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.

Comments

Re:When does it stop?

[Garin]

One must remember something extremely important: free speech is protected.... HOWEVER.... Nothing says that anyone else must support your message with their resources. For example, you have the right to publish and distribute your own magazine, but you do NOT have the right to demand that an arbitrary magazine publishes your essays.

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.

First Amendment

[cdlu]

"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?

I'm Dubious...

[ewhac]

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

The hands are in view...

[CPol]

... 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.

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 .) (And please read everything criticaly, especialy this article.)