FBI took the hard drives of IMC servers in the UK
por Mat ((i)) Thursday October 07, 2004 at 06:10 PM
http://www.indymedia.it/press_release_en.html
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US authorities issued a federal order to Rackspace's office in the US
ordering them to provide Indymedia's hardware located in London to the
requesting agency. Rackspace is one of Indymedia's web hosting providers
with offices in the US and London. Rackspace complied, without first
notifying Indymedia, and turned over Indymedia's server in the UK. This
affects some 20+ Indymedia sites worldwide.
Since the subpoena was issued to Rackspace and not to Indymedia, the reasons
for this action are still unknown to Indymedia. Talking to Indymedia
volunteers, Rackspace stated that "they cannot provide Indymedia with any
information regarding the order." ISPs have received gag orders in similar
situations which prevent them from updating the concerned parties on what is
happening.
It is unclear to Indymedia how and why a server that is outside the US
jurisdiction can be seized by US authorities.
At the same time a second server was taken down at Rackspace which provided
streaming radio to several radio stations, BLAG (linux distro), and a
handful of miscellanous things.
The last few months have seen numerous attacks on independent media by the
US Federal Government. In August the Secret Service used a subpoena in an
attempt to disrupt the NYC IMC before the RNC by trying to get IP logs from
an ISP in the US and the Netherlands. Last month the FCC shut down community
radio stations around the US. Two weeks ago the FBI requested that Indymedia
takes down a post on the Nantes IMC that had a photo of some undercover
Swiss police and IMC volunteers in Seattle were visited by the FBI on the
same issue. On the other hand, Indymedia and other independent media
organisations were successfull with their victories for example against
Diebold and the Patroit Act. Today however, the US authorities shut down
IMCs around the world.
The list of affected local media collectives includes Ambazonia, Uruguay,
Andorra, Poland, Western Massachusetts, Nice, Nantes, Lilles, Marseille (all
France), Euskal Herria (Basque Country), Liege, East and West Vlaanderen,
Antwerpen (all Belgium), Belgrade, Portugal, Prague, Galiza, Italy, Brazil,
UK, part of the Germany site, and the global Indymedia Radio site.
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Micah Anderson of the global imc-tech collective said, "We suspect it has to
do with an FBI request that we take down a post on the Nantes IMC that had a
photo of some undercover Swiss police. They claimed there was threats and
personal information, but there was nothing of the sort. The undercover
police that were photographed on the page were photographing protesters.
Rackspace is a US company, but have colocation in the UK where these servers
are (err, were) located. So this is about Swiss police, on a French site, on
a server in England, taken away by American federal police."
However, according to information from IMC Nantes the pictures in question
were already removed a week ago.
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