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FBI Shuts Down Website
An AC sent in this Village Voice story - "In a highly unusual move last week, FBI agents called mike zieper, an independent artist who goes by the name Mike Z., and "requested" that he remove his site from the Internet. When he declined, the FBI worked in tandem with the U.S. Attorney's office to persuade his Web host and its server to pull Zieper's site--18 days after it went up--without having a subpoena or court order of any kind." The site was apparently crowdedtheater.com. What annoyed the FBI? Apparently the site had a video about rioting on New Year's Eve. Will the FBI shut down every site mentioning disruption on 2000-01-01?
Update: 11/24 08:11 by michael : One of our alert /. readers apparently saw and saved the video while the site was up, and has put up a mirror.
I think that, given the recent "Y2K: The Movie" from NBC, this is pretty frickin' ridiculous. I read the article; the local sheriff's department called him to intimidate him? Give me a break. I don't know where I really come down on the political spectrum, but I can only shake my head when someone confuses "safety" with "free-speech" in this way.
I think it was Oliver Wendell Holmes who originally wrote the Supreme Court opinion about "clear and present danger" being a rationale for restricting speech, especially in wartime. I think that the "crying 'fire' in a crowded theater" is the classical example. But this is not *nearly* the same thing.
"The horse leech's daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum does not vary."
Similarly, the FBI (or anyone else) does not have to get any sort of legal document to tell an ISP to wipe out your web site. All they have to do is ask nicely, and get the ISP to agree that they shouldn't be supporting this. Then, subject to the agreement that you have with your ISP (which almost ALWAYS protect the ISP, and practically never gives you any say in anything at all), your pages get trashed. End of story. Nobody's constitutional rights were stomped on at all.
So what's the moral of the story? Find yourself a medium that you control, don't depend on renting space from other companies. How you do that is up to you.
In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it. -John Archibald Wheeler
Now, I know the Constitution isn't perfect, but it's a lot better than the system we've got.
-- $SIGNATURE
...isn't this exactly what the "artist" intended? By the FBI's apparent unconstitutional censorship, he ends up with far more press than he would have gotten if his poor-taste stunt had been left to be ignored.
This does not excuse the FBI's behavior, but points to a lack of intelligent leadership in the Bureau as well as lack of common sense by the artist.
It also is a sad reflection on any media outlet that would have covered this "artist" before his rights were violated -- his domain name says it all.
If everyone had ignored him, he probably would have gone his way toward ignominy that is every American's God-given right -- the US Gov't took that away from him, and US taxpayers will likely end up paying him a hefty settlement.
Hmmph!
A Google search turns up nothing for "crowdedtheater" (all one word), and nothing related for the phrase separated into its component words.
You do, however, get a page on watchtower.org, the official website of the Jehovah's Witnesses.
Lousy spooks! They've gotten to the search engines!
_____
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The antidote to bad speech is not censorship, but more speech.
We'd all probably be surprised by how often various agencies quench the fires of free speech on the Net--many people would probably have given in without a struggle and given up their sites quietly if paid a visit by the Hoovers. Then, there are probably many cases like this one which we simply never hear about due to media apathy/siding with the J. Edgars. Plus, a tactic which is even subtler: if you can't beat them, buy them out.
This is what very likely recently happened to Decadentcity.com and a related site, grokthis.com/decadent. I can't be 100% on this, but all evidence points to its verity. This isn't meant to be off-topic, it's meant to express something which probably has become a commonplace tactic by law enforcement. See, decadentcity.com and the related site were dedicated to message boards discussing "escorts"--like, the Heidi Fleiss type. It started out local to D.C. back in '96 and soon every major city had a message board and ads and reviews and "ripoff warnings" sections. Maybe a year ago a cryptic message about "new ownership" appeared on the site and then disappeared--and yet everything remained the same. The "new ownership" never revealed itself to the board--not so much as a single message or change to the site. The old owner had always dropped in, but he suddenly disappeared. The site was left untouched. The ads section--principal source of revenue--expired, and for about a year no advertisements were added or deleted even though the women themselves expressed interest on the boards. The boards chattered away, most of the escorts in the D.C. area (and, I'm told, in others) who'd been there for years left the board and several left the business without warning. Rumours circulated about the FBI buying the board as part of an investigation into the "organized crime" involved in escorting and message parlors nationally. Perhaps coincidentally, and perhaps not, the sites have been shut down ever since the very day a week or two ago when the national investigation the FBI had made into the spa/massage/escort business was revealed on the news nationally. I doubt it's coincidence, and I'm furious that either our federal tax dollars went to buy a legal message board (it's legal to *discuss* escorts/"gray market spas", first amendment and all) in order to use it to investigate a local crime like prostitution, or that the owner was possibly coerced into handing a discussion area to the government. What's the FBI doing investigating escorting/spas, anyway? Their excuse given to the media was that they were focusing on "a nationwide network of slavery and indentured servitude in Asian spas"--and yet, in three years on the Decadent City board, I never came across even the mere mention of such a thing. In all likelihood, the operation was mostly about getting a media victory and about using a major national discussion forum about escorts as a clearinghouse to help local law enforcement fight a moral battle about something most people think should be legalized--street prostitution is something most people abhor, but quiet out-of-the-way escorting is seen by 67% (Gallup? poll) of Americans as something which should be legal.
In reality, websites are probably censored or removed by the American government all the time. We need to start to hold the FBI and others accountable, and the mainstream media has to stop seeing the Feds as a purely benevolent force and realize that it's bad when they deep-fry Davidians or shut down a site for having video of a riot or try to accuse some hacker kid of being responsible for hundreds of millions of $$$ in damages for copying but not destroying corporate data purely for fun and challenge.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or
of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
I think this states fairly clearly that the FBI stepped waaaaaaaaaaaaaay out of bounds. But will they be held accountable? Or will the only Western country not to sign the Geneva Convention ignore human rights, once again?
OFTC: By the community, for the community
I would have to agree - the following statement at the end of the article really caught my eye:
:-)
"For Z., blurring the line between truth and fiction is what makes his work unique".
I think we might all be becoming part of his work; the video clip (the truth of which the site apparently left in doubt), followed by a story (in a well known media source) of federal agents behaving in a manner that sounds more like what was apparently portrayed in the video than real life, followed by our real reaction to it.
If this was his intent, for the fictional video with a faint suggestion of truth to produce several layers of apparent reality arount itself, I admire his creation
Or, I could be half alseep, and my normal paranoia overrun by fatigue, with an inexplicable flashback to an art history class I attended several years ago.
If this is true, it is a career-ending move for the agents and officers involved. Period. Which is why I think it's a hoax intended to garner publicity for the artist's work. Your local yokel in B.F.E. might be this stupid; the FBI are not.
If this is a hoax, then I hereby nominate that the artist actually lose his 'net access for 90 days. In my view, we cannot afford to have people crying 'Wolf!' over issues like this, especially when the underlying motive is self-promotion. We need to discourage this kind of thing... If it's a hoax...
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
... but the feet deal under the table, as an old Russian saying goes. The trick here is that no Government wishes to have Internet listed as a freedom of speech issue.
.) (And please read everything criticaly, especialy this article.)
In Sweden there is a constitutional legislation about protecting the freedom to publish and distribute your views. And yet a recent (quite controversial) jugement decided that the internet is not a valid print media, and as such not protected by the free speech act.
This is happening all around the globe. And why? Because it's very easy to publish something on the net. No special resources are needed, you don't even need a computer as you can walk down to your local library and borrow one. All you need is a little bit of knowledge and something to say. And that's dangerous to any government.
I could just as easily be describing how to destroy the US (or any other) government, telling people that one race or religion is superior to another or that abortion is murder and should be punished by death. All of these are statements that are easy to find on the web. All of these are available in print, if you know where to look. So why would anyone care if these (or any other) opinion are also available on the net?
First of, the net is accessible to anyone and there is no (practical) way to check on who accesses what. Therefore there is no way to catalogue 'dangerous elements', however security agencies choose to define the term. It's very easy to check who's going to a meeting or ordering a book, it's much harder to check who's looking at a webpage and even harder to check who's there because of conviction and who just surfed on in.
Secondly, news on the net spread like fire on the steppe. Just think about the case of Mahir, the turkish man who's (stolen) page became the focus of millions of viewers overnight (why? don't ask me, I find it all rather strange). The same could be possible of the White America Movements webpage, or any other extremist groups. And that would lead to media panic. Just think of the headlines 'Nazi party attracts millions of followers', 'Fourth Reich founded in Illonois'. Heck the possibities for bad titles, bad reporting and free exposure for any obscure extremists are humongous.
Third, the Internet is not (yet) protected by any cohesive freedom of media act. Therefore anything published on the net does not benefit from the same rights as a 'normal' publication. For example, in Sweden it's illegal to force vendors to stop selling a certain book, but it's quite legal to force an ISP to stop hosting a certain page. I immagine it's the same in most of the western world.
So there you have four points (yeah, I did number only three, mea culpa) about why censoring the web is so attractive. It's easy to publish on it, it's hard to check the spread of publications, it's easy to spread the widely, which makes undesirable (from an government policy standpoint) websites classed as 'dangerous' and it's easy to do something about it, which makes govenment agencies more likely to intervene. And I'd like to point out that they did not pull Mike Z.s' page until it started to attract attention (security trough obscurity and all that *grin*). Until Mike Z. became famous (however little fame he got) he was just another coock (sic?) ranting away on the net.
For the wrap up then; first to repeat Garins comment:
Find yourself a medium that you control, don't depend on renting space from other companies.
Very true, just as you can't depend on finding a printing house that is willing to publish your essay on why 'Mein Kampf' is the greatest literary work of all times, you can't expect that ISPs will be throwing themselves at your feet to host your 'International Terrorism for Dummies' website. And if an ISP does host it, don't expect them to fight for it. That's your job. If you feel that your views are worth fighting for, you're the one that has to do all the fighting.
Secondly, assuming that you share my brand of political pessimism, governments will do pretty much anything to force their version of 'goodness' on the world. But anyone with a conviction will do that, even if it's a politico whos conviction is that pushing a certain matter will gain him more votes.
If still in doubt, see how the German government managed to ban 'Mein Kampf' in the western world (I'll give you a hint: they claimed that they had the copyright to it and then refused to allow anyone to publish or distribute it, they even managed to get it banned from libraries, except for research reasons) or how the Swedish government managed to claim that the Swedish people wanted to ban nuclear power (by calling a referendum where the choices to vote on were 'ban now', 'ban by year 2000' and 'ban by year 2015'. The 2015 won with a large majority).
So, without further ado, have a nice and very optimistic life
Phase 1: Where do you want to go today? Phase 2: This is where you want to go today. Phase 3: You're not going any
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
You're missing the point. The FBI is not a group of concerned citizens. The are an agency of the Federal government. Therefore, they are NOT permitted to use their power to intimidate. Regardless of the paperwork, the ISP thought the FBI was coming after them.
That has what is known as a chilling affect. Speach that would be protected can be silenced by the government even if the law is on the citizen's side. Even if it isn't close, the government can intimidate, clearly an abuse of the citizen's rights.