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Indymedia Server Seized By UK Police, Again
timbrown writes with word that "On 22 January 2009, Kent Police seized an Indymedia server hosted by Manchester-based colocation facility UK Grid and run by the alternative news platform Indymedia UK. The server was taken in relation to comments on an article regarding the convictions in the recent Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) trial. Seven activists were sentenced to a total of 50 years in prison."
The complete story is worth reading; timbrown continues: "I'm posting this as a concerned UK administrator who hosts a number of sites. The message appears to be clear: the UK establishment does not want political content, legitimate or otherwise, hosted from these shores. The message has been noted, however free speech must be supported even where it may not be agreeable."
freedom of speech..
btw I run a site along the lines and I have an interesting setup, the database server is in one country and the web frontend is in another with secure tunnel between so if someone does a traceroute to the site and then goes datacenter and pulls the server out of rack all they get is a proxy, its far from perfect but at least the database is safe
This bugs me. Freedom of the press is a vital tennet of our society, and it needs to be protected vigourously by everyone both inside the media and out. Without it we would have no way to stand up to the sort of tyranny that is all too common in countries where people aren't free.
Which is why I think Indymedia should shut the hell up in this case.
What does this have to do with freedom of the press? The name, address and other details of a judge were posted on an Indymedia site and mirrored to this server. That's not journalism. Trying to claim that the police investigating it is an infringement of the free press just undermines the real press and makes otherwise rational people wonder if freedom of the press is really important after all.
Other people's private personal information is not "political content".
http://twitter.com/onion2k
So now we know that the UK is by far worse than the US on similar issues.
"You updated a website protesting animal cruelty vs drug companies. Now we're gonna smack you with a conspiracy charge for 4.5 years in prison."
Damn.
The UK government doesn't seem to really bother trying to hide all of the atrocities they are comitting and condoning against the common rights of the common man, knowing full well that at the end of the day, MOST people would rather bury their heads in the sand and go back to sleep when someone starts explaining to them what the fuck exactly is happening than stand up and face the truth. They know that they can stage panels with hired actors on bs talk shows to come up with altruistic-sounding arguments to condone the removal of the rights of the people, and quote text from books out of context knowing full well that very few will bother to get off the couch and do the research themselves. Watching the bullshit start to trickle down into New Zealand is starting to really piss me off, all the more so given that we have no constitution and a lot of the rights we take for granted don't implicitly exist. /rant
This post was made in complete sincere seriousity; as such any attempts to derive humour are doomed to instant failure.
In the UK I have been seeing how a 1984 situation is being established:
1) Speed cameras to the wahzoo....
2) Camera's to watch people to the wahzoo...
3) Rights being taken away and people sent to jail on issues that would otherwise seem "ludicrous.."
It has been proven that the cameras do squat to stop crime. Yet there they are and more are coming. Why? It is an issue of the establishment in the UK wanting to control the people. 1984!
The result of Indymedia and the posters is a direct reaction of the restrictions. No more no less...
All that has to happen in the UK is that they start loosening up! Though I doubt that will happen, until a "revolution" occurs. You might think it is funny and cannot happen. I on the other hand say, sure it can happen, but we have gotten so used to "law and order" that we think it cannot happen.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
I know everyone is going to jump up and down about the right to free speech, but that isn't really the topic here.
The police regarded the comment as an implicit threat to the trial judge, which would not come under "free speech" laws in many (most?) countries.
They seized a *mirror* of the main server (the main site is still up a running just fine), in order to try to trace the original poster, and requested that the comment was removed from the site, which it has been.
The main issue I see here is one of oversight, who's there to check that the police only look for forensics on the original poster, and don't start a fishing expedition on the seized server?
I have no problem with the police taken the action they have, far from using their powers to "repress" anyone they are taking appropriate action to prevent groups like SHAC from harassing people, blackmailing them and generally making their lives a misery.
In the article linked to in the header they are 'concerned' that the police have been instructed by their political masters to clamp down on anyone daring to threaten 'the corporations'. The author has obviously totally missed the point that primarily the activism isn't targetted at 'corporations' but at individuals who happen to work at them. It's usually not the 'corporation' which is branded as a paedophile in a leaflet campaign in it's neighbourhood, it's not the 'corporation' who has masked terrorists driving around his house at night shouting abuse and making threats and it's not corporations whose dead relatives are dug up and then held for ransom. Usually it's a delivery driver, admin assistant anyone who is unlucky enough to be targetted by these groups.
I personally would not want to be relentlessly attacked in this matter because some random group of nutters took exception to something the company I worked for is involved in and I welcome any attempts by the government or the police to stand up and do something about it.
This happened in 2004 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/08/fbi_indymedia_raids/ - FBI confiscated its servers in London (how the hell does that work, then? US law enforcement in the UK?) based on comments on the G8.
It also happened in 2005: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/28/indymedia_server_seizure_bristol/ in Bristol, UK, again relating to the G8 conference.
You'll just have to trust the police.
After all, they've never let us down before...
Except for the last 10 billion times. :?
The Belgians banned a political party because they felt it was systematically racist. It was one of the largest when it was banned (the Vlaams Blok).
The Germans infiltrate every political party massively that they feel have 'nazistic tendencies'. The one time they prosecuted a party for being Nazi, it was so infiltrated by police officers that the case had to be dropped because it was impossible to distinguish between material produced by the accused and material produced by the police. One of the police officers wrote an extended manifesto strongly derogatory about jews.
When Austria wanted to give something like 20% of the vote to Jurg Haider, the entire EU instituted a boycott.
The Netherlands is prosecuting senior politician Geert Wilders for making and pulishing the 'Fitna' video. This isn't a matter of seizing a server because a death threat was on it, it's a matter of a court of the land deciding to push for criminal charges against someone because of a film he made.
It's therefore in my view rather ridiculous and pathetic when people whine about "This is an attack on freedom of speech!111". It's already dead in Europe.
Tor
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Imagine if /. servers got seized everytime someone saw fit to post comments with the addresses related to the "bad guy" in response to a story. Indymedia had already pulled said comments, does /. even have such a facility? I find some of what gets put on Indymedia to be massively disagreeable, OTOH I'm not a big fan of servers being pulled at random either.
Tim Brown
...this concerns me. I've just sent off an email to their support division asking for information about their policies for dealing with police requests. I am skeptical that Indymedia is giving us the full story, but if UK Grid handed over physical hardware without a warrant it makes me wary of continuing my contract with them (not that I'm doing anything illegal, but it can be argued Indymedia wasn't doing anything illegal either)
From the details available, it appears this may relate to information that could be used to threaten the judge in the SHAC trial, the trial of some pretty unpleasant and violent people http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7837064.stm.
I know everyone is going to jump up and down about the right to free speech, but that isn't really the topic here.
Oh really
The police regarded the comment as an implicit threat to the trial judge, which would not come under "free speech" laws in many (most?) countries.
Which is one of the reasons why Indymedia removed the comment
They seized a *mirror* of the main server (the main site is still up a running just fine), in order to try to trace the original poster, and requested that the comment was removed from the site, which it has been.
Yet the original poster can not be retrieved from the "mirror" (or from the main site for that matter).
The main issue I see here is one of oversight, who's there to check that the police only look for forensics on the original poster, and don't start a fishing expedition on the seized server?
The main issue here is what was the intention of the police. Obviously it can't be to trace the original poster (why seize a mirror, or anything at all since Indymedia does not log ips), nor can it be to remove the comment (this had already happened). Would it just be a form of punishment for a "critical" organization? Indymedia is entirely volunteer-run and depends on donations. Taking a server offline and a potential court case will seriously increase the workload and will have financial consequences too.
It's like being a scientist in a way. At the end of the day, you want the answer to be right. In pursuit of that goal, scientists and journalists have developed a certain ethic and certain procedures that more or less work.
It's easy to be a pretend scientist: all you have to do is mix pretty solutions in some test tubes. Likewise, it's easy to be a pretend journalist. Easier, these days. But, in either case, the difference between real and pretend is not the web site or the test tubes, but whether or not someone is digging away, really trying to get at the truth.
Now, when Indymedia posts that kind of personal information that could reasonably imply a threat and isn't relevant to the story, it's the equivalent of a chemist blowing up his/her lab. At the very least, it doesn't give you confidence in their competence.
Who thought nothing of ruining the lives of people who had the most tenuous links with Huntingdon Life Sciences. Fuck them; the only fitting punishment for its members is vivisection.
Me? Bitter? Fuck yes.
Obviously it can't be to trace the original poster (why seize a mirror, or anything at all since Indymedia does not log ips),
Well, yes, I agree the motivations of the police could partly be to put pressure on a "critical" organization. Putting a check on how eager the police are to investigate a crime like this would be part of the oversight I mentioned.
However, the point about the logs is irrelevant:
"No officer, there's no need to come into my house, even if someone had committed a crime, I keep it so clean there'd be no evidence in there"
If the police believe a crime has been committed, they *have* to investigate it fully, and not ignore potentially useful evidence just because someone else tells them so.
that must be a humourous/sarcastic reply - yes?
mod +5 funny
in Switzerland you can not flush your toilet after 10pm and woe betide you if any cooking smells emanate from your apartment!!!! the police will be around...
Please mod this up:
You could always make another internet to get away from the bullshit on the current one.
Freedom of the press does not apply to "journalists" only, because once you start applying it only to an arbitrary and subjective definition of "journalism", you now have a loophole the size of a galactic cluster.
It doesn't matter if it's CNN or little timmy's html experiments, if you kill people's websites and jail them for what they SAY, you are a tyrant!
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
The police did not seize the server to stop free speech. They did so to find the identity of the wider network of people who have, and maybe still do, support violent acts against those involved in scientific research which involves testing on animals.
I will avoid the obvious reference to nuts and fruitcakes.
Other people's private personal information is not "political content".
Below is a story from the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times:
ST. PETERSBURG -- A 54-year-old man was struck and killed by a truck Friday night while walking his bicycle across U.S. 19.
James Allen, of 2445 38th St. N in St. Petersburg, was crossing in the 3700 block about 6:45 p.m. when he was hit by a northbound 2000 Ford pickup driven by Brian Aldrich, 39, of 3776 28th Ave. N, St. Petersburg, according to a St. Petersburg police report.
linky: http://blogs.tampabay.com/breakingnews/2009/01/st-petersburg-2.html
Ignoring for a moment the (significant) differences between the US and UK... When the mainstream media freely publishes names and addresses of the people involved in newsworthy events, it becomes problematic to censor that information when it's published by non-mainstream media.
Is shared-hosting... and backups, off-site naturally.
In that case, if they seize the server, they are seizing my site... and the site of more then 1000 other hosted sites...
And with the backups, you are ready to just setup another host, and update everything in no time... ;)
Something people forget is that it isn't an unlimited right. Really, no rights are unlimited in a free society. Why? Well for you to have an unlimited right, implies that your right could infringe on my rights to some degree. For example suppose you had an unlimited right to speech. That would mean you could call for me to be killed. You could tell everyone that I should die, explain how best to kill me and so on, and I've have no recourse. You could lie about me continuously to people I care about in an attempt to harm me, you could harass me at every opportunity, and so on. While you having no limits to your right might make you more free, it would make me less free. In fact you find that the only place where people have near unlimited rights are dictatorships. The dictator has the right to do basically whatever they want. However that comes at the expense of more or less everyone else.
Thus in free societies we have to have some limits to rights. We can't have a situation of "You do whatever you want." It has to be more along the lines of "You can do whatever you want, so long as that doesn't interfere with other people." Thus we get laws that restrict rights to an extent. You can say what you like, but not if you are threatening others. You can own all kinds of property, but you can't own other people. You can burn a flag but you can't burn your neighbor's flag and so on.
So people need to get over this idea that you can just say whatever you want and there are never any consequences. No, not the case. You can say a whole lot, speech is one of the most permissive rights in most free countries, but there are limits. A threat would certainly be a limit just about everywhere.
Any time you see a limitation like that, and you think it is unfair, ask yourself how you'd feel if you were on the receiving end. If your life was being threatened, would you be ok with that, or would you then want the person threatening you arrested? Because remember: You can't have it both ways. It can't be ok for you to do it to someone else, but not someone else to do it to you.
Well done for just taking the Slashdot tabloid headline for granted and not actually finding out the facts. Had you done that, you would realise that the site was not, in fact, taken down because it contained anything The Man would be unhappy with, but because the people responsible for it where fanatics found guilty of criminal damage, threats, smear campaigns and a hole host of other nasty shit.
It's worth pointing out that this is not a simple freedom of speech issue.
SHAC members have been convicted of terrorism related offences. This wasn't a misuse of the law, it was justified. They threatened people with violence and otherwise intimidate people, they'd print out leaflets saying that contractors working with Huntington animal research were paedophiles and put them through their neighbours letter boxes, they called in bomb threats.
Although their range of targets aren't/weren't wide, they still were pursued a campaign of fear against individuals that went beyond protesting.
If this comment was a valid threat against a person or persons by a SHAC member, it deserves to be investigated. The linked to website provides a horribly biased picture of what SHAC do. I don't understand how they can defend this 'activists'.
"I'm posting this as a concerned UK administrator who hosts a number of sites. The message appears to be clear: the UK establishment does not want political content, legitimate or otherwise, hosted from these shores."
Oh come on... While I don' agree with the seizing of the servers this is a pretty ridiculous statement. And you know it. But it's always nice to see yourself as the primary victim of "the man".
Indymedia gave the information they had.
You can't give more than that unless you lie.
And lying to the police is criminal.
Are you saying they should commit a crime? In which case, you are inciting a criminal act and should report yourself to the nearest police station.
Remember, the computer is your friend.
Since this was a mirrored server that does not log IP addresses, is there any way we can think of that the police could use information stored on the server to identify the individual poster?
Just off the top of my head, if the original post was still stored on the server, they could perhaps obtain the time punch as to when the comment was submitted.
So how can punishing someone who isn't the criminal be OK?
Because Boy George tied up and beat a man, I'll arrest you.
Fair?
Democracy per definition demands tolerance to non politically correct views and beliefs. Democracy cant exist without totally free speech since whats forbidden today is totally ok tomorrow. Just step back twenty years and there is plenty of stuff that was forbidden to talk about then thats just plain PC nowadays.
A democracy without free speech is just a scam and not a single bit better than communism, nazism, monarchy or dictatorship. I hate it when people try to redefine free speech to be some quasi-free expression where you can only express politically correct stuff and nothing else. Thats not free speech at all.
HTTP/1.1 400
Sounds like the police turned up without a warrant, asked the people running the hosting company, and they just handed it over.
Not a "freedom of speech"/"police"/"big brother" issue. More of a "watch out who hosts your servers".
If I had hosting with that company, I would remove it immediately for that.
And "free speech" too...
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
SHAC members [...] threatened people with violence and otherwise intimidate people, they'd print out leaflets saying that contractors working with Huntington animal research were paedophiles and put them through their neighbours letter boxes.
Christ, John Grubor did worse than that to me back when he was ranting his way through Usenet. It never even occurred to me to call in the cops. We're talking tens of thousands of hate messages. I should have demanded Google's servers instead of just asking them to turf the spam?
If the site doesn't log IP addresses, then it doesn't log IP addresses. A mirror of the site will *certainly* not have IP addresses on it even if the original server did... so this doesn't seem to have been taken to gather information, it was taken to punish them for not being able to provide the IP address of the poster. And the expectation that the IP address *would* be logged because there's an EU directive requiring it is disturbing.
The toughs now in jail were not even bright enough to harass employees of the company doing the animal testing. They were not even bright enough to harass employees of companies doing business with them.
They would find names of big conglomerates doing business (in ways that often were extremely derivative, like messaging companies), choose a company from the group (that had nothing to do with animal testing) and then start harassing lets say the janitor.
Anything the police does to put those individuals in jail should be applauded, freedom of speech has nothing to do with this,
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
We are smarter than they are. Remember "Tubes"? Don't want government in your server? Serve the pages from country X, put the database in country Y. For that matter distribute the database from Y, X and Z.
There are solutions. When what's available today quits working by then very smart college students will have designed a web server similar to P2P. They had better get used to having the free flow of information. We're only one generation removed from the catch phrase "Information Wants to be Free." It's what the Internet is based upon.
JMHO -[d]-
More daily fascism from our friends in the UK.
There is a war going on for your mind.
the web site or the test tubes
Who cares about test tubes? I want production-quality tubes for my website!
They seized a *mirror* of the main server (the main site is still up a running just fine), in order to try to trace the original poster.
Yet the original poster can not be retrieved from the "mirror" (or from the main site for that matter).
Thanks to your insight, I have developed a foolproof method for the Perfect Crime:
1) Commit crime
2) When the police ask you whether or not anything in your possession implicates you in said crime... (and here is the genius bit): tell them "NO!"
3) !!!!
4) Profit!
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
This is a personal privacy issue. This site was posting personal details of a judge who put away some nasty and violent criminals. I don't care where you stand on the animal testing debate but it's a debate and not something that can be solved by terrorising people because of where they work. The judge who put them away deserves the right to have his family protected in the same way that the personal details of a judge taking on the mafia would expect to have his family protected. Let's all calm down and put this in perspective, if the site hadn't published something it knew it shouldn't have published then it wouldn't be in that situation. Trashy home made media outlets need to learn some responsibility for their actions.
Be nice, sponsor me: http://jailbreak.ragabonds.org.uk
Basically, HLS is pointless. It is useless to try pulling guinea pigs apart to see how they work -- they only work when they're all together, and work better when happy, so are best studied as pets and not laboratory animals.
Why can't some decent scientists get off their arses and actually prove some of this with proper science (i.e. stuff based on known maths and physics) rather than follow the herd that believe in the nonsense that is modern medical 'science'
The main issue here is what was the intention of the police. Obviously it can't be to trace the original poster (why seize a mirror, or anything at all since Indymedia does not log ips), nor can it be to remove the comment (this had already happened). Would it just be a form of punishment for a "critical" organization? Indymedia is entirely volunteer-run and depends on donations. Taking a server offline and a potential court case will seriously increase the workload and will have financial consequences too.
Who says they can't find anything? So some Indymedia guy says they keep no logs. Well, some admins are not the brightest, and it is entirely possible that while Indymedia _believes_ they don't keep logfiles, they might actually have logs. Or "not keeping logs" might mean "delete the logs every seven days". Or their servers might keep some other information that is not obviously usable but can find IP addresses after some forensic examination. Or that Indymedia guy might be lying. They might have a policy to tell all their users that no logs are kept, but they still keep them, just in case some user does something _really_ shitty. If that judge, his family and twenty neighbours were murdered, would you be very surprised if log files suddenly turned up?
Same process of law.
It is a valid example.
Else, if this did have a link to some UK place, you could say "Well, yes, but that's just Lancaster for you. It isn't the UK as a whole and you always get the bad ones somewhere".
to be able to find the judge.
and, in keeping with free speech, they (the police) should be dragged out and shot.
THAT will be enough to get this server seized, yes?
another me-li mass (acure). big bro thrashing around in frustration.
pat
packrat ; writer-informer. http://packrat.comicgenesis.com http://www.youtube.com/area163 https://www.smashwords.com/
Then why the fuck did you start it?
If we don't know what is going on, why did YOU post that analogy? Since you don't know what really happened, why would that analogy work?
You're letting your personal hatred of these people predetermine what you will say is acceptable.
Your hate of them has justification, but your hate doesn't justify your determinations.
that kind of thing pushes customers away.
Read radical news here
Hozza, thanks for explaining that.
But so what. I have a business, and we allow people to post messages in a mostly anonymous way. Kinda like a big corkboard outside a grocery store where anyone can post a flier. If someone posts something illegal, the government shouldn't be allowed to take the wall because we already pressure washed the fingerprints off.
The grocery store should not have to keep a record of every person that may potentially post an illegal message. And a website should not be subject to search and seizure because of an anonymous post. We the people do not want to be tracked all the time. We want anonymity. Anonymity cannot be stopped.
This article makes me imagine a scenario like this:
Cops: Give us your surveillance tapes.
Business: We have no security cameras, or tapes.
Cops: We will decide who has cameras or not by seizing everything in your business indefinitely.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
agree with you on this....
the police may be a bit dull and often do the wrong thing but they are better than most alternatives - and we all go running to them pretty damn quick when we need them
a lot of hypocrisy here today (shock horror!)
"Whether you believe killing jews is right or wrong, that is not the way to go about protesting it."
how does that sound ?
Read radical news here
Your freedom to swing your fist stops an inch away from my face.
I'm generally supportive of freedom of speech in general and IndyMedia in particular (it certainly serves as a counterweight to Little Green Footballs, the Drudge Report and Free Republic). However they have shown a shocking lack of discretion on who they implicitly support in what they allow to be published (stories AND comments).
I'm going to look askance at anybody who supports terrorists, whether they kill in the name of Allah, or in the name of cute furry little animals.
When a terrorist cell posts the home address of a judge to a website along with incitement to violence, removing that information is not censorship.
Nor is it censorship for the police to verify that the information has been removed, and take steps to attempt to ascertain the identity of the poster (who has committed a serious crime) rather than simply taking the hosts' word for it that the information is unobtainalble.
(captcha = innocent)
I'll share my story. Once upon a time in a Montreal metro, there was a table with all sorts of blown up photos of animals being vivisected and in all sorts of pain. Behind the table stood a couple of people pushing the brainwashing that hurting animals is wrong, and you must be angry about these big blown up photos. So they emailed you, and eventually setup a protest where they basically told you to show up with a mask or other face covering and marched through an upscale residential neighborhood after dark with a megapone and just yelled Puppy Killer at some executives house. A few of us decided to go, thinking it might be some benign animal rights protest of some sort, but it was basically mob-rules yelling, accusing and belligerence. i don't even think the people we were terrorizing were even home at the time. I really wouldn't be surprised if this group is run partly by people on the inside of the government or Huntington themselves as it seems like its only out to attract violent guerilla types who are willing to carry a pitchfork and a torch at the first possible opportunity.
I am a member of the ACLU and believe, fundamentally in free speech. However, it is not "free" speech when you threaten or create danger, like yelling "fire" in a crowded movie house. That is an abuse of your rights.
Your freedom to swing your fists stops at my face, as it were.
With all rights there must be responsibilities. This is one of those contentious problems when people exercising their rights are not being responsible. There is *no* good answer to this situation.
When one uses their freedoms irresponsibly, it creates a threat to all freedom because it offers legitimate precedent for those who's aim it is to repress.
Other people have made a similar point. But I think it should be reinforced that Indymedia might not be telling the truth. So many people have been so quick to believe the story that they have neglected to ask themselves, if the story is accurate.
The one thing the police have done is not trust the word of a site that might not have an honest track record. Why give the police anything if they haven't got a warrant?
I wonder if the police just decided that they might still be able to get the IP because they have better hackers than Indymedia. I imagine SOCA (like the feds)would have an interest in this one.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
As does the police and current government.
It is important to be clear about how Indymedia differs from other news organisations. Indymedia provides a platform for people to speak freely at the same time as guarding their anonymity. It does this on principle, and its systems are configured to promote this by not recording IP addresses. See http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/static/security.html and http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/static/privacy.html
The question is whether _this_ freedom should exist and be defended and if so, what limits should be set on that freedom.
I think the freedom is worth defending. Certainly if you live under a repressive government, this capability may be essential to protect people who want to report on that repression. Whether the UK is or is not repressive is disputed, but if this freedom is defended, it makes it harder for it to become repressive. For this reason, Indymedia should be free to provide the service that they offer without unreasonable interference - they should also have a duty to behave responsibly.
The downside of this open publishing approach is that the platform might be abused by some in ways that threaten the rights and freedoms of others (as in this case). There is a need to moderate and remove abusive content. Indymedia acted promptly to remove the offending post.
If Indymedia should be free to operate as they do (no-one has brought legal proceedings against their right to work in this way), and they behave responsibly in terms of moderating abuses (which they have), then they should be allowed to do so without interference.
I have no sympathy for SHAC, but I am glad that some people give up their time, energy, money and equipment to enable our right to free, anonymous 'speech'. I think these volunteers deserve similar protections against interference as do commercial journalists and publishers.
They are protecting any whistleblower that is protecting the public good.
That it can be used for protecting animal protesters is not why it is set up.
It isn't a SHAC newsgroup, and if you want to get dirty with this, take down the KKK newsgroups, run by the white supremacists themselves.
If someone posts something illegal, the government shouldn't be allowed to take the wall because we already pressure washed the fingerprints off.
Says you, but how would the police know that you actually did this or actually know how to make it forensically "clean"? They don't and therefore should examine that cork board. They'd be negligent if they didn't.
The grocery store should not have to keep a record of every person that may potentially post an illegal message. And a website should not be subject to search and seizure because of an anonymous post. We the people do not want to be tracked all the time. We want anonymity. Anonymity cannot be stopped.
No, they shouldn't, but they should also be prepared to have their board examined if someone does post an illegal message.
This article makes me imagine a scenario like this:
Cops: Give us your surveillance tapes.
Business: We have no security cameras, or tapes.
Cops: We will decide who has cameras or not by seizing everything in your business indefinitely.
Now imagine this one:
Cops: Can we inspect your hunting knife? We suspect it was used in a murder.
Murdering bastard: I have no knife! You're mistaken.
Cops; oh, OK, sorry to have bothered you Sir.
The police have to follow up on potential evidence or they'd just be taking every bodies word for it.
the police still have to obtain a warrant to seize property without the owners consent. A scenario like yours requires the judicial system to become completely corrupt (yes, yes, people already say it is but many judges still believe in the law) and when that's happened we've got more problems than property seizures.
Silly rabbit
While I'm not fan of the triple-K, it seems to me that the above exerpt is more of a "rally to us if you're against a black president" (distasteful for sure, but not visibly advocating violence) as opposed to "rally to us and help us track down and kill Obama during event X at Y etc etc"
Nobody's posted what the original comments on the IM server was, but I could see the line being drawn as "group of assholes" VS "notice of group planning specific criminal action" (however much they may be associated with such in a broad aspect).
I wonder who actually runs the servers for groups like the KKK though. I get a "connection refused" when trying to do a whois, probably because it's blocked by Canada's anti-hate laws etc, but I do wonder about being intelligent enough to be a sysadmin but dumb enough to be a member of such a group...
So when you have 30 ESX servers running virtual servers then do they take all the hosts and the SAN?
Perhaps it's time for Indymedia to move to a cloud computing service such as Amazon's EC2. I imagine it becomes quite a lot harder to sieze a server in this kind of environment. Their server could be running pretty much anywhere (and would easily be restartable,) and their data could be replicated in multiple geographic locations.
Of course, the police could just get Amazon to shut down their account instead. It depends on whether the siezing of the server was to recover data, or to take down the service.
"Pokey, are you drunk on love?" "Yes. Also whiskey. But mostly love... and whiskey."
for there is nothing to explain. you are way too immersed in your opinion, and therefore cant leave the particular perspective of the animal rights-activism issue.
that analogy was based on pure logic.
think.
where does the 'peaceful protesting' obligation end, and the necessity for physical/armed action begin ? when does it begin ?
should the revolutionaries in 1774 have instead protested peacefully and tried to achieve their ends that way ? or, should the dissenters in french revolutionary period not take up arms, and protested peacefully ? what would the world you live in today be like, if they had done that ?
today's analogies :
there are neonazis who think that jews should be burned. there are a lot of islamist groups that everyone should be muslim, and those who are not should either be killed or put under yoke. a goodly number of them believe that any means to achieve this end is justified.
they not only believe those. they actively recruit people to their cause, seek funding, do whatever necessary. all the while using the liberties of the more liberal regimes they live under.
they are not mounting an armed revolution. they are not kidnapping or beheading anyone. yet. but they are increasing their numbers arithmetically.
with your logic, this is something that should be peacefully protested against, and within the limits of personal liberties.
but is it ?
Read radical news here
It's not the free speech of the poster people are concerned with, it's freedom of the press. Since the mirror server doesn't contain any information that could conceivably help in finding out who the poster was, taking it is nothing more or less than harassment of the free press for the 'crime' of existing.
First, most of the people trying unsuccessfully to win the argument made by the OP are doing so as "anonymous coward". Why? Are they part of the same Indymedia company who sees nothing wrong with posting full details of their enemies? Is the disclosure of personal details restricted to "just our enemies"? Is it any wonder the authorities don't believe them when they claim "not to have any traceable logs". They seem to be as honest and upfront as the politicians we elected.
Second, human beings are animals too. This means all the terror (wrap it up in fancy words all you want, it does not change what it is) is harming other animals.....human animals. The "animal rights" assholes have no problem commiting animal cruelty for their cause.
Yes I thought I'd add this comment as "anonymous coward", please don't lump me in with the inbreds.
Except this is more like taking somebody's second car when they are investigating a hit & run involving car you used while on vacation in another country.
And they know the car is still in factory mint condition and there won't be any evidence because they've seized it several times before, it has the new car smell(and have probably contracted cancer from it), and the eyelash they taped to the door is still taped to it.
Yay, a car analogy. I feel so dirty now.
Given this comes just after the police were given the powers to infect peoples computers i sincerely hope that when the server is returned it is sold on ebay and a replacement is bought.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Or, Indymedia could realize that the post itself is dangerous to society as a whole, and should be looked into by the police.
Of course, this is a slippery slope that they may not want to walk down on, but then they shouldn't complain when their servers are seized. I don't know if they have "searxh warrants" in England (I suppose they do) or not, but when the police want the poster's ID, it is clear that they serious about getting it.
They simply should have said ... "Releasing the info under duress". Because the government now has more info than they really wanted, and that doesn't really serve anyone.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
But so what. I have a business, and we allow people to post messages in a mostly anonymous way. Kinda like a big corkboard outside a grocery store where anyone can post a flier. If someone posts something illegal, the government shouldn't be allowed to take the wall because we already pressure washed the fingerprints off.
</quote>
The police would still come and dust the wall for prints. They would still send a SOCO (Scenes Of Crime Officer)out to dust the wall if they had seen you with the pressure washer because it is easier to send the SOCO than it is to explain why they did not if the judge gets murdered.
<quote>
Cops: Give us your surveillance tapes.
Business: We have no security cameras, or tapes.
Cops: We will decide who has cameras or not by seizing everything in your business indefinitely
</quote>
They will also search your shop for security cameras and tapes.
The law has deemed that the police can spend a reasonable amount of time searching your shop thus keeping you closed and the law has deemed they police can take your servers for a reasonable amount of time thus keeping you offline.
Maybe the police are keeping servers for too long but they can not stop you from implementing your disaster recovery plan and getting back online that way.
If you are hosting fringe political groups websites you are going to get your servers seized, I am not defending fishing trips by the police but sys admin to sys admin I advise you to include search and seizure to your disaster recovery plans.
For an added bonus if the police are seizing your servers to silence you this will a/ really piss them off and b/ if they keep coming back give you a good case for harassment.
They seized a *mirror* of the main server (the main site is still up a running just fine), in order to try to trace the original poster
Siezing an indymedia server to find logs of people using it is like siezing a section of tarmac to find logs of people driving over it -- the information simply doesn't exist, and the police knew this before stealing the computer.
I agreed 100% with the main gist of your comment. However, this particular point stood out to me:
Since judges are the ones that name their "customers" criminals, it's quite obvious to me that some cyclic logic is going on here. Judges may or may not deal with criminals, depending on guilt or innocence, but by the very nature of their job they almost always claim to so. Whether they actually do so regularly is a matter of debate. Especially when discussing articles like this one, where we're talking about government seizure of legitimate press equipment.
Indy media is not
a reputible wiki.
They have a very strong social agenda.
Do I need to say on what side of the political spectrum they are on?
With the power to blog comes responsibility.
These people don't seem to care about other
people's lives and safety
as long as they get their left
leaning political and social agenda's out there.
I have no respect for Indymedia anymore.
They don't have any credibility.
Try to post anything that isn't left wing
cool-aid drinking propaganda for the cause of
global Marxism and see if they leave it up there.
They especially seem to allow anti-semetic hate
tyraids as well.
And when you try to counter with comments . . .
maybe it shows up, maybe it doesn't.
They reap what they sow.
Every blog needs an editor and a moderator who
removes the dangerous hate. They only seem
to take down political opinions that they don't like. Hardly free speach. So don't weep for them.
It is not ok to post information to try and
get someone to target another person at their
house or their place of work.
Free Speach is not license for
planning conspiracies to murder and cause harm.
Indy-media gets what it deserves.
wrong
I had been looking for a way to anonymously set up a web server and stumbled apon the .onion domain which runs on the tor network. I think, but not sure, that this is the same network that bitorrent runs on.
Anyhow, it allows you to setup a server that you can provide a domain name for others to find, but the actual physical location of the box is hidden behind several layers of proxy redirection.
If I was looking to setup a system where it would be difficult for others to seize the online assets... I would start with an .onion server... and then add proxy and other hidden mechanisms on top of that.
One problem is that it requires the browsers to be running a tor client in order to interpret and make proper requests to access .onion pages. This makes the site somewhat less useable to the general public. As a solution to this.. I'd put up multiple front end proxy cache servers to pass the anonymous data through a regular (.com, etc) domain. That would allow faster access to the data and to a wider potential audience.
For more info, check out: ".onion" on wikipedia.
people here don't seem to understand:
- Judge infos were removed as soon as seen by indymedia UK collective.
- The machine the police seized was a mirror and they knew it. There were no informations on that machine about the poster and there wouldn't have been if indymedia was logging IPs. Police was informed of that.
So why would they seize this machine anyway?
Maybe because it was hosting an important service for indymedia's activists: their wiki, which is widely used by every local collective. This is a way to damage indymedia, and by then freedom of speech for anyone that don't agree with the gouvernments. Not to mention all the data they can collect on this wiki, even if it was a public one, it's still faster to analyze them that way rather than by browsing it...
No matter what was posted, indymedia didn't broke anyone's rights.
It's an habit for the authorities to tell they will do some new law to prevent terrorism or pedophilia, law that break privacies, but with that argument, they can slowly extend its application to anyone. This is the same logic here. Let this happen and soon yourself will loose your freedom of speech.
I really wouldn't be surprised if this group is run partly by people on the inside of the government or Huntington themselves as it seems like its only out to attract violent guerilla types who are willing to carry a pitchfork and a torch at the first possible opportunity.
That's a pretty reasonable assessment. One of the ways civil rights groups in the 60's were combated was to insert agents into groups whose job it was to sow dissent and splintering. Having seen how something as simple as a D&D game can dissolved by the introduction of just one new person who is brought along (because s/he has no friends and wouldn't it be nice to take pity on this difficult person), I have no doubts whatsoever that the larger and much more complex work of organizing a city, state or even country-wide activist group would be vulnerable to this kind of counter-intelligence tactic.
And you can see why. --When people DO manage to gather together into a cohesive and like-minded group which is clear of head-cases, the power to do big things effectively skyrockets. Groups like that could easily alter or even topple governments, so it is no surprise to me that the intelligence community also recognized this and had the problem analyzed, solutions proposed, and money diverted to make it happen.
If counter-intel programs were running forty years ago, why would they have stopped today? Especially with initiatives like the whole Homeland Security nightmare to juice it all up.
-FL
A good percentage of Western societies are rapidly approaching that point.
Are they, though, really?
I'll be the first to agree that a lot of the laws passed this millenium are not shining examples of how to do things. That tends to happen when a culture of fear pervades politics, as it did after the 11 September attacks, and as it does again today with the state of the world's economy.
Typically under those circumstances, politics takes over for the remainder of the current term of office. The incumbents are often returned at the next election as well, because the fear and emotion are still running high. It's the next election after that where you find out whether a more reasonable balance will be restored, bad laws undone, and those people who were unfairly treated compensated as much as possible.
I submit, therefore, that the resilience of nations' freedoms should be judged not by how they are attacked, but by how quickly they recover. To me, civil disobedience is what comes between "jury" and "ammo" on the four boxes scale. On the timeline above, most of us are still on "ballot". Judging by the dramatic change in emphasis in US politics since 20 January and the all-but-certain total annihilation of the Labour Party in British politics at the next general election, ballot is doing its job.
There have certainly been cases where things have gone too far, but in the UK they have been on a small scale (which doesn't make them any better in principle, of course) and more importantly they have been soundly thrashed by the press and opposition politicians. In many cases, corrective action either has been taken by government voluntarily or because a court ruling said they had gone too far. In other cases, corrective action is likely to be taken after the next election.
In the UK, the most likely justification for genuine civil disobedience in the near future seems to be the rise of the database state. This represents a profound and permanent shift in the balance of power between the people and the government, and it is very much a creation of the current, highly authoritarian Labour administration. It is interesting that on the issue of ID cards and the National Identity Register, a very large number of people have declared themselves willing to engage in civil disobedience, from the grass roots to the leaders of major political parties.
So yes, there are bad laws being made and right now a government with no real mandate is abusing its claimed authority for a couple of years. This sucks, but the system will deal with that particular administration fairly soon, just as it has done in several other countries recently, and in all likelihood much faster than any forcible revolution and overthrow of the government would. If it doesn't and the problems persist, or if the government attempts to accelerate the downward slide while it still clings to power such that waiting until the next election is too long to prevent serious or permanent harm to the nation's freedoms, then we may yet reach the point where civil disobedience is justified.
But we are still a very long way from the kind of dictatorship we see in Zimbabwe, the corruption endemic in politics in Russia, or the level of daily violence around Gaza. When contemplating actively stepping outside the rule of law, I think it is wise to remember how lucky we still are in the grand scheme of things, and to keep a sense of perspective.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
-- Apparently not.
...Perform abortions? Free Speech!!
Publishing home addresses of Judges is fine when it aligns with your politics..
When contemplating actively stepping outside the rule of law, I think it is wise to remember how lucky we still are in the grand scheme of things, and to keep a sense of perspective.
But that's the point, isn't it? When it becomes illegal to promote free speech, I think you're in serious trouble.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That's exactly the problem and why anyone providing this kind of facility has to moderate and remove such content promptly.
When it becomes illegal to promote free speech, I think you're in serious trouble.
As I've said from the start, if the proper warrants weren't in order for the action the police took, then they screwed up and should be dealt with accordingly. I've never claimed otherwise, and in one of my other posts I suggested a rather strong set of conditions that I think could reasonably be enforced on the authorities in cases where it is absolutely necessary to remove hardware in circumstances like these.
I just don't believe in using the magic words "free speech" as a convenient excuse to bypass other laws protecting personal privacy, reputation, and so on. Life isn't that black and white.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
So in which country should Indymedia puts there servers to have minimal trouble with the police ?
Raping yr virgin daughters since 1066. The British security apparatus is why I am not likely to visit (or do business with) the UK.
SHAC is a terrorist organization. I'm against censorship, but this is understandable. The UK doesn't want a reign of terror (arson, brutal beatings, etc), over there like it is over here in the US. It has already started there and they are trying to stop it before it really gets underway.
You hated Bush for stopping progress by merely withholding Federal (Taxpayer) funds for stem cells (which was wrong for him to do), but SHAC is far worse, no new lifesaving drugs without animal research unless you want a disaster like the TGN-1412 catastrophe to happen every week. Which kind of death do you prefer, from otherwise treatable disease, or in human trials, or even worse, population wide (like thalidomide)?
I prefer research.
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As Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged) once said: It is not the ability to agree with the State that is so important -- it is the ability to disagree that is so crucial.
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