'Free Speech' & the Internet under attack? Multi-National cooperation?

http://www.indymedia.org/en/index.shtml

Italy and Switzerland Requested Indymedia's Server Seizure
Today, October 8, 2004, Indymedia has learned that the request to seize Indymedia servers hosted by a US company in the UK originated from government agencies in Italy and Switzerland. More than 20 Indymedia sites, several internet radio streams and other projects were hosted on the servers. They were taken offline on October 7th after an order was issued to Rackspace, Inc., one of Indymedia's web hosting providers.

The reasons for the court order or who actually holds the servers now are still unknown to Indymedia.

According to Italian news agency reports and an Agence France-Presse (AFP) interview with FBI spokesman Joe Parris, the FBI acted on Italian and Swiss requests. "It is not an FBI operation," Parris told AFP. "Through a legal assistance treaty, the subpoena was on behalf of a third country." (1)

Earlier today Rackspace published a statement that they turned over the servers in response to an order under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT). The MLAT establishes procedures for countries to assist each other in investigations regarding international terrorism, kidnapping and money laundering. The court prohibits Rackspace from commenting further on this matter. (2)

An Indymedia system administrator stated: "We do not know if Rackspace is under a gag order, or what legal restrictions were imposed requiring them to act this way, or whether their legal department had enough time to study the request."

Aidan White, the General Secretary for the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) had this to say. "We have witnessed an intolerable and intrusive international police operation against a network specialising in independent journalism. The way this has been done smacks more of intimidation of legitimate journalistic inquiry than crime-busting." (3)

Indymedia condemns the fact that even 24 hours after two entire servers were taken down, Indymedia is still not getting any information of the reasons for the order.

By taking down 2 servers more than 20 Indymedia sites were affected in different countries globally as well as several unrelated projects. Indymedia considers this extremely invasive operation a a serious threat to the Freedom of Speech worldwide.

Indymedia insists that the servers are returned because each day they are inoperable and Indymedia's irreplaceable data is unaccessible means greater material damages to the Indymedia operation worldwide.

Another Link...

FBI Confiscates Anti-Globalist Website Servers... Orders Came From A Foreign State


http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1509&ncid=738&e=6&u=/afp/20041008/tc_afp/us_internet_justice

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A website billed as a grassroots news source for the anti-globalization movement and other issues said one of its Web servers was shut down after the FBI served a subpoena.

The Independent Media Center said the FBI issued an order to hosting company Rackspace "to remove physically one of our servers."

The FBI acknowledged that a subpoena had been issued but said it was at the request of Italian and Swiss authorities.

"It is not an FBI operation," FBI spokesman Joe Parris told AFP.

"Through a legal assistance treaty, the subpoena was on behalf of a third country."
[color=blue]Israel Maybe???[/color]

The FBI spokesman said there was no US investigation but that the agency cooperated under the terms of an international treaty on law enforcement.

Rackspace, a US Web hosting company with offices in London, said it complied with a court order "pursuant to a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, which establishes procedures for countries to assist each other in investigations such as international terrorism, kidnapping and money laundering." The company declined to elaborate.

"The order was so short-term that Rackspace had to give away our hard drives in the UK," the Independent Media Center said.

Italian news reports said access to Indymedia had been cut as a result of an FBI operation at US and British locations.

Mauro Bulgarelli, a member of Italy's Green party, called it a "provocation and intimidate effort" against the alternative media.

The website was established by organizations during the 1999 World Trade Organization ( news -web sites ) protests claiming the mainstream media failed to adequately cover the news.

It calls itself "a network of collectively run media outlets for the creation of radical, accurate and passionate tellings of the truth."

Indymedia said in a statement it "had been asked last month by the FBI to remove a story about Swiss undercover police from one of the websites hosted at Rackspace."

The statement added, "It is not known, however, whether Thursday's order is related to that incident since the order was issued to Rackspace and not to Indymedia. According to Rackspace, they 'cannot provide Indymedia with any information regarding the order.'"

Maddening but predictable.

Download stuff like FAEM, Jewish Tribal Review and all that now. Don't wait much longer. The free internet is about to become a thing of the past and there have been warning signs before.

FBI taking down Brit servers at the behest of the Italians and Swiss at the request of a "third country"? This stinks from forty paces off. Let's stop the new world order before this nonsense goes any further.

This story also emphasizes the critical importance for webmasters of 'interesting' or 'controversial' websites to do their own backup of hosted content for their website. They must not rely on the representations and good intentions of a webhosting company to do backups for them.

Investigate setting up at least one mirror site (even a standby) until Censorship resistant peer-to-peer content addressable networks (http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=545392) are available. Projects like Freenet (http://freenet.sourceforge.net/) can make censorship more difficult.

On what authority is the FBI acting outside their jurisdiction?

I read the article twice and can't make up where the servers were physically located, I narrowed it down to UK and USA.

What foreign nation is able to order the FBI around?

More information from truthseeker:

http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=2356

Part:

...The IFJ believes that the authorities may have abused their powers in carrying out the action, which is said to have been carried out at the request of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States.

Yesterday police seized two web server computers in London used by the Indymedia network. The servers were located on the premises of the Rackspace company, which is now not giving out any information.

...Initial reports suggested FBI officers themselves had seized the servers. The seizure follows visits by the FBI to Indymedia personnel in the US inquiring about the publication on the French site Indymedia Nantes of photographs of Swiss undercover police photographing protestors. The photographs remain available on other websites.

Indymedia sites, which provide challenging and independent reporting, particularly of political and social justice issues, are open forums where any member of the public can publish their comments.

The IFJ believes the seizure may be linked to a September 30 court case in San Jose California, in which Indymedia San Francisco and two students at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania successfully opposed an application by Diebold Election Systems Inc to remove documents claiming to reveal flaws in the design of electronic voting machines which are due to be used widely in the forthcoming US Presidential election....

Home Office in frame over FBI's London server seizures

By John Lettice
Monday 11th October 2004

The US seizure of two Indymedia servers in London last Thursday is likely to have needed the approval of UK Home Secretary David Blunkett, but Blunkett may have acted on tenuous legal grounds, according to a Statewatch analysis. Statewatch considers that the seizure is likely to have been made under a US-UK Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) of 1996, but it seems doubtful that the Indymedia request could have been justified under even the broad terms of this treaty.

Indymedia itself does not know why its servers were seized, while Rackspace, the hosting company which was compelled to hand them over, issued a statement saying it was complying with a court order under an MLAT, and that the court prohibited it from commenting further. Under the terms of this MLAT (there are more in the works, and others now litter the globe's legal systems) the Home Office may not admit that a request has been made. The FBI commented to Agence France Presse that this was not an FBI operation but a subpoena issued "on behalf of a third country" and that the FBI was acting for the Swiss and Italian governments. This, as The Register reported here, provides some clues regarding the justification for the seizure.

Indymedia had been contacted recently by the FBI and Swiss authorities regarding two photos of Swiss undercover police published on Indymedia's French site, IMC Nantes. The police had been handling the G8 events in Switzerland in 2003, but their identities do not appear to have been clear in the photos. Rackspace had also been contacted by the FBI, but according to Indymedia, correspondence it received from Rackspace on Tuesday indicated that the matter was closed. Or not. Indymedia is unable to identify a recent, particular reason for Italian involvement, aside from the Italian government's having been "overtly hostile ever since the 2001 G8 Summit in Genoa."
The likeliest grounds for the MLAT request would therefore seem flimsy, while the FBI's role as some kind of Uncle Enforcer for the Swiss and Italians seems a dubious use of a US-UK treaty.

And even if there were something far more serious involved than just a couple of photos, the procedure ought to send shivers down the spine of every publishing organisation on the Internet. It is clearly perfectly possible for their operations to be crippled without warning, without their being told what it is they've done, and without explanation. Depending on whether the authorities (under the international MLAT regime this could be many, many authorities) want something you've got or just want to stop you doing something, the crippling could be pretty extensive and pretty long term. If they want you to stop doing something then they'll quite likely want your backups as well, and if you've no servers, no backups, and no idea when/if you're getting them back, two photos is going to be the least of your worries.

Paradoxically, Indymedia may be rather less vulnerable to this kind of action than a conventional company or news organisation. Indymedia's decentralised structure (it describes itself as "a network of collectively run media outlets") gives it a certain amount of resilience - anybody wishing to knock it out entirely must recognise it has numerous heads in numerous jurisdictions to be cut off. The more structured IT setups of conventional publishing organisations, on the other hand, make it a far simpler task for their key infrastructure to be identified and impounded.

Standing between the press and such an unfortunate fate we have, in the UK, David Blunkett's Home Office. The terms of the 1996 MLAT would have permitted Blunkett to refuse assistance if he felt granting the request would impair sovereignty, security or "other essential interests or would be contrary to important public policy", or if the request relates to "an offence of a political character." The request itself should include a description of the proceedings to which the request relates, a summary of the information giving rise to the request, a description of the evidence sought, and the purpose for which it is sought.

It should also include "a precise description of the place or person to be searched and of the articles to be seized". David Blunkett's MLAT unit should therefore have in its possession details of proceedings to be brought against Indymedia and/or Rackspace by Italy and/or Switzerland. It should also be relatively confident that any alleged offence is not of a political character (photos of secret policemen seldom are, right?) and have a clear indication that the obtaining of the evidence sought necessitated the removal of whole servers or hard disks.

Or not. According to Indymedia in the AFP report: "The order was so short-term that Rackspace had to give away our hard drives in the UK." This suggests that the FBI requested something that was on the hard disk, now and that handing over the hard disk or the server was the only way to comply. So although the authorities will have known very well that they would be carrying off the hardware, the request itself quite possibly did not specify this. It is however clear from the MLAT's terms that it was devised primarily in order to detain or question individuals, and that if it has indeed been used here, the treaty has been to some extent repurposed.

The treaty does however provide for the "return of documents or articles... as soon as is practicable unless the Central Authority of the Requested Party waives the return of the documents or articles". The custodian here is the US, which presumably does not face insurmountable problems in extracting whatever it was its friends wanted, and sending the kit straight back. Statewatch editor Tony Bunyan has called on Blunkett to explain himself: "Why did the Home Office agree? What grounds did the USA give for the seizure of the servers? Were these grounds of a 'political' nature? Has the Home Office requested that the servers be returned? What does this action say about freedom of expression and freedom of the press?", he says. "A trail that started in Switzerland and Italy has now ended fairly and squarely in the lap of the UK Home Secretary to justify."


http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/11/home_office_fbi_mlat_request/