol Indymedia server (currently redirected to the United Kollectives IMC site); this follows on from the Ahimsa siezure last October.
The current siezure was carried out using a search warrant by the UK police at approximately 16:30GMT on June 27th, 2005. This was despite being warned by lawyers "that this server was considered an item of journalistic equipment and so subject to special provision under the law" (press release). Bristol Indymedia is currently being supported by the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), Liberty and Privacy International. Other media organisations have declared their support."
WTF is indymedia?
That's absolutely ridiculous - but gives (to me personally) credibility that Indymedia is seen as a force of change.
Word has it that they're going to move to Sealand/Havenco - Take that UK!
Dada Mail - Program, Art Project or Absurdity?
While we may think this is terribly wrong from a moral/ethical standpoint, it may well be completely legal in the U.K.
Remember, I'm not saying this is right, but if you post a comment where you judge its legality by U.S. standards, you may be very wrong.
Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
In fact, that just encourages scurrilous rumor mongering -- which is diametrically opposed to good journalism.
"One cannot hope to bribe or twist,
Thank God, the British journalist.
But seeing what the man will do
Unbribed, there's no occasion to."
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Fool me once, shame on you...
:)
Fool me twice, use an encrypted filesystem fool...
Was that so hard? And random bits are so much fun
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
The West has become like Microsoft, with neither competition nor government powerful enough to stop it.
And as power corrupts, so we sink into fascism; for our rulers are no longer afraid of the population causing a revolution.
"Revolt?" they say "There is no other path to take. No alternate system to emulate. We are inevitable."
Fascism, here we come.
At least this time, the Blag Servers at http://blagblagblag.org/ aren't affected, as they were the last time.
Dada Mail - Program, Art Project or Absurdity?
Thanks for the heads up, but perhaps it's a good idea to mention the reason for these seizures alongside the fact that it just happened.
For those of you left wondering by the initial post these seizures are apparently related to an investigation of a bit of vandalism that cost somewhere around a hundred grand...
That's a little background, it's not like some evil government was seizing their servers simply because of a difference of opinion (although, depending on who you listen to, that may be the case)...
1st time. This is how governments work.
..you can blame all those simpering faggots who voted for Tony Blair thinking things 'would only get better' when they actually got a whole lot worse on the censorship front and what constitutes 'terrorist movements' and things (and that was pre 9-11)
However I had honestly never heard of Indymedia and I had to do some reading about them. Leftwing, anarchist (although I don't consider ararchism a left trait myself), communist distributed news network. They very much had their own interal censorship agenda, so maybe well they got a taste of their own medicine.
And I know it's a romantic notion for some Slashdotters that the answer to the world's problems is some lefty nut pot agenda, and I'm no fan of Bush and buddies myself, but the left has often been highly corrupt with extraordinarily draconian and backwards thinking approaches to things. It isn't actually an answer to anything.
I would be much more sympathetic to Indymedia had they offered a truly uncensored and wide range of views (including extreme Right instead of their own incestuous agenda for world change. That would have made them truly a force to be reckoned with. Sadly it seems Freedom of Speech was never their plan.
Someone commits a crime, and boasts about it on IndyMedia. The police haul in their server, probably hoping to arrest the dickwads who dropped concrete from a bridge onto a train, endangering lives in the name of "protest".
I'll bet you $100 dollars this has been seized for evidentiary purposes, in an attempt to trace the IP addresses of these hooligans, so they can be arrested. And I say "good", because the sort of cocksuckers who drop concrete weights onto trains deserve to go to prison.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Indymedia...."Independant Media"....
The whole idea is to provide a supposed outlet for the emotional side of horror stories related to human crisis', etc. I personally would find it analogous to the the dreams of the leftist media stations of the US (although I am sure that other countries have it worse)...
Yes, I would say that the removal of free speech in any situation is bad, and things like this just shouldnt be allowed. Furthermore it just provides more support for the ill-treated organization.
However, Just to throw my personal view into the mix...I find that such organizations such as this are more biased than most news, and have the sole purpose of pushing leftist heart string stories to gain the support of the global public. This kind of manipulation outrages me.
Does putting the server atop a crate/box/etc help?
don't you mean. 1984 here we come?
to paraphase; hope lies with the proles (peasants/working class/majority), but the proles are incapable of seeing any alternative to the current society because none exists that they can compare the current system to, therefore a revolt will never occur.
The police nabbed the server because someone boasted of violent criminal behaviour on it, and the police want to trace them.
Suppose a kidnapper used my typewriter to write a ransom note. Would my freedom of speech be curtailed if the police took it down the station to dust it for prints?
Don't get your panties in a wad, folks.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
But all the links lead to either Indymedia or pro-Indymedia sites.
It would be nice to get an unbiased source of this news, especially since Indymedia can't be expected to report on itself without bias.
Why are practically all the links to indymedia itself? What about having links to some other news sites so that we can get, like, more view points into this?
Can anyone post a NON-biased view of why this is happening and the past history of why the FBI in conjuction with other international agencies raided them in the past? Oh wait, that's impossible (but please try).
And given they could easily build their own server for PEANUTS that would at least be able to get the minimum news out the door, they would have done this kind of redundancy the day after the last time this happened.
I'd be inclined to call them Stupid Hippies, but they're not Hippies or Stupid. I just guess they don't have the few hundred pounds per node to set up a back up server somewhere.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
But if you want to know what Indymedia is, its an underground network of journalists. You can check it out and judge for yourself
Here are the sites
Radio4All
Live Radio
Wikipedia IndyMedia
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Did anyone else notice the timing co-incidence here?
From Indymedia.com: "The UK Indymedia site will be facilitating independent coverage of the actions and events. - G8 summit is running 6th-8th July.
Now I don't want to sound paranoid or suggest a conspiracy, but come on, the timing of this seizure is extraordinary. And there's about 0.00% chance of getting the server back before G8.
It's not just for communists or anarchists. In fact I'd say its mostly filled with socialists. I admit its left wing, and I agree its news for people who support universal healthcare, education and other social programs. I wouldnt say the majority of people want anarchy or communism, thats the far fringe of even the left. Common sense, we will never have communism or anarchism for the basic reason that too many humans want power over another and it would eventually end up as corrupt as capitalism and the systems we have now.
The purpose of these networks are to give news to the working class, and if people can ignore all the crazy anarchists and communists who don't have a very realistic plan or concept of global government, theres some articles and news worth listening to or reading.
I think this site exists for the same reason FoxNews exists, and these outlets have to exist. The left factions overall are bigger than the conservative right, so I see this as their foxnews.
If you agree with their ideas then go ahead and listen to them, if not then keep watching FoxNews.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
In the USA we don't have an Indimedia at all. There is no left wing media in the USA unless you want to call Air America and CNN liberal, but liberal is not the same as the socialist left you see on Indymedia. Most liberals support free trade and don't really care about helping the poor, the socialist left on the other hand is busy fighting against CAFTA and fighting for fair trade. Free speech only exists anywhere because of the internet, and while you think you have free speech in the USA, if you are too much of a socialist or communist here you could lose your job, and this is if the government decides to be nice and not declare you a terrorist.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
If you want to make change the only way to do it is through capitalism. A lot of the people on the left know this and are doing it, then you have the journalists who just talk about how bad free trade is and how globalization is wrong. The only way to change the system is through the economy and everyone who knows anything about government knows economics are the key, not votes.
You want a cleaner healthier environment? Create a profitable industry to clean the environment. You want fair trade? Create systems to help promote fair trade through technology, software and computers. When the computer technology can make the management decisions and the trade decisions more accurately than a biased human, you'll have fair trade.
This is how change actually works, voting is just a way to choose between two people selected by big businesses. So unless you own a big business or your big businesses in your country support a progressive government, you wont have one. Voting won't matter because its all about money.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Suppose a kidnapper used my typewriter to write a ransom note. Would my freedom of speech be curtailed if the police took it down the station to dust it for prints?
Suppose the Police seized the printing presses of the Sun newspaper because a letter to the editor contained some nasty words. Would that curtail any freedom of speech, you think?
It's not like they seized your laptop, dude.
Nowhere in the article does it highlight the reason the server was taken, which can eventually be found buried in the links, but the response by Indy is: "As the G8 summit approaches, threats to our freedom of expression, and action, appear to be increasing rapidly." So, Indymedia contacted the Police in the firstplace, and now something is being done, they're crying about it.
All they need to do is develop a decentralized file storage system. They could easily design something like this. The client server model is kinda stupid for this purpose.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
As issues like this are becoming more and more common internet law neutral hosting enterprises are starting to sprout up in places that would normally have fishing communities as their primary income. As governments begin to make laws and regulate more and more information across the internet it will only force these new "bastions" will begin to flourish. In many ways it will benefit the internet more and more to have more of these friendly countries hosting content that cannot be seized.
Technology must be used to aid politicians in making ethical decisions. This is why ethics, election reform, and sustainable economics are all important. When you have sustainable big business, and you focus on ethics and people actually get involved things change. Voting is not the same as being involved and most voters don't understand anything about economics or politics. If they stopped shopping and giving money to unethical businesses they wouldnt have unethical governments. If they actually organized around this instead of just vote they'd elect their own representitives. Right now in most countries, people blindly buy anything thats on sale without any awareness of what say Walmart does politically to their community.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
We're going to laugh all the way to gulag.
So far you've posted six posts defending the draconian tactics of the police. Makes me wonder what your agenda is...
As a UK citizen I am ashamed and appalled at the continuous erosion of civil liberties that have taken place during the last couple of terms of government.
- cards.shtml
B'liar is in the process of forcing through optional (year, right!) ID cards through parliament today that will cost an average of over $200/citizen (to be bourne by taxpayers of course). In addition everyone who wants to have a passport renewed will be forced to be finger-printed and iris scanned.
http://www.no2id.net/IDSchemes/faq.php
http://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/privacy/id
All of these pieces of information will be stored and cross-linked with other personal details totally ignoring the data protection laws in the UK (that all businesses have to comply with and were put in place to try and prevent this sort of gradual slip into a surveillence society). In addition, the UK is the process of testing out road charging that will require all cars/busses/lorries to be fitted with a satellite tracking system so that the location of *every* vehicle continuously and this information will be available to the police.
I don't know about anybody else but this scares the hell out of me - especially with changes to the court systems to avoid the use of juries in certain cases and the 'anti-terrorism' laws (currently being contested) that allow *anyone* whom the state deems to be 'a threat to the state' to be detained without trial. I wonder whether there will be a ban on reading George Orwell's '1984' next...?
I have a young family with children in school and family here but if I had less attachments then I would be getting the hell out of here fast!
How would they oppose action against Sealand? "Ehherm,... I have no *personal* interest in Sealand, but I want it to stay there because I like err... MP3s... errr.. tax evasion... errrr...."
OTOH, invading Switzerland look like poor form.
Anyway, it won't be troops. The Navy/RAF stop the Sealanders from landing until they get sick of drinking seawater. The last time Monaco seriously annoyed France, the French just shut the borders.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
The police nabbed the server because someone boasted of violent criminal behaviour on it, and the police want to trace them.
It is not necessary to seize anything to do this. At most all they need to do is mirror the drive, which can be done without even removing it. In the previous case all they really needed was the cooperation of Rackspace in supplying the needed data.
Seizing of computer equipment not actually needed for evidence is very simply a means of discomfiting and intimidating the owner and the case of the siezure from Rackspace itself illustrates that they only really need the drive at most, not the entire computer, as only the drive contains the evidence in question.
Would my freedom of speech be curtailed if the police took it down the station to dust it for prints?
Why don't they just dust it where it is? They're perfectly capable of doing the job. In any case, as per above, this particular case is more like they impounded your typewriter, your desk, everything in it, all of your files and all of your customer's files.
KFG
Come on, sending in the commandos would be an illegal invasion of a sovereign nation. Would the UK seriously contemplate such action?
Err..
K.
If you're going to have your computers (or any other possession) seized from you, you should at least be told why. Having your property sezied and, when asked why, being told "That's a secret"...
Give a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day, but set him on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Suppose the Police seized the printing presses of the Sun newspaper because a letter to the editor contained some nasty words
We can live in hope...
There's a fucking good reason for that you fucking idiot.
i thought my activist days had long gone, but hearing all this I get really pissed off its as if they do it on purpose to get the movement/people get going again ...
not very smart
Choose the BBC. It's not perfect, but it's a huge amount better than the alternatives. The World news site does indeed cover many stories that aren't otherwise in mainstream attention.
Having the stories edited professionally is a big plus. Also, while some stories can be biased, one is likely to see differing points of view, particularly in the editorials, and ever-increasing comments sections. The "Have your say" articles are perhaps more interesting because all comments aren't published, but rather a selection of differing views from people in different locations.
They are quite accountable, with a "Newswatch" section where corrections and responses to criticism are published. Readers can email and offer comments on or corrections to any story - indeed I have done so in the past myself, and the response (changing the article) has been swift.
For a mainstream news organisation, that hails from one country, I don't think you could expect anything of a higher standard than this.
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
They could just use wonderful browsers like Konqueror with builtin spellcheck support for form filling. But no, this way it's the /. way. Oh yes, I'm redundant, I know.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
1, The article you mention is in the context of a larger document. There are provisos that limit its scope. These include limiting the scope according to public order, national security, economic well being, etc, etc.
http://www.pfc.org.uk/legal/r-i-b.htm
http://www.pfc.org.uk/legal/echrtext.htm
2, Have people actually even skimed the press release. It isn't long! What it actually says is they were contacted. The police requested IP logs. Indymedia said no, and they don't keep IP logs. The police threatened seizure. Indymedia are in contact with the police through their legal representative. Nowhere does it mention the actual seizure of a server.
awe man i suck!
When the UK servers were seized, I was the first techie to put up a mirror. FYI, I was shipping around 200k/s for over 40 odd days. The UK mirror alone is around 9Gb in size, not to mention the other sites that the original UK server was hosting. The fact is that we now have 8 servers handling www.indymedia.org.uk, spread globally around the world. Hosting a mirror takes serious amounts of good will.
One thing governments appear to miss is the fact that we DON'T log IP addresses.
Tim Brown
Don't worry; the people modding you a troll are only doing it because they know fascism is already here.
...a previously expelled member, probably still angry over his treatment, decided to take it upon himself to decide what was morally acceptable and contacted the police, which did something that flies in the face of any society that wishes to deem itself ethical, moral and free. This smacks of a dictatorship who wishes to control the media with an iron fist (see Soviet era Russia, current day China (to an extent) and North Korea (on the extreme end of things, although the BBC only showing stirring nationalistic songs about Tony Blair might be amusing, for a while)).
I am NaN
I believe there are some technical requirements regarding evidence held on computers: it must come directly from the original drive, and not from a mirrored copy. Whether this holds in the UK, US, or just my imagination is anyone's guess.
Stupid, yes, but that's (possibly) the law. There's certainly no reason why they couldn't seize just the drive, except that the police probably don't have the technical skills to remove it.
Anybody get the feeling this has something to do with the G8 summit being held in Gleneagles in a short time? Considering Indymedia's past association with AntiGlobalization maybe the Police thought they could take some of the pressure off the inevitable protests which will occur outside and around the summit by taking out an information hub, or maybe Indymedia were inciting violence, which IANAL but in the UK is a reason for a court injuntion.
("Public safety" tends to overrule civil liberties in the UK, just look at the banning of Hoodies in shopping centers.)
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
From previous dealings with the police I doubt they have the capability. A while back I was working for a company which had a lot of servers. Mostly windows, but there was a linux box sitting in a corner of the datacentre which no-one working there at the time knew about. It got hacked because it was never patched. It was then used as a porn and warez distribution server and some of the porn on it was disturbing and illegal. When we discovered it we powered down the server and informed the police. We took the server out of the datacentre and put it in the office, powered down, so they could take it away for examination. Each month we prodded the plod (heh) to come take the server.
2 years later, when the company was bought out that server was still sitting there, unused and unexamined.
Suppose the Police seized the printing presses of the Sun newspaper because a letter to the editor contained some nasty words. Would that curtail any freedom of speech, you think?
Writing a nasty letter to the editor, is unlikely to result in a printing press containing evidence that can't be easily found elsewhere. If this has ever happened in the past, then I agree the police abused their powers. But then again, all this has nothing to do with the article. Indymedia was given the choice to freely give the police logs and keep their server, they refused, so the law allows the police to gain the logs without Indymedia's permission. The fact that they are unable to do this without taking their server is not a fault of the police. It is, at best, the fault of the law for allowing the police to gain the server.
FTFA Indymedia UK needs additional http mirrors to help decrease bandwidth costs. but you just slashdot it !!
Because of the nature of digital data and HDs themselves evidence is almost always examined from a mirrored copy to protect the integrity of the original, but such a copy must be produced to forensic standards acceptable to the courts. There are a number of commercially available packages to do this, but dd works just fine.
Depending on the nature of the case the original may be necessary as a standard to compare the copy to, or may not be needed at all.
In this case the data on the drive isn't even primary evidence at all, the sort that would be presented in court, but only needed to help try to determine the identity of someone who claims to have commited a non computer related crime.
Non computer evidence against the poster is what would be needed to bring a case against him to court. It is actually quite common for people to make false confessions to crimes.
KFG
It is not necessary to seize anything to do this. At most all they need to do is mirror the drive, which can be done without even removing it.
They might be able to forensically recover old deleted log data, etc., from the original drive that they couldn't do from a copy.
OK, they should have let Rackspace mirror it onto a spare drive before they walked off with the original, though, so they could keep running the site from the mirror.
http://www.nth-dimension.org.uk/mrtg/bulgaria.publ ic-internet.org_195.85.245.2.html makes quite the point quite nicely, watch the traffic rise.. and this is just 1 of 8 mirrors.
Tim Brown
When the largest nation on earth (US) has just a few media outlets owned by right-wing Bushites, pumping out their awful crap; it's good to have a diametrically opposite media outlet - even if some think it's biased.
If the "big guys" are doing it, damn right the oppossing camp should. Media is war, and the US certainly needs taking on.
But, I'm sure this raid on IM has something to do with that fucker Bush coming to Scotland.
We don't want the cow-shagger here.
Calling Indymedia journalism, is like calling '10 PRINT "HELLO WORD" ' a C.S. Masters Thesis.
Every wahoo get's on indymedia, and makes up half of what they say out of their imagination. Even if they, by freak chance, are well informed they manage to mangle the 'facts' to the point of propaganda.
I was all for the concept when it started, and I followed it regularly. But it became quickly aparent that IM had nothing to do with news. It has long since degenerated into a reched sesspool of incestous self congradulation. Liberal or not, IM has no 'news value' that can be decerned.
I'm just cynical enough to believe that the only reason 'journalists' would get behind indimedia is that they have paranoid delusions that the New World Order(tm) is out to get them. And as long as Indymedia is around they have someone to point to who is vastly worse than them. "How can you come after us before them?"
I would rather be ashes than dust!
Then they'll just be fired or pay higher prices and the money still goes to fund Walmart which funds politicians who want to abolish social security.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
and if that's the case isn't indymedia redundant? at best a venue for the extreame fringe, at worst a home for them?
2 9/1411214&tid=1&tid=14Divincies helecopter to work.
IM's original goals were of a noble idea. It's just a failed idea. Allot of ideas are like that. But we move on and find better ones. Lest we'd all still be trying to get http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/
I would rather be ashes than dust!
PS : ever wonder why every national UK newspaper has a clause that says something like "correspondence intended for publication must contain your full address and daytime phone number." Well now you know why.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Actually, with the sort of people Indymedia are, I'd be surprised if there *were* any logs to hand over.
Sounds like a combination of a distributed file system and WASTE to me...
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Which would be to copy, or possibly seize, the drive.
.
I will note also that Indymedia claims they cannot supply the required cooperation because they do not log ips in the first place, because. .
well, that's the kind of people they are.
According to them there was no request of any kind made of them or of Rackspace in that particular instance, and the hosting company that handles their local in Italy handed over the encryption keys to their mail sever, without anyone telling them.
KFG
And what unbiased source are you going to use to tell you whether or not your sources are unbiased?
eh?
What you are asking for is bias that is too hard for you too see.
If thats all you need, just close your eyes and everything will be ok, eh?
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
...vandalism is mindless, any moron can do it, and all it does is tar everyone involved, however remotely, with the same brush.
What I do take offense to is one person taking it upon themselves to stir up trouble without first opening up a meaningful dialogue with indymedia, and the police for failing to act lawfully by respecting their journalistic status.
Also read about the Italian police who had a backdoor into an indymedia server for over a year, that kind of spying on your own people, who's only "crime" tends to be going against the "status quo", deserves to be relegated to a bygone era, unfortunatly, that's patently not the case.
I am NaN
Ask any lawyer : once you refuse to cooperate with the police, they lose any interest in making your life any easier than they're legally obliged to. Quid pro quo.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Seland claims they are a nation, that doesn't make it so. What is and is not a nation is partly in what the world agrees on, and partly what you can enforce. If you have the might to break off from another nation and enforce that right, you can become a nation. This is pretty much how the USA started (though they also had help from France). They beat off their founding nation and thus established themselves as independant. In contrats the Confedracy (the states that broke off and rebelled during the American Civil War) failed to do that and are now again part of the USA.
It's also partly in what others recognise. There are a number of nations that are incapable of self defense, yet are widely recognised as legit and have countries ready to go to bat for them. The Vatican is such a country. It is a small district, entirely contained in Italy and without any sort of defense, save that provided by the Swiss. However it is internationaly recognised as a soviregn state and any attempt to conqure it would lead to a massive backlash from most of the world.
Well, Sealand has neither of these. It has no military, no security force to speak of. A division of regular troops from just about any nation would be sufficient to conquer it. Nor does it have any diplomatic status. Nobody appears to recognise it as a legit nation.
Thus if Britan took it over, I imagine most would view it as a recapturing of a military installation they built in the first place and legitimately own.
Well, they could have just brought a mirroring device on-site, and made two mirrors of the drive. They then take the original and one mirror with them, and put the other mirror back into service. It isn't like Indymedia needs the original back.
My objection isn't so much to seizure for use as evidence, as long as they have a warrant. My objection would be to significant user inconvenience - as happens when the FBI confiscates computers and then returns them 3 years later...
A footnote in the Evening News today hints that the server was suspected of being used to organise 'civil disorder' in Edinburgh during the G8 summit. Living in Edinburgh and watching the City bracing itself for full on riots, offices and shops closing, wide spread road closures, non critical surgery being canceled to deal with possible injuries, local - family run businesses going to the wall, supermarkets saying they may not be able to sufficently stock their shelves with food.... I'm happy at any steps being made towards limiting the anarchy that some groups are planning.... Even Edinburgh Castle (realy nothing more than a tourist attraction now...) is stepping up security. How would you like it if the world Invaded (and I use that word deliberatly) YOUR town, shutting it down for a week, potentaly destroying a large part of it and making the residents lives hell? Everyone seems to assume that everyone that claims to support freedom of speech should also have freedom to do whaterver they dam well please... With Freedom comes responobility, Freedom to state your views also comes with the need to consider the concequences of those views on others... If you incite a riot you must accept to be held accountable....
[The Universe] has gone offline.
I listen to the BBC... *thinks to self* I listen to the BBC...
And any good lawyer will tell you that part of their own function is keeping the police within the restrictions of their legal obligations, which is the issue to which my posts have been addressed.
Indymedia was under no legal obligation whatsoever until served with a warrant. That's the whole point of a warrant in the first place, to place the actions of the police under judicial review.
KFG
[i]Turns out it's actually illegal to shoot them.[/i]
Use a car, then.
From personal experience (having computer equipment seized) they take the computer, (pulling plug out of back - not powering down), remove the drives, mirror them and then search the mirrors for basic evidence. They then scrawl all over the discs in permanent marker and stick a annoyingly sticky label on the computer. Remember that in most cases it will be a normal cop who does the searching of the computer. Computer experts are expensive to use.
...for those (sad enough?) who are interested, that would be a quotation by Humbert Wolfe, a British poet, from "Over the Fire" 1930.
They refused and gave a good set of reasons: 1. They are a journalist group, therefore have journalistic privelidge and do not have to release sources of articles 2. It is against their policies to hand out peoples details to the police (to cover all eventualities) 3. This is the good one! They don't keep IP logs? How complicated is that for someone to understand? Also, the 'vandalism' is actually a rumour - there is no proof of such an event occurring (other than the original newswire article). What is your meaning of 'because that's the kind of people they are'? I am involved in indymedia and know for a fact that co-operation with the police is not going to happen due to a probable drop in the number of users of the sites. Would people post their actions - which could be legally dodgy - on a site that gave out details to the police willy-nilly? I just think you are trolling and trying to follow some sort of 'anti-leftist' agenda.
Isn't "libertarian" a right-wing thing? I'm sure the "left-wing" "equivalent" would be "anarchist"...
Actually, the only thing I'm really sure about is that "left wing" and "right wing" are pretty damn stupid labels anyway.
"Right wing" is pro-freedom, except when it's pro-repression against things it doesn't like.... "Left wing" is anti-repression, except when it's anti-freedom for things it doesn't like.
They're all so similar to each other; it's a surprise they don't get along better... actually, the main problem is that the left wing become the thing they hate in order to keep society distorted enough to support their "ideal" (although in the case of people like Stalin and Mao, it's pretty clear that they were power-hungry dictators on a par with [Godwin filter activated]; they latched onto their respective causes solely to gain power. I'd say they were right-wing in that sense, although I might be showing left-wing bias there; however, those dictators had idealistic, blinkered zealots to support them- *those* people are dangerous).
And the "right wing" don't care about the hypocrisy present in themselves, because when it comes down to it, they want freedom to do what the hell *they* want to do, without giving anyone else the freedom to stop them.
And if you live in a world unfettered by outside intelligence- or if you consider your God external to human will- as most people think they do, then you have to accept the premise that all humans-- all *organisms*-- started from a blank slate with no external laws, and used this absolute "freedom" to influence the behaviour of other humans/organisms. Everyone lives in a "free" society in this sense; laws, repression and such are just other organisms using their absolute freedom to influence them.
And, of course, if we could somehow create "absolute" freedom again, we may well end up with (allegedly) left-wing, "un"-free societies created by groups of people exerting their freedom on other people. Those other people are free to disregard the "laws" of this society, although they will suffer the consequences (as they would in an entirely free society). No-one's "freedom" is infringed, no matter what the outcome
And this- to cut an increasingly long story short- is why you can either consider "freedom" supporting right-wingers to be full of crap, or alternately, that they already won, their beds were made, and they should lie in them because "freedom" already exists and there's nothing they can do to make this world more "free".
Alternately, you could just consider "freedom" a contradiction spouted by people who don't know or care what type of freedom they want (see above).
I really *have* to start expressing my points more concisely.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
You seem to have a romantic notion shared by a large amount of /. that because Sealand declares themselves independant that makes it so.
The "romantic notion" that a portion (perhaps but not necessarilly a "large part"--I'd love to know what statistics you're drawing on to conclude that) of slashdot has is that nations obey international law.
As the UK and US have proven in Iraq, it just ain't so, but many nations still would like to see that action as an aberration, not a norm.
Seeland played by all the international rules in establishing its sovereignty. It was an abandoned structure, in international waters at the time, that was laid claim to and created as a sovereign nation in accordance with international and martime laws. They may not have the wealth or clout of the Vatican to get recognized as such, but by the United Nations' own rules, they are an independent state.
So, if the UK, US, or anyone else should chose to invade Seeland, and if they should get the "blessing" of the rest of Europe or the UN to do so, the only thing it demonstrates is that the world's powers, and their servant states, aren't willing to even play by their own rules.
Which really, these days, is no surprise, but it is nevertheless very sad.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Especially people with the same casual relationship to honesty that indymedia has.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
The reason they dont just mirror it is that they need to maintain the original unmodified if they are going to try and prosecute with any evidence gained from it. How easy is it to falsify digital data?
The second any trial came along based on such a disk copy I have little doubt that you or any rational person would want to make sure that the data was not falsified -- i.e. the original was intact and entered in evidence.
Now it may not be necessary to impound the server indefinitely until trial, but it would be necessary to do so until a verifiable and sealed duplicate can be made to ensure a fair trial.
--Kevin
"Konqueror"; that's a godawful name for a start.
And don't even get me started on those fugly icons that look like they've been made out of cheap plastic (although in reality, they've probably been made in Gimp using a script that's supposed to make 'Aqua'-like shading, but actually look like something that's been through a half-decent Gimp script- which it has).
Anyway, isn't "builtin" supposed to be hyphenated? (^_^)
Hey, that's cool.
I've no problem with Indymedia's initial refusal, or the police's eventual action. Strikes me, that what's happened here is precisely the way it should function. Indymedia wanted -- nay, demanded -- due process, and that's exactly what they got. They should be pleased that the judicial checks and balances on police power are working perfectly.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
There is no point in encrypting the system or the content since that is all public anyway. At issue here are the logs - and yes, there are logs otherwise how would they go about banning based on IP address as stated in the Wikipedia article about them?
The correct solution here is to have the system create a random key upon startup and create a fresh filesystem where the logs will be stored. If the system is seized and powered off for cold anaylsis then the key will be lost. Not even the system admins would know it - and if they don't know it they can't be held liable for it even if the UK does consider it a crime to withhold decryption keys.
This way the system admins can easily find the IPs of people who abuse the system as well as do logfile analysis.
Generating keys that are really random is also more secure because the keys will not be weak to be easy to remember nor will they be written down anywhere.
Now, I know that UK has a pretty elite history of code breaking. I have also have it on pretty good authority that for high profile cases there is a special place where encrypted data can be sent and it just magically comes back decrypted with no explanation. Speculating on this kind of thing is a guilty pleasure of mine, and frankly this discussion of freedom of the press this, they're journalists not hippy treehuggers that is boring me so here's a couple of points:
1) It's probable -- a no brainer really, that government and law enforcement in the UK do have massive farms of computers to crack passwords and they routinely use them. It is a fact that most people who use encryption don't really know how it works and don't really appreciate how crucial it is to use really strong keys.
2) The PC was not designed with cryptography in mind. People blissfully believe laptops are secure with their cryptographic filesystems at the same time they use the hibernate feature which writes the contents of the memory, including keys, to disk. Recovering those keys is now easy. Another side channel attack may be against the main memory. Who says all the data is gone when the machine is unplugged. There may be good ways of recovering that data thus recovering the key. There are products which handle cryptographic operations in hardware and have some kind of protected storage for keys. I assume this storage is memory mapped so that the kernel doesn't need to ever store the key in actual RAM anywhere, but I haven't investigated those kind of solutions so I don't want to be talking out of my ass too much about them. Think about it though... entering a key in with the keyboard via a userland program... how many buffers is that data going to get stored in? This problem is non-trivial. Lets see... the key ends up on the stack of the application at least twice, then when we go into kernel mode via a system call I suppose we can just copy it directly from there into the hardwares address... then we should probably overwrite the location(s) in RAM with random data a whole bunch of times...
Then we can worry about side channel attacks against the "tamper resistant" memory of the crypto hardware. Cause hey, all those super tamperproof commerical devices are perfect right?? Like smartcards! right?
In conclusion, I don't really buy into the theory that big governments can crack the crypto itself. Instead I think they can do it when it's used improperly (examples: Enigma operators who reused keys, suspects who use words based on their hobbies as keys) and when that doesn't work they get down to the electrical/mechanical level and recover the key that way.
Many of the posters on indymedia are NUJ members - this makes them journalists. Therefore indymedia is a journalistic group. So you think that every crime that is posted on indymedia (I think there are a lot) should be dealt with by the police? How quickly would you then realise how draconian laws are in this country and you would realise that the law isn't all it is cracked up to be. The police will spend as much time annoying people by keeping the server. I had a computer seized once and it took me over 5 months to get it back. The actual work they did on it took them 1 week. They are not some friendly 'do good' force. The only reason they went after the information was become some moron (Mark 'Zaskar' Watson) contacted the police and said 'hey, they keep IP logs' - thus showing they do believe every tom dick and harry regarding evidence.
Forgot to say. What do you mean by 'Especially people with the same casual relationship to honesty that indymedia has.'? Does this mean that you are honest all the time? Does this mean that everyone should be honest all the time? This is a flawed moral argument. What if a murderer came and asked you where someone they were chasing went? Would you tell them? Honesty is a stupid ideal created by religion. It is not a practical way of getting change - as the other side is never honest...
However, since most journalists would rather sit in a pub discussing how great they are, IM offers a useful outlet for those too lazy to do the legwork.
I think that every violent crime committed should be investigated by the police to the full extent of their powers.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Yes but this contradicts your earlier statement of the police following the word of every 'tom dick and harry'.
One person says 'they keep logs', the group of many people turn around and say 'no we don't, it is against policies available on the site'.
This should lead the police to believe that the informant is a moron.
lets face it do you really want to try and reconstruct the raid pattern on a set of disks numbered 1-5 when you don't know what the original was?
and no I don't want the array controller card as well, remember that most police-bods are not IT engineers. they've been told to execute a warrant to seize a specific server. the rackspace guys have said "its that one" and if they've got any sense, they've helped the police to dismount the damn thing, rather than have the entire rack chainsawed from the floor and carted off.
--- This meme is memory intensive
I post news to indymedia and I would not sell to papers. Also, a lot of papers wouldn't touch 98% of the articles on indymedia because they don't follow their corporate lines and would damage their sponsorship from other companies.
The entire point of indymedia is to be a place for independant journalists and normal people to post information that they know to be true. As stated before it is not possible to 'double source' everything.
The point is to be able to get the information out quickly and efficiently - not to send to a paper and wait whilst it is passed through 90 editors and isn't the same article when it is done.
Regarding violent crime. There is no evidence of the crime being committed other than the original post. None, nada, nothing. So why do you think this should be followed?
What is violent crime? Against people? Property? what?
Wouldn't "I have no idea how the universe started" be more honest than "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth"?
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
The BBC has a very left leaning liberal agenda and Newswatch is a vapid farce.
I don't mind either of these using private money but unfortunately we Brits go to jail if we don't pay for it.
As someone said recently, Murdoch is a (expleted deleted) but we do have a choice about whether we read/listen to/watch his products.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
You can choose not to watch the BBC too; since when was a TV legally required?
It's official. Most of you are morons.
"Other media organisations have declared their support."
No, that is not correct. Another left-wing *blog* has declared its support. Follow the link.
You post gossip to indymedia.And safely removed from such journalistic niceties as fact checking, proper sourcing... And this obsession with speed explains why Indymedia has the same relationship to news that McDonalds has to cuisine...No evidence except a confession. And besides, the original post encouraged other people to do the same. That's a crime in itself.Dropping concrete blocks on manned trains is violent crime. You're possibly too young to remember, but during the miners' strike, several strike breakers were killed by miners who dropped concrete blocks through their car windscreens from a motorway bridge.
Now, I supported the miners' strike, but that doesn't mean I'm not glad that those cold hearted murdering bastards were locked up.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
If two people say contradictory things, you don't automatically disbelieve either of them. The smartest thing to do would be to make further enquiries. For example, you could get a search warrant and find out for yourself whether logs are kept.
Hey! Waddya know! That's what they did.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Obviously you have weird moral values. (As stated by you comment about indymedia having weak ethics - they stand for protecting everyones freedom, the earth and animal rights, how is this not a high ethical policy?)
Honesty is a tool - it is useful when battling against other honest beings but when the others are dishonest, you can be also.
Religion is a control - created to make people do things how the controlling individuals want them done. Nothing more nothing less. The concept of honesty is a religious one - as being dishonest is a sin etc...
I post fact. As I am there and see things with my eyes and hear things with my ears. They are facts. Saying something like 'One of the people shouted 'Blah Blah'' is a fact if it happened. It is not gossip. You have some very strange ideas about facts - maybe you have bought into the ordinary media too much.
"So the police took the next procedural step"
Incorrect. The next procedural step would be using a subpoena in order to demand the information. Instead, the police jumped straight to a seizure of the server, which is not only unnecessary from a technical standpoint (they could just copy the drives) but is such an aggressive action that it can only be viewed as intimidation or bullying.
The only way your viewpoint could make sense is to someone who assumes every police request should be met with acquiescence, regardless of the presence of a court order.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
"Honesty is a stupid ideal created by religion"
You sound like you hang out on Indymedia quite a bit. Are you an editor there?
Also, as you stated before - the site is not perfect. Therefore a single article posted on the newswire is not good enough to use as a 'confession'. Instead it is good enough to see as someone trying to cause trouble.
You should look at indymedia as a forum. Information is passed onto it and people decide whether they believe it or not. Same with everything else. Obviously, you don't believe anything indymedia has on it but do believe everything that other media has to say (or so it seems). The media does not always 'double source their articles - most of it being opinion but labelled as fact. How does this differ from indymedia?
I guess I kinda thought an infallible being would be, I dunno, smarter somehow.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
"They do seem to be very, very biased, but it's better for information to be collected for me to sort out what's useless, biased drek than it is for someone else to decide what's drek and filter it for me"
You accept and agree that Indymedia is biased.
THEN
You suggest that it is not filtered.
This is a contradiction.
Disclaimer: I know nothing about Indymedia. This comment is solely to highlight the logic (or lack thereof) in the parent post.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
Insults - very mature. A lot of the things I report are not possible to get other sources, get this, AS I AM THE ONLY PERSON THEIR REPORTING IT!!! So using your logic, I cannot post something because someone else didn't back me up? I have been interviewed by newspapers who send 1 reporter and then produce an article from that persons experience. This isn't double sourced? It is standard reporting. If others are there then they will report it and you can make a comparison of the articles. The same as in a court of law - one persons POV is read out and cross examined and then anothers, thus building up a fuller picture.
If, as the case seems to be, the action was done to highlight the damage done to the environment by cars. This appears to have been dropped on a freight train. This means that lives were not at risk, only cars. Your argument can be extended backwards - what about the freedom to breath fresh air, not have concrete everywhere (or tarmac) and not have to worry about the environment being destroyed by cars? Surely this freedom can be preserved by getting rid of cars (true the thing this person supposedly did was dumb)?
Damn, if you are an example of the type that posts at Indymedia then I think you have proven his point. Too bad you are too stupid to realize this. He won, you lost.
There are a whole bunch of reasons Indymedia can't really deal with backup servers competently.
1) It costs money. Every server in another hosting company costs bandwidth, rack space, hardware and maintenance. Indymedia is a bunch of Hippies in the sense that even the slightest cost seems to be too much for them. Even when presented with a donated old PC in the bottom of a rack with a solid but shared internet connection, the idea that one of them might have to do some work drives them away.
2) It requires some technical competence. The Indymedia folks are not exactly stupid, but most of the ones I've met dropped out of school as early as they possibly could. They prefer poorly educated ignorance as a way of life. I'm sure there are some highly educated agent-provacateurs leading these dolts around by their nose jewelry, but those people couldn't care less about keeping web servers up.
3) There is a victimisation ideal among Indymedia type folks. They think its much better press to have a server seized during a police investigation and make a big stink about it, rather than saying "the Bristol server was seized, but since it was mirrored on 3 continents nobody noticed one gone missing".
This has turned into a big, trolling rant. Sorry, but their anarchist, nobody-responsible-for-anything attitude wore thin a long time ago.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
you wear a mask and run down the street shouting about the illegal things you've done, you will be stopped and forced to remove your mask. and a good thing too.
indymedia can consider themselves journos if they like, but posting unedited bragging onto public servers isn't journalism.
if they don't keep logs then the idiot who posted the original post won't get a visit. I doubt very much the police are interested in the rest of the complete crap the disk wil have on it.
oh, and there's nothing leftist about indymedia, it's far too incoherent for that.
I can't think of any EU state other than Belgium that doesn't have a colonialist, imperialist or otherwise expansionist past. Europe had a very violent middle-ages.
t huania, Estonia, Latvia
Hmm, let's see - as pointed out, Belgium does have a particularly nasty colonial past in Africa. But the EU states that don't have any colonial nasties in their history include:
Finland
Ireland
Luxembourg
Malta
Cyprus
Li
Poland?
Slovakia
Slovenia
Czech Republic (unless you count expelling the Germans after WW2, and, er, the defenestration of Prague).
Certainly, Finland, Ireland, Slovakia and the Baltic states (and others) were themselves the victims of colonialism, as was Poland, for long stretches of their history.
IIRC, this used to be called 'demanding money with menaces', back when we lived in a free country.
But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. -Hermann Goering
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
make computer wipe hard drive on loss of power...
p.s. buy a UPS and machine with redundant power supplies first.
Believe me, better have a good TV product like the BBC with a bit of proper taxation (and following enforcement) than something like the Italian RAI, that is mainly paid-for by advertisers because the tax in place is, in practice, just not paid by anyone but the most honest minorities... the result makes Murdoch's products look professional and engaging.
-- Let's go Viridian.
Not that this would look all that great in the court, but perhaps in an act to piss the cops off, they could've encrypted the hard drive and flush that key down /dev/null.
I don't like indymedia. It's quite apparent what their bias is, but I don't agree with the government seizing journalist's equipment because someone posted on their site, unless that post has to do with some violent crime (and I don't mean protest, like murder or aggravated assault or something).
The conclusions one has to draw is that we're in fact living in a global police state.
This is another proof that the UK government has become a totalitarian, undemocratic, and perhaps not even legitimate government that violates international rights of the press and free speech. This is simply disgusting and unacceptable. I hope the international community or the people in the UK step in and do something about that.
That's what journalists do. You're a blogger.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Perhaps after reading some examples of what Indymedia calls journalism they decided that extending journalistic protection to them might be considered insulting to real journalists.
It was a very weak argument then, and it's still very weak now. I would highly suggest those of you hosting websites on Rackspace leave, it seems pretty clear that they are willing to bend over for basically no reason at all. AFAIK, there is no official statement from them and they've chosen to ignore the situation.
What makes this new case different from the last one, is that it would appear in the last one they just wanted to hide undercover swiss agents, but in this one, they want IP addresses. That is going to be rather hard for them to do since Indymedia never records those. If they parse logs, they might get something to go on. I don't know.
s/THEIR/THERE/
>Many of the posters on indymedia are NUJ members - >this makes them journalists
If by "many", you somehow meant "not many", you would be correct.
"There is no evidence of the crime being committed other than the original post"
So then you should be pleased that the Police are doing their best to gather evidence and establish the facts of the matter.
What is Indymedia doing ? Making things awkward for the Police pursuing their enquiries.
Yeah, if you can't beat them - join them.
In fact what you're saying here is that you are basically prepared to lie whenever you feel like it might further your agenda which rather throws your statements earlier about how trustworthy your journalistic posts to Indymedia are into doubt doesn't it.
This link is representative of typical Indymedia content - judge it for yourself.
uglf communique 05.01.2005"
"I worked hard for it. I deserve it. And I have it," Campbell said. "It's all mine."
So you think the best way to argue to the point that cars can damage is the environment is to drop concrete blocks onto freight trains ?
What you are really saying is that criminal dropping concrete on trains, and quite possibly yourself, hold a particular view and hold anyone elses views on the matter as being irrelevant.
This allows you to then ignore any democratic process and justify ( to yourselves ) any action you believe is necessary to impose your agenda on everyone else.
If this is the case, then there are almost no repsonsible journalists out there - you might as well close down CNN for that...
See http://www.cjrdaily.org/, an excellent site showing inaccuracies in reporting and facts that are glossed over.
--LWM
The above AC paid for by Indymedia inc.
Because the prosecution can't walk into court and say we got these finger prints from a typewriter in so and so's house. They have to be able to produce the typewriter as part of the evidence in a trial.
So confused...
Ok I get the point that they're similar, in fact I agree with you, but only in the sense that they're similar in liking certain things and disliking others, and that both groups want to enforce thier idea of right and wrong. i.e they're similar in that they both seek control
Just because someone is a power hungry dictator doesn't mean their not an idealistic power hungry dictator. Infact interpreting your Godwin filter You seem to be saying that while Hitler was clearly only embracing facism to gain power, it apears at least that Mao and Stalin had at least some attachment to their causes. I would tend to argue that oposite. Hitler was not intelligent enough to rise to power without fully embracing the ideals of the major minority. He was only charismatic because he believed the stuff he was spouting. Stalin, who was clearly more intelligent, and maybe even Mao (whos particular history I'm less familiar with) could be considered capable of doublethink, and leveraging Machiavelian principles to control their populations.
Here's where I lose you...
First of all I completely disagree that belief in God -> no external laws. In fact I would state the opposite. If God exists then its easy to postulate absolute morality, to which we are all bound. The athiest view point of morality has to be that morality exists, because its more convinient for everybody. There are no absolutes. This is closer to what I would describe as a blank state.
I follow the first half of your argument that real anarchy cannot exist, and that sociey's rules are created in response to freedom (even if it inhibits freedom). And in this sense I agree that freedom can be thought of as a contradiction. However, I think it is much more useful to actually give the word freedom meaning. My favorite definition (paraphrasing) is that your freedom to swing your arm ends where my nose begins.
Isn't "libertarian" a right-wing thing? I'm sure the "left-wing" "equivalent" would be "anarchist".
:-)
:-)
:-)
Don't take this the wrong way, but it's really funny to watch someone's brain asplode as they try to artificially twist real-world politics down to a mere two pidgeonholes.
The reason you can't do it is because politics is not one-dimensional. The childishly crude left vs right garbage is something you only get in obsolete or broken political systems incapable of supporting anything other than two main parties. Having only a lousy two reference points, a line is the result - and from that is drawn left and right, a retarded one dimensional political concept.
You wouldn't happen to be American by any chance?
(Fisher's deduction states: "The more issues a person crudely shoehorns down into a liberal/conservative dichotomy, the more certain you can be that the person is an American"
Anyway, if you haven't already seen it, check out Political Compass, which at least expands things to two dimensions, and will make your brain stop hurting
(No offense intended in all this, I'm not exactly being entirely serious here. Hence the liberal sprinkling of smileys
No, you are misquoting me. I stated that lies and trust are a tool. I did not say what I do. I said that is what occurs.
No. I stated that the action (if it occurred) was dumb. Things can be done far better than that, just look at demonstrating. Personally, being an activist, I see my views as being backed up by science and the views of those who come and pick holes in the arguments (admittedly not very well put sometimes) that I post as being irrelevant. We do not live in a democracy - the government aren't my voice. They don't represent my views. I am obivously arguing with some very right winged people here, so I will end this now.
I've met people like you, ill informed nutcases who are unable to hold a rational discussion.
Do you see the BBC campaigning for renationalisation of the railways, or higher taxes, or a stronger welfare state
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Many are doing the best they can to destroy social security along with every other social program. I guess you've never met a true neo-conservative but they don't believe in social programs.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
"When the largest nation on earth (US) has just a few media outlets owned by right-wing Bushites, pumping out their awful crap;" Yep, Dan Rather is a big time Bush guy. *** shakes heads and walks off ***
If you are running an indy newspaper, and you want to have public forums, for God's sake, put the public forums on a separate server. That way, when someone commits a crime on the forums, the police will only sieze the server the forums are hosted on.
This is a case of not having the proper disaster strategy in place.
The internet is why we still have free speech. Build the next internet and you increase free speech.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
The problem isn't that you are arguing with "very right wing people", which in fact you're not, it's that you aren't arguing very consistently or very well.
The fact is that we do live in democracy, whether or not you agree with that doesn't change that fact.
The government are your voice but they are also the voice of everyone else, the problem you have here is that your extreme, inconsistent and stupid beliefs are not shared by the majority of people and therefore not directly expressed in government policy.
Essentially you are selfish, you believe you are right and everyone else is wrong and you are willing to use whatever means you can to impose your beliefs on everyone else. Whatever that is it's certainly not democratic.
The fact that you believe it's OK to lie and break any laws you decide are not helpful to your cause should be a wake up call for you to rexamine your personal beliefs and stop behaving in such a self centred and selfish manner.
Go learn what "representative" means. Choosing one of the most extreme postings available is not representative, it is manipulative. You are a dishonest shit; utterly typical behavior for a illiterate neocon such as yourself. Pathetic, truy pathetic.
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
"Honesty is a stupid ideal created by religion. It is not a practical way of getting change."
If that is what you believe then I would expect you to live your life and base your actions on those beliefs, if those aren't your beliefs and you were just lying there to further your own ends then I think you've proved my point.
They're only being leftist because of our currently right-wing government. It's their job to criticise the government position.
I am trolling
I do post to indymedia uk regularly. The news wire doesn't have an editor though - as it is an open forum. The articles in the middle (features) have editors though...
Don't take this the wrong way, but it's really funny to watch someone's brain asplode as they try to artificially twist real-world politics down to a mere two pidgeonholes.
:)
Not really; if you re-read the post, you'll see I said that "the only thing I'm really sure about is that 'left wing' and 'right wing' are pretty damn stupid labels anyway", and then proceeded to point out their contradictions.
The reason you can't do it is because politics is not one-dimensional.
That's the gist of what I was saying.
Having only a lousy two reference points, a line is the result - and from that is drawn left and right, a retarded one dimensional political concept.
Which would make 'left wing' and 'right wing' "pretty damn stupid labels anyway", as I was saying
You wouldn't happen to be American by any chance?
No, but I suspect your misreading of what I meant may have been guided by that wrong assumption. Also (possibly) by my bad phrasing (the post was train of thought as much as anything), although I don't think I was that unclear.
Actually, I'm a Scot, and I don't consider the American concept of 'left' and 'right' to be very meaningful. I mean, how the **** did "liberal" come to mean "left wing"? Well, (a) Because American politics are inherently biased to the right (by world standards) and (b) the inherent contradiction in the "right" and "left" wing labels and ideologies.
Anyway, no offence taken; my brain doesn't hurt because I already recognised what you're trying to say- my brain hurts because there's plenty more complex stuff when it comes to politics.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
You seem to be saying that while Hitler was clearly only embracing facism to gain power, it apears at least that Mao and Stalin had at least some attachment to their causes.
No, I was saying that Mao and Stalin exploited their supposed causes simply as a means to an end; "they latched onto their respective causes solely to gain power".
Your "useful" meaning of freedom is obviously necessary for a workable society, but it does imply restriction at *some* level that goes against the "literal" meaning of freedom. And your definition says nothing about where (reasonably) one can swing their arms, or one can stick their face; this must also be argued.
My point was that; if everyone is free to do what they choose (in the absolute, unrestricted sense), then they must still accept the consequences of their actions, and the situation they are in, if it was reached from an initially free position- which it was. To have it any other way would imply restricting the "freedom" of others.
So, any actions done by a person(s) A to another person(s) B, including smacking them in the face, or imposing an unwanted society and/or system of law is the result of A's freedom. B is also free to respond to this in any way they like; including ignoring the A's laws/punishments (AKA threats). A in turn can use *their* freedom to punish (AKA attack) B who broke their "laws".
Thus, all societies started from a point of "freedom" and can be considered "free".
And so on..... this would be intellectual masturbation if it weren't fundamentally true.
And; if God imposes Free Will upon man, then the religious types can claim that man is Free to do what he likes. I'm not religious personally, but if God does not directly impose his (His...) will upon Man, then Man is still free to choose to ignore this, and morality is still only God's choice.
This, of course, assumes we are discussing a Christian God; I'm no expert on religion, and certainly not non-Christian ones.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
pfft!
The server doesn't contain the IP logs though, that was what they were originally asked for and they said they didn't have them. Is there a law that says you must be able to trace who wrote anything you published?
I am trolling
My beliefs can be summed up as follows: I believe everyone should be free. I believe all animals should be free. I believe that the environment is more important than petty posessions. I believe that in order to ensure these ideas, anything should be done to achieve them. This does not include dictatorship etc... but instead a more de-centralised system - where EVERYONE is heard, ie. consensus. Or more specifically Anarchy. The world is more important than you or I. Just because the way I write isn't very good doesn't mean my views aren't. I believe in education. This involves stunts, stalls and demonstrations of all shapes and sizes. It also includes discussions and learning more myself. That is one of the problems we, as activists, face. All we receive is blank faces when trying to inform people because they are being blindsided by other, richer and more powerful, people. We are not living in a democracy. We can choose between 3 people in elections for our area. How democratic. Everyones voice should be heard in all decisions else things will always be bad for someone. This is the root of the worlds problems - people are ignored and instead the governments pander to those with most money.
I work with Indymedia here in Pittsburgh --- more so in the past--- and we do not log IP addresses for this very reason. We log pages served for generateing statsistics, though we cannot determine things like the number of unique page views.
If they ever kept logs in the UK, I would be surprised if they still do given the past seizures of servers in that country.
-- john
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
While the majority of people involved in Indymedia are on the left (some/many? on the extreme left), it is a fairly open organization. Anyone can publish whatever they want and get involved in shaping the organization. I believe this would be difficult since there is a lot of momentum going to the left. However, this is something that isn't even possible with Fox News.
-- john
seriously.
I'm going to summarise the first portion of what you have said like this:
I belive
What you are in fact arguing for here is not a system which weighs everyones views but a system which does what you want it to. This is generally known as a dictatorship.
Can you explain to me why you believe how we are not living in a democracy and why some kind of system based purely on your beliefs would be better for me ?
Really I think you are just drawn to the glamour of "Activism" without having really thought through much of the things you say you believe in.
I have been to a lot of festivals and demonstrations and meet a lot of people like you who are very good at repeating slogans or reading the headlines off the magazine they are trying to sell me but can't ever give convincing explanations or proof that what they are saying is true or offer provide me with any reason to agree with what they are saying. In most cases even Politicians are more credible and honest than this type of activist.
My recollection is that the "left" and "right" labels refer to where representatives were seated in the French legislature at the time.
Shakes head and walks off? Grow up. The 'battling viewpoints' offered within the tight confines of big news all fall safely within the controlled margins.
If your viewpoint ever opens up, you'll begin to see the big picture. Regardless of any spit and thunder, Mr. Rather still promotes the fiction of 'Terrorists' and the need for Fear.
-FL
If the events described in the confession actually happened, and if the poster is not a wholly incompetent loser (clearly not a sure bet), then his actions surely would have left physical evidence, presumably already known to the police. So you're saying that when someone confesses to a crime, including details not widely known, that should be ignored, because, well, he belongs to your favourite group of thugs^H^H^H^H^H^H 'journalists'.
Actually, with the sort of people Indymedia are, I'm surprised they managed to turn on the computer.
Your Server are belong to us.
insert inflammatory anti-microsoft comment here
I don't particularly want to argue semantics, but if we tak about absolute freedom, and practical freedom I think that we eliminate some of the problems. If ideal freedom is the ability to do whatever one wants, and practical freedom implies consequences I think we get closer to the mark.
Of course there are some always going to be problems with any definition. In this case Absolute freedom doesn't exists, because even if you live on an island with absolutely no human interaction you are still forced to feed yourself and drink. Since dying would be a consequence of failing to nurish yourself everything would fall under practical freedom, so the distinction loses meaning.
The point being that saying everything is ultimately free is the same as saying that nothing is free. At some point we need to draw a destinction between free and not free. It is convinient to define practical freedom as the ability to do whatever you want, so long as it does not effect my ability to do the same.
This of course tends to draw a fuzzy line, but it is better than calling everything free. It is also of practical importance to be able to speak in degrees of freedom (e.g. China is more free than it was, France is more free than Iran, etc.)
The only non-free state then is one which is predetermined. Christianity is rather unique in declaring that humans have free will. Jews ignore the question, and Muslims deny that free will exists. Since you were raised in a Christian society (even though you're not religious yourself) your default position is that we are able to choose. Christians have wrestled with this question ever since there was a Christian church. Of particular interest is that if God imposes anything we are not free. Even if that something is free will we did not have a choice in whether or not to be free, so we are not free to be not free.
Therefore, if we can talk about practical freedom, rather than absolute freedom then the political spectrum has meaning. The extreme right prefers facism, and the extreme left communism. Any two, competeing items in between, that contain an aspect of freedom, can be charactersied as right and left.
...about as easy as it is to put falsified data onto a seized drive after the fact.
--- What
I consider myself a small-a anarchist, and my attitude is that everyone is responsible for everything. If people don't realize they actually have power to oppose policies and institutions that require "the Will of the People" as their basis for authority, then we are forever doomed to anti-democratic government.
Basically, you agree to let your government govern you. If it does something wrong in your name, you don't get to claim innocence. You are responsible for holding authority to account, and making public institutions prove that they deserve the right act in your name.
To me, the essence of Anarchism is creativity, not "everyone for himself". Creativity leads to diversity: it may be messy, but it is the essence of humanity. Which is why authoritarians can't stand art that doesn't serve as propaganda.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
..which is that this is lower than circumstantial evidence that they're pursuing. The evidence in question (i.e. the logged IP of the anonymous poster) may lead police to the suspect; but assuming that police do find who posted that message, after getting the IP from the server, then sending a subpoena to the ISP, and finding out his or her identity, the evidence on the server becomes wholly irrelevant to the case, and thus will likely never come into question.
Basically, you can't convict someone of a crime because they posted anonymously to a board saying they did it, given no other evidence, nor a signed confession by the suspect. So really, what does it matter? If the guy who posted the message actually committed the crime, they're going to need to, for instance, initiate a full investigation, not haul him to court based on the validity of some IP logs unrelated to the crime itself.
--- What
Ha. Continue your blinded little life. Ensure that you can continue to use your little software analogies. Just remember that 'activism' is the reason we are where we are.
The womens rights movement went about things in the same way.
The black rights movement did also.
Unless you look at the ENTIRE picture (ie. all the laws, people and power) you will not see that we are living in a fascist state already. It will just take a little while longer until it affects you more.
What the prior poster posted was not a dictatorship but instead a situation where people are not blinded by stupid propaganda and can actual make an informed decision by themselves based on fact. No-one will tell people what to do, they make their own minds up.
Also, the system you are invisioning is one made up of 'countries' etc... whereas (I believe) the prior poster was talking about smaller groups. If groups of people are too large - someones voice is lost and their views are no longer counted, that is when it is no longer a 'democracy'.
Do a bit of reading on anarchism, activism, consensus etc... and you will understand how things are done. The prior poster is just not very good at presenting his arguments.
If the police had reason to believe there was secret information on the IndyMedia servers, they could have obtained a court order to allow them to send an expert to copy all the information on the servers, and not seize anything.
Look at what actually happens when servers are seized for the purpose of "investigation": the site goes down for six months, the server comes back in pieces if at all.
The investigation is mere subterfuge. Don't be fooled. If it was just an investigation, they'd need only a complete copy of the hard drives, which would require six hours of downtime. The seizure is the purpose of the investigation, not the other way around. When the server is not returned tomorrow, or the next day, or week, or month, this will be as good as proved.
What seems to have happened here is that first of all someone unknown appears to have posted a message on the 'indymedia' server that has now been seized, apparently claiming to have been involved in train vandalism. Dropping large rocks from bridges on to trains, cars and lorries is unfortunately not unknown as a habit of some UK vandals, and injuries and deaths have occurred. Not surprisingly, the police want to lay hands on criminals of this kind.
The police seem to have asked for the indymedia people's help in identifying the correspondent and possible train vandal, and they seem to have got a refusal.
I don't know why the indymedia people would want to treat a person who volunteered a posting that boasted of criminal activity as if protected by a special journalistic privilege (which probably isn't legally recognised in the UK in this kind of scenario anyway).
Against a background like that I'm not surprised that the police were not inclined to take no for an answer -- but it is of course open to question whether they have been overly high-handed in seizing the server in this sort of situation. I guess that what they really want to do is see whether the box contains any traces of routing data, that could give them a lead back to the source of the train-vandalism claim. In the absence of any help from the server's owners, I can imagine that the police may take some time to sift through for any traces of data relevant to their search.
I don't understand why the indymedia people seem to want to shield a train-vandal who on the face of his own boasts may be responsible for a particularly nasty crime of violence. If they had offered some hope of help in tracing the person claiming to be a perpetrator, they might well not have had their server seized.
-wb-
When surveying a population, a sample size of one can only represent a population of one with any statistically significant confidence.
You're going to have to provide a reasonably sized *random* selection of such links to achieve accuracy in representation.
Any less dilligence betrays ignorance, bias or intellectual dishonesty. Which is it for you?
"At most all they need to do is mirror the drive,"
That still requires access to the original data in a controlled environment.
"In the previous case all they really needed was the cooperation of Rackspace in supplying the needed data."
Um... NO! Welcome to the World of Law, where claims of evidence-tampering is more than enough to make or break a criminal case. In this situation, you do not let a third party touch the evidence in any way, shape or form, instead making very measured and well-documented steps in a controlled environment.
"Why don't they just dust it where it is?"
Possible != feasable. On-the-spot dusting is usually reserved for cases where the object being dusted is immovable (say, a wall). And even in those cases, in order to create the required controlled environment, they order you out of the house and surround the place with police tape while they work, doing any dismantling that's needed on the spot. It's actually less of an inconvenience to the owner to have the item taken into police custody and examined off-site.
"In any case, as per above, this particular case is more like they impounded your typewriter, your desk, everything in it, all of your files and all of your customer's files."
Only if your typewriter and desk are inexplicably welded to your filing cabinet.
The sample given is highly unrepresentative.
l l l
The indymedia guys do occasionally seem to give space to some whacked-out lefites, but most of their stuff is quite reasonable.
I've been espacially impressed with their coverage of Latin Ameircan issues.
If you don't want your news presented from a left wing angle, go elsewhere.
But dont' try to misrepresent indymedia's point of view. In the long run, you only do yourself a disservice.
And finally....
Here are some more representitive articles, taken from UK indymedia page today:
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2005/06/314908.htm
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2005/06/314733.htm
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2005/06/314391.htm
"I post news to indymedia and I would not sell to papers. Also, a lot of papers wouldn't touch 98% of the articles on indymedia because they don't follow their corporate lines and would damage their sponsorship from other companies."
The whole concept of "journalistic privilege" relies entirely on "The Man" telling people who does and who does not warrant this privilege. As soon as you start applying a double standard, there has to be someone in place to define that standard and hand out such privileges. Medical, spousal and legal privileges all rely on state licensing boards to decide who gets that privilege, and that's all but literally true for journalistic privileges as well.
So either IM takes the egalitarian approach and asks for no special so-called "free speech" privileges beyond what the average person gets, or IM has to start behaving like those corporate entities you denegrate in order to qualify for that privilege.
As an aside, it seems to me that jounalistic privilege is less a matter of "freedom of speech" so much as "freedom from responsiblity for what is said." I don't know how things work in the UK, but here in the US the only people who truly have that sort of protection according to the constitution are memebers of Congress (art I, sec 6, clause 1), and even that only applies to things said during session.
There are some important differences between those movemements and the type of activism hinted at by the previous poster.
The main difference is obviously that these movements had some well defined purpose and although they have began with various kinds of illegal action they ended up joining the political process and thus acheiving their goals.
What the previous poster and now you were envisioning is in fact a fantasy, the only groups snmall enough to acheive your goal would be groups of one which will in any real world situation would be unworkable. Democracy has worked well for the last 300 years or so and there is a good reason for that.
Initially the previous poster was describing how dropping chunks of concrete onto trains was a good way of addressing the problem of pollution from cars. CLearly any sensible person would agree this is not the case.
I am not living in a facist state, anyone else living here who suggests I am should perhaps go and find a real facist state to live in and see where they'd prefer to stay.
What software analogy ?
If you live in a police state, then yes, that's exactly the way it should be handled.
What many are failing to realize is that both the US and the UK are turning into police states, without even the poor reason of the cold war. They're doing it because the politicos in power like their power, and can get away with it. (N.B.: This comment is NOT party specific. Both parties claim to be against this policy when out of power, both implement it when in power.)
In this case I'm firmly on the side of Indymedia. The police acted abusively. I neither know nor care about the details, as I find it difficult to concieve of details that would justify the rough outline of the actions within the rough outline of the circumstances. Details will tell you just HOW corrupt the police are, not whether they are corrupt. Details will tell you whether and to what degree Indymedia protested, not whether they should have retained possession of the server (or some equivalent substitute with complete copies of the data). Details will tell you how much the police overstepped the warrant, or how much of a catch-all warrant was written, not whether they should have read the entire disk drive.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
And as history has shown owns when everyone is responsible for everything then nobody cares anymore.
Thousends of years of history, trial and error and there are still people ejaculating such idiocies.
There is no hope....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You know, I see what you're getting at. I'm kind of arguing this for the hell of it :)
However... I was discussing absolute "freedom of *action*" in the sense that you're not *prohibited* from doing anything.
I didn't mean the God-like freedom to do what you want, nor to avoid the consequences of your actions. The latter would require making some other entity less "free" anyway.
If you are on a desert island, you are not forced to do anything. You can sit on your arse, dehydrate and die- if you have the willpower. Freedom in that sense *must* include the freedom to do what you want with your own life, if that's in the set of actions available to you.
The point being that saying everything is ultimately free is the same as saying that nothing is free.
No, I'm not sure that this applies to "freedom" in the sense that I meant. I would say that saying everything is free (in that sense)- which it is- effectively renders freedom (in the same sense) meaningless.
Practical freedom is, of course, a different kettle of fish. It is more desirable, and includes an element of power. It also requires restriction, which prompts some to complain about their "freedom" being restricted. This *is* where my somewhat ivory-towered point approaches real-world practicality. There's always going to be some guy bitching that someone's imposing on his "freedom".
But, as I mentioned, we have to decide where it is acceptable to put ones face and where it is acceptable to swing one's arms (*this* is where the conflict lies), and if we say to people "do what you like", we have the absolute "freedom" described above (yuk!) and a totally unworkable society. Or rather, we don't, since chances are people will come together and decide some rules on swinging arms/putting faces (!) which they may wish to impose on others. And so on, yadda yadda...
BTW, your discussion about choosing to be Not Free points to a good chink in the armour of what I was saying; namely, that we don't have the choice to be born- let alone born into a "blank slate" society.
[ I wrote a long-winded section here about how the rights of children conflict with the responsibilities- and rights- of parents, but it got out of hand. ]
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Yes, the Labour Party is quite right wing, I must say. :?
huh?
You can choose not to watch the BBC too; since when was a TV legally required?
There's a big difference between decidiing not to support Murdoc's Fox and not supporting BBC. If you don't want to support Fox then don't watch it, you still have other sources, but the only way not to support BBC is to not have a tv therefore you don't get any points of view on tv. While I like BBC, I used to listen to it on short wave along with Pravda (I'd get should a crack listening to their "news"), support for it should be truly voluntary as in freely sending in a check instead of being required to pay a tax on tvs that is used to fund the BBC.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Believe me, better have a good TV product like the BBC with a bit of proper taxation (and following enforcement) than something like the Italian RAI, that is mainly paid-for by advertisers because the tax in place is, in practice, just not paid by anyone but the most honest minorities... the result makes Murdoch's products look professional and engaging.
Taxation is legalized robbery. You're robbing Peter to pay Paul.
FalconShould there be a Law?
While Fox News may lean to the right about as much as your typical news organization (ABC, CNN, whatever) does to the left
Disney is left leaning? As is GE? And I guess Viacom also leans leftwards? I do think so. That's basically what you're saying when you say ABC, CBS, and NBC lean to the left. Disney owns ABC, GE owns CBS, and Viacom owns NBC.
FalconShould there be a Law?
FoxNews is a company, as a media conglomerate they exist on advertising.
Fox News will also pull, change, or cancel a news story if an advertizer doesn't like it. One Fox station fired two reporters because they wouldn't change a story to suit an advertizer.
Hidden Danger in Your Milk?
Welcome to the online news source for anyone who drinks milk or consumes other dairy products...and depends on the news media to report suspected health concerns accurately and honestly.
Here you will find behind-the-scenes details about how a large share of America's milk supply has quietly become adulterated with the effects of a synthetic hormone (bovine growth hormone, or BGH) secretly injected into cows...and how pressure from the hormone maker Monsanto led Fox TV to fire two of its award-winning reporters and sweep under the rug much of what they discovered but were never allowed to broadcast.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Isn't "libertarian" a right-wing thing? I'm sure the "left-wing" "equivalent" would be "anarchist"...
No, if anything libertarianism is center. Libertarians, generally, believe in small government and liberty just as Classical Liberals do. Notice I used "Classical Liberals", as to distinguish them from the liberals of today who are more like socialists.
Liberalism
FalconShould there be a Law?
I prefer this one, World's Smallest Political Quiz . Well actually I don't, it's just shorter.
Oh, going by either or both I am Libertarian.
FalconShould there be a Law?
My recollection is that the "left" and "right" labels refer to where representatives were seated in the French legislature at the time.
Do you mean "liberty" versus "monarchist"?
FalconWhile I agree with the French Revolution I disagree with the "Terror"!
Should there be a Law?
in 1999 during the seattle anticapitalist protest
I think you meant:
in 1999 during the seattle riot
Unless protesting can somehow be construed to include the wanton destruction of public and private property.
Most of the protesters in Seattle during the WTO meetings there were neither violent nor distructive. Most of the violence and vandalism were caused by anarchists. During the meetings though a few media outlets reported this it wasn't well publicizied.
WTO Meeting of 1999
The situation was complicated around noon, when perhaps a few dozen black-clad anarchists (in a formation known as a black bloc) -- many of them likely from Eugene, as discussed above -- began smashing windows and vandalizing corporate storefronts. This produced some of the most famous and controversial images of the protests (one particularly widely-distributed photo showed a Nike-wearing anarchist vandalizing Niketown). Reaction from other protestors was mixed (some attempted to physically block their activities) and the police were unable to make arrests. A widely circulated communique claimed to dispel myths and explain the actions of the black bloc anarchists. [2]
However anarchists dispute that they were primarily responsible for violence:
Seattle Anarchism and Revolution Page
In case you missed it, tens of thousands of people succeeded in shutting down the WTO in Seattle. Check out the NO2WTO news page for more info.
There has been much finger-pointing by Seattle officials (who will soon be looking for new jobs) and the mainstream media. Whether you were an eyewitness to the protests downtown, a resident of Capital Hill, or just watched the news between Tuesday and Thursday (Nov. 30 - Dec. 2), it should be clear that one group of black-clad thugs were responsible for all but a couple isolated acts of violence. Their weapons of choice were clubs, rubber bullets, teargas grenades, concussion grenades, fists, steel-tipped boots, vehicles, and pepper spray, among others. They were, of course, the Seattle police and others brought in to "keep the peace" by any means necessary.
In contrast, the "violence" the media kept talking about and using to demonize anarchists was a relatively small amount of grafitti and broken windows (the estimated cost of the property damage was a small fraction of the cost due to losing a couple of shopping days)
In general the majority of protesters in Seattle were peaceful.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Mumia Abu Jamal? He is a political prisoner just as Leonard Peltier is.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I can't think of any EU state other than Belgium that doesn't have a colonialist, imperialist or otherwise expansionist past. Europe had a very violent middle-ages.
Belgium was one of those colonized:
A Brief Outline of Dutch History and the Province of New Netherland
Although most Americans are familiar with the basic outline of the British colonization of America, and even know some information on the Spanish and French settlements, their is less familiarity with the history and geography of another new word settler, namely the Dutch. Not only did they settle the colony of New Netherland but coins from both the United Provinces of the Netherlands and the Flemish area held by Spain, which we now call Belgium, circulated in America. The following summaries are presented to clarify statements in the various sections of this site that mention events concerning the Dutch; below are capsule histories (a) on the formation of the states of Belgium and the Netherlands and (b) the development of the province of New Netherland in America.
FalconShould there be a Law?
So even Belgium has a colonial past. But hey, so does America (war with Spain, the Philippines, anyone)?
The US itself is a colony. There isn't one country, nation, that wasn't built by colonization and therefore doesn't have a colonizationist past. It's only been relatively recently, the last few hundred years, that countries have gotten as big as they are.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Hmm, let's see - as pointed out, Belgium does have a particularly nasty colonial past in Africa. But the EU states that don't have any colonial nasties in their history include:
Finland
You might wat to ask the Sami, The Sámi people (not Lapps!) if they hadn't been colonized by Finns.
Ireland
What's this between Ireland and Northern Ireland?
There isn't one country that doesn't have a colonist past, including being colonized.
FalconShould there be a Law?
And, did you know (They won't teach you this in Public schools) that the DNA of a human is more closely related to that of a cockroach than to any primate?
Can you cite one scientific link that backs this up, or is it hot air?
FalconShould there be a Law?
I still would like to know how one can say that the Atheists are being discriminated against in our schools.
I still recall rulers being applied forcefully to hands for not saying prayer or "under god" when saying the pledge. I very much call that discrimination.
Evolution is a religion
No more than football is. At least as a scientific theory evolution can be disproved if it's false.
It's simply easier to believe in evolution, because that allows you to do anything you want.
Actually it's easier when you believe in a "God", just blame everything on it. Though I don't believe in any "God", deity, or other "Supreme Being" I'll say that if there is one then IT is sadistic!!! Almost 10 years ago I had an accident it would of been better if I had died from and the docs told my family it'd be a miracle if I did live while I was in a coma. I spent years praying and all I got out of it was silence, after that I came to the realization that if "IT" exists it must be sadistic as I've been living in hell on earth.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Funnily enough, I'd argue the exact opposite. A broad view of who is or isn't a journalist defeats the object. Imagine you haul in a drug dealer... You've got enough evidence to convict him of dealing, but you're really after the higher up connections. So you tell them that if they don't grass their dealer, you'll add "obstruction of justice" to the charge. Would you really want them to have a "protection of source" just because they once had a blog, or posted to indymedia?
Funny I thought there was an amendment to the Constitution of the USA about self incrimination. Oh, yea, there is, it's called the Fifth Amendment.
FalconShould there be a Law?
If journalists should be able to refuse to testify against others, then so should the average citizen.
Anybody can refuse to testify against anyone else, even in a grand jury. The only way someone can be "compelled" is if they are given immunity from prosecution. But even then, as long as they are willing to be jailed they can still refuse to testify.
FalconShould there be a Law?
very true lol
Who's to issue those credentials, the government?
FalconShould there be a Law?
Nah, trust me, I've spent time in America and its a right wing society alright. I think the problem here is that you think liberal is the opposite of right wing. Liberalism is orthognal to the the left and right wings and actually opposite to authoritarianism. You can pick one from either category so to speak (e.g., Stalin = authoritarian left wing, Hitler = authoritarian right wing, Hippy commune = liberal left wing, Pure capitalism = liberal right wing). I'd say the US is a very liberal right-wing society in this case but currently moving towards authoritarianism (as is normal in war time of course). One's "wingedness" as it were is dictated by one's postion on the ownership of capital and, these days, whether one favours trickle down or the redistribution of wealth as best for society. I see absolutely no movement towards the redistribution of wealth in America outside intellectual circles (which ironically enough do include some vastly wealthy people who recognise the problems the concerntration of capital may well have in the future).
Pretty good job. Your liberal or Classical Liberal as I say, being "opposite to authoritarianism" isn't the same creature as that used in the US today. It's most prominent usage today seems more along the lines of socialism, big universal health care coverage and so on. It's definitely not the liberalism Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and others of their tyme meant, a small and limited government.
FalconShould there be a Law?
They asked nicely for the logs, and explained why. Indymedia refused, because ... well, that's the kind of people they are. So the police took the next procedural step, because that's the kind of people they are.
Did you read the whole thing or just the part that fit your preconceptions? It did say they didn't keep the logs that were requested. But whether logs were kept or not the hd could of been mirrored then the mirror used to replace the original drive thus allowing services to continue. They would of then been able to have the original hd analyzed. The only reaason to do it the way it was done was to keep the server offline. I admit I don't know much but I know enough to realize that.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
You speak of "the government" as if there is only one.. there are several..
In the US, most professions are regulated at the State level. Each state has governing boards for each governed profession. Currently, there is a clear need for some kind of regulation of journalism. Here's why:
Jayson Blair
Stephen Glass
Diana Greigo Erwin
et al...
So-called "journalists" for major reputable firms who were disgraced by their acts of journalistic fraud. These people intentionally pushed blatantly false information in order to push their respective agendas.. oh wait a minute... sounds just like Indymedia!
Why should not Indymedia face the same fate as these liars?
Ok, I'm re-reading this thread this morning, any you seem to be making two points, feel free to correct me if I'm misrepresenting you.
1.) The political spectrum is silly, because its too simplified.
2.) Everyone is free, because they chose to be a member of their particular society. If they don't like it they are free to leave.
Of course I'm just arguing for the hell of it too. I feel that expresing my opinions and gaining feedback helps me strengthen my arguments,and codify by beliefs...
As for the political spectrum, I think it is exceedingly useful to group single ideas, and slightly less useful to group people who likely have some rightist and some leftist ideas. Personally when I think of the spectrum I picture it as a horseshoe, rather than a straight line. The right capped with despotic facism, and the left capped with communism (maybe anarcy, but no sane person even pretends anything like that will ever be realised). I think the horseshoe image is useful because Mussolini's and Stalin's societies were more similar than either of them would admit, and what do you know on a horseshoe the right and left ends are pretty close together...
As far as freedom is concerned, while it is true that we can all technically do whatever we want, some of our freedom can be removed by threat of harm. I think this is the main distinction between practical and absolute freedom. Since we are all animals we will do alot of things that go against our principles (i.e. things we don't want to do) for the sake so self-preservation.
Since there is no society on earth, and rather no plausible society which could ever impliment unmitigated absolute freedom I say such a beast does not exist (except of course in a metaphysical sense so that we can talk about it like we are doing now.) As soon as the primordial society told Ugg he couldn't eat Grogg's mammoth burger we left the realm of absolute freedom for good.
As such I think we should be talking about degrees of practical freedom, and this is where the two points tie together, since IMHO the best way to talk about degrees of practical freedom is by with the political spectrum.
An organization deliberately not keeping IP logs in order to hide criminal behavio[u]r is just an invitation for some power-hungry government to pass new laws requiring it. It seems like I read about that recently on Slashdot.
It may be unneccessary anyhow - in all likelihood some upstream router does a complete IP trace which allows reconstruction of TCP/IP traffic at a later time. Web Logs are just simpler to access.
The best ally of a totalitarian despot is the anarchist.
Final 2006 "Proof of Global Warming" US Hurricane Count -> 0
Look at their policies, not their traditional position. They're privatising right left and centre, being anti-immigration, cutting financial support for university students,....
I am trolling
You don't have to watch X-Files to know the government lies and does not care about its people. Just look at how the world actually is, do you actually trust the government?
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Wrong. Interviewers are supposed to ask who, what, when, where, how, and why" Journalists are supposed to report the facts.
And the facts are "who, what, where, when, why, and how". A did what because of why at where and when, and this is how.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I don't know as much as I should about the history of France either. I didn't learn nearly as much about it when I took French as I did reading various books like those written by and/or about Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. I'd also like to read Alexis de Tocqueville however I don't know that he wrote much about France. Oh, here's one, The Two Tocquevilles, Father and Son: Herve and Alexis De Tocqueville on the Coming of the French Revolution. I may get it though it's not by him per se. I'll have to see about getting my hands on it from Barnes And Noble before I buy it. Here's another one, The Tocqueville Reader: A Life in Letters and Politics (Blackwell Readers) Amazon has however it looks like it's more about his travels in America, if so then I'd rather read his "Democracy in America" first. I've read parts of it but not the whole thing at once.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Actually, and somewhat ironically, if humanity first evolved in Africa, surely Africa is the first ever colonial power?
I don't subscribe to the "Out of Africa" theory myself,. actually I tend to lean towards the Multiregional theory of Evolution. Here's a good intro to the competition between the two theories, Origins of Modern Humans: Multiregional or Out of Africa?
FalconShould there be a Law?
Currently, there is a clear need for some kind of regulation of journalism
The government shouldn't have anything to do with regulating or licensing jouirnalists. Said road leads to censorship. If a journalist, reporter, or writer has to be certified or licensed then they can't be open and forthright with their writing or reporting, if they say something the powers that be don't like they can be denied a license or have it revoked. Slippery slope. To keep them honest requires public participation, alert editors and publishers, if that doesn't work then go after their advertizers.
So-called "journalists" for major reputable firms who were disgraced by their acts of journalistic fraud. These people intentionally pushed blatantly false information in order to push their respective agendas.. oh wait a minute... sounds just like Indymedia!
Sounds just like Rush Limbaugh. For a few years back in the mid '90's I listened to him regularly not because I agreed with him, I disagreed with most of what he said. And I'd wonder where he got his "facts". He'd say one thing, give one set of statistics or such and I could go and check them myself and he'd have thing turned around. Ann Coulter isn't much better. Niether is Bill O'Reilly. It also sounds exactly like the "New York Times".
Fact is is that there are people on all sides who will do what they can to have their way. It's up to everybody to do their own research.
FalconOh, I had thought of seeing "The Shattered Glass" about Stephen Glass but never got around to it.
Should there be a Law?
Did you miss the part where I said "including being colonized"?
I don't doubt the Sami are people, but are they a distinct nation?
The Sami, in some places spelled "sammi" though with other variations of spelling, I wouldn't say are so much a distict nation as much as they are part of a group of interrelated peoples. They are related to the Lapps which is a derogitory term, Lapps call themselves Samek or Sambe, and range from northwestern Russia to Norway and Sweden. Also related are the Inuit of Iceland and northern Canada and Alaska. Because these people are spread over a broad area they have formed their own dialects and customs. Here's a link to a pdf on Artic languages from UNESCO, Artic Languages: An Awakening. It's quite large at 446 pages and more than 2MB. Here are more links:
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An introduction to the Sami people
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The Sami in Finland
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The Sami and Lapland
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The Kola Sami in Russia
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INUIT CIRCUMPOLAR CONFERENCE
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Eskimo (Yupik/Inupiat/Inuit)
FaclonShould there be a Law?
No. But I certainly don't buy the official line.
The endless number of fishy details, from the 'terrorists' passport found on top of the rubble by FBI, to the destroying of all forensic evidence, and the endless hampering of a proper investigation into the collapse, to stories about a controlled demolition blast in the basement of the towers the same instant an airplane hit, to the ability of a 'terrorist' pilot who couldn't pass flight school to direct a Boeing into a building from half a state away without making any flight corrections, to stories of FBI higher-ups deliberately ignoring months of warnings about terrorist plans to attack the towers, to ordering interceptor fighter planes to remain grounded for half an hour after people knew there was a problem. . . There's just so much weird and fishy sounding crap coming from an administration which lies obviously and often with no shame at all.
The big picture appears to be one of deliberate manipulation by elements within the U.S. government to fight endless wars for the direct profit of a few men. I do not see how anybody who bothers to honestly seek into these matters will not reach a similar conclusion. There's just far too much one would have to ignore in order to believe in simple 'terrorists'.
I'm not trying to make you feel dumb; we've all been made fools of, but there IS a much larger picture out there than the one Dan Rather is presenting.
Here's a relatively good essay which presents a basic summary, if you're interested.
-FL
I don't believe the Xfiles, I do believe when millions of people tell us something. I believe its easier for the government to lie to me than for millions of people.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Did you even ATTEMPT to look up the DEFINITION of journalism before submitting your own version of what you THINK journalism should be?
Here's what Merriam-Webster has for "journalism":
It isn't fair to cherry-pick the definition you like. But even if a reporter tries to present "just the facts," their version of the facts will be colored by their experiences, tastes, personalities, etc. No one can truly be unbiased, because the facts they choose to present are the facts that support the version of the story they experienced. It matters which witnesses the journalist interviews. No one, not even a good journalist, can cover every angle of a story. You're fooling yourself if you believe in unbiased reporting.I would like to point out that Merriam-Webster is an American dictionary, and the definition of "journalism" is even further from your narrow view in other languages and cultures. The French have newspapers with admitted left- or right-biases, which is how we ought to do things here. Fox News claims to be "fair and balanced," which is the reason I hold them in complete contempt. If they admitted they were a conservative news network, I would have . . . what's the opposite of contempt? respect? no, not quite . . . I would have less contempt for them.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
This http://www.digitalronin.f2s.com/politicalcompass/ is a very good site that should clear things up.
It explains how politics isn't 1D but rather 2D.
From the site:
There's abundant evidence for the need of it. The old one-dimensional categories of 'right' and 'left' , established for the seating arrangement of the French National Assembly of 1789, are overly simplistic for today's complex political landscape. For example, who are the 'conservatives' in today's Russia? Are they the unreconstructed Stalinists, or the reformers who have adopted the right-wing views of conservatives like Margaret Thatcher ?
On the standard left-right scale, how do you distinguish leftists like Stalin and Gandhi? It's not sufficient to say that Stalin was simply more left than Gandhi. There are fundamental political differences between them that the old categories on their own can't explain. Similarly, we generally describe social reactionaries as 'right-wingers', yet that leaves left-wing reactionaries like Robert Mugabe and Pol Pot off the hook.
Millions of people support an American empire. Millions of people want to remove social programs, and millions of people hate the poor. This is not new, its always been like this and you can go as far back to slavery in the USA, the slaughter of the natives, or all the way back to Europe when there was slavery and elitism. If you are a rich white male CEO you'd be logical to vote for George Bush, now the people who voted over silly stuff like gays and other stuff which really has nothing to do with politics or policy, that part of it was the brainwashing, but the majority are just voting in their own self interest.
If you work as a teacher, a scientist, a doctor or in one of those types of fields then its more likely you'd vote for Kerry because you'll be out of a job if you vote for Bush. It's simple.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.