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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."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indymedia All hail the wiki.
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?
You mean like the BBC did? As pointed out by the Hutton enquiry? Though as it later transpired, the BBC was entirely right (and the Government should have sued them or put in a complaint with the Press Complaints Commission, in stead of a blatant attempt at cencorship, much like seizing Indymedia's servers?).
In fact, that just encourages scurrilous rumor mongering -- which is diametrically opposed to good journalism.
You see, the thing is, rumor mongering is covered by Freedom of Speech to a very great extent. After all, who is to say what is Good Journalism? The Government??
Seizing servers without a judicial verdict is kind of iffy. Usually if you slander/libel you'd get a fine and the instruction to retract your story. The Government doesn't get to impound printing presses, nor servers. Not in civilized countries, anyway.
Bollocks, matey. If anything we have more.
I thought only a court injunction can prevent publication of material in the UK, and judges are often loathed to issue these except where personal privacy or safety is at stake. As far as I understand, there isn't even a Government mechanism to legally force newspapers to keep quiet over military secrets; the "D-notice" mechanism is an advisory system, based upon mutual agreement.
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...
AS an indy editor I'd disagree its filled mainly with socialists, at least in the conventional sense of the term.
Its mostly a left-libertarian thing, where anyone can play as long as they arent bigoted pricks.
for the record I dont speak for the network.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
In the USA we don't have an Indimedia at all.
Incorrect. Thankyou for trolling Adolf, please have a nice day.
Seizing servers without a judicial verdict is kind of iffy.
Lucky that didn't happen in this case. FTFA:
On Tue 21st June, the police contacted an IMC Bristol volunteer asking for IP logs.
They didn't get the logs, so they contacted a judge and received a search warrant.
The problem is that the police (British Transport Police I believe not the met) have demanded the server logs from on the server.
However Bristol Indymedia (I think Indymedia in general but I'm not involved in Indymedia) has a policy of allowing anonymous posting and so it's against their principles to divulge information on posters or stoy submitters, they claim that they have journalistic rights and so as such the information should only be divulged with an appropriate high court order.
In this case it appears that Bristol Indymedia don't agree very strongly with the news story that started this - infact if you RTFAs then you'll see that Bristol Indymedia removed the article from their servers within 24hrs of it being posted as it contravined some of their own guildelines.
Regardless of all of this however even if BIM wanted to hand over the IP logs, the server has been configured NOT TO STORE SERVER LOGS. That means that to the best of their knowledge the server doesn't have that information. How would an encrypted filesystem help here?
So the Police have now seized the server regardless of all of this (and without the proper high court order, a simple search warrant was all) as well as the personal PC of one of the members of Bristol Indymedia. Indymedia is a collective, just because the server was physically at one location doesn't meant that the people who may live there own it in any way. Furthermore they arrested the Indymedia member who was in residence where the server was housed.
All this despite what appears to me to have been the best efforts of Bristol Indymedia to cooperate with the police in good faith.
I actually wish the Police good luck on getting themselves out of the mess they've dug here. It seems to me that they've certainally been needlesly harrasing the BIM member in question and BIM in general and also they've quite probably knowingly broken the law by taking the server.
Slightly off topic, my conjecture as to why the police may want to harras Indymedia - it's the G8 next week incase anyone didn't notice and Indymedia tends to cover these events in a manner quite different to the dare I say censored mainstream FOX news style media. If you look at the different Indymedia servers that have been seized around the world, there does tend to be a strong conincidence of timing to forthcoming political events for which adverse news coverage may be generated. THIS IS POLITICAL CENSORSHIP and should be reviled.
> some of ours isn't even owned by McDonalds and Microsoft
No, it's owned by Rupert "Bloody" Murdoch, instead.
Although we do have some good laws that are supposed to protect journalists from this kind of behaviour, it does not extend to preventing the seizure of the server.
Section 10 of the 1981 Contempt of Court Act states: "No court may require a person to disclose, nor is any person guilty of contempt of court for refusing to disclose, the source of information contained in a publication for which he is responsible unless it is established to the satisfaction of the court that it is necessary in the interests of justice or national security or for the prevention of disorder or crime."
If a court was satisfied that the information was necessary in the interests of justice, they have a right to demand it.
Poor example (not that your original point was completely invalid) - the banning of hoodies was made by the private management of the shopping centre involved. This could happen just as easily in the US if not more so where private rights tend to supercede public rights. But in the UK we have old protections of public (in the public use them, not public owned sense) space that basically say if you're open to the public that means everyone unless you have a good reason. All the govt did here was support Bluewater's decision and say that was a good enough reason for them.
--
USA: home of the world's largest terrorist training camp.
RTFA yourself. They were told that said logs did not exist, via the server owner's legal counsel, but nevertheless the police decided to confiscate the equipment anyway.
Pirate Party UK
from the horse's mouth.
Yeah, the UK is the most primitive EU state in this regard.
Actually, I'm informed that most journalists believe France to be the worst EU state for freedom of press.
England, France and some other countries have very unpleasant things, such as colonialism, in their histories, and it would be so much easier to forgive them for this if they put their current affairs in order in some way.
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.
Set up a proper legal system which guarantees the same results to everyone for the same actions
The only possible such system is one in which actions either always succeed (i.e. a police state) or always fail (i.e. anarchy). Any other system recognises that justice is subjective and leaves the eventual decision up to people, and as nobody is infallible sometimes decisions are made in the opposite way to the way they should go.
created electoral systems in which multiple parties can truly succeed,
Based on the evidence that a significant number of seets in the House of Commons are now held by Liberal Democrats, it seems clear to me that it is possible for 3 parties to succeed in the UK.
But as the UK loses its security council seat to the EU and moves its army into EU control, we'll start civilizing them.
These things are many, many years away. Don't count your chickens 'til they're hatched.
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.
Nothing in reuters, or ITN either (or CNN for that matter).
Thre is:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=24242
That's it so far.
It's a little ironic to read a post like this when the UK government is pushing through a bill to criminalise such comedy gems as The Life Of Brian and The Spanish Inquisition. However, we've been told that we have nothing to fear because a labour party official will decide which cases should be prosecuted and which should not.
So, if you play the Life Of Brian, you've been a very naughty boy and deserve a good seeing to at Her Majesty's pleasure but if Tony Blair watches the same film, it would not be in the public interest to prosecute.
The gulf between theory and practice in the UK is great. In theory, the state now enjoys huge power to suppress free speech. In practice, the UK state finds it convenient to have a vibrant press. Therefore it chooses to employ these powers very infrequently.
"Other media organisations have declared their support."
No, that is not correct. Another left-wing *blog* has declared its support. Follow the link.
btw. the US has a banned books list too, as I found when googling writing this post... surprised me.
The US banned books list is a list compiled by the ALA. The books are not banned by the US Gov't. Instead, they are typically books that some local yocal (think of the children!) found offensive and persuaded their local public library or school to ban.
FreeSpeech.org
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.
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