Three months ago the US Government had the ahimsa* servers’ hard drives removed from a Rackspace data center in London, UK. The servers hosted a number of Indymedia sites and BLAG.
Rackspace is under a gag order and can’t/won’t say why they removed the hard drives & sent them to the U.S. The FBI initially said they were involved, but are now disclaiming it. The UK government claims no involvement whatsoever, despite the fact that the servers were on their soil, and seizing them appears to be a violation of a few of their laws (not that I think they’ll care about that…).
It appears that things went this way, but we don’t know for sure, because, well, it’s secret:
1) Some fascist judge in Italy ordered an “investigation” into a web post on Indymedia Italy.
2) The Italians contacted the U.S. Government via the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) to get the US Government involved. Why not contact the UK government directly? Rackspace is a US company, but the server hosting contract was with their UK Company.
3) The US Government happily complies with the Italian request and has ~20 Indymedia sites, BLAG, and a few other sites yanked off the net.
4) The US Governemnt has Rackspace hand over the drives/data and slaps Rackspace with a gag order. Rackspace apparently does nothing to challenge this, but even that isn’t known for sure.
5) All this is done in secret. The US Government doesn’t claim any responsibility. No one in Indymedia (nor me) knows why the servers were shut down or who did it…
6) The EFF files a Motion to Unseal a couple weeks later. They have to guess which court to file it with, since it’s even secret which court ordered the seizure.
7) Two months after the seizure, the US government files it’s response to the EFF’s motion to unseal. This is the first real confirmation from the US Government that they were responsible for the seizure. In their reply, the US Government says neither Indymedia nor I have no standing before the court, despite the fact that the data was ours. They also invoke the big “terrorism” word, which they use as a license to do whatever they want, and keep it secret.
8) The EFF files a reply to the government’s response….
9) It’s three months later and we still don’t know why the servers were taken, what law was violated, etc.
Links:
http://www.eff.org/Censorship/Indymedia/
http://www.indymedia.org/fbi/
Well the government is full of corruption and they are all wankers. Now watch my ass get hauled off because some member of these democracies of hypocrisy decides that I am in violation some internet terrorism law because I use Linux. You know next they will blame Micro$oft and say they did it all and that if you used Windows servers they would leave you alone.