Indymedia Server Seized By UK Police, Again 528
timbrown writes with word that "On 22 January 2009, Kent Police seized an Indymedia server hosted by Manchester-based colocation facility UK Grid and run by the alternative news platform Indymedia UK. The server was taken in relation to comments on an article regarding the convictions in the recent Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) trial. Seven activists were sentenced to a total of 50 years in prison."
The complete story is worth reading; timbrown continues: "I'm posting this as a concerned UK administrator who hosts a number of sites. The message appears to be clear: the UK establishment does not want political content, legitimate or otherwise, hosted from these shores. The message has been noted, however free speech must be supported even where it may not be agreeable."
Freedom of the press? (Score:5, Insightful)
This bugs me. Freedom of the press is a vital tennet of our society, and it needs to be protected vigourously by everyone both inside the media and out. Without it we would have no way to stand up to the sort of tyranny that is all too common in countries where people aren't free.
Which is why I think Indymedia should shut the hell up in this case.
What does this have to do with freedom of the press? The name, address and other details of a judge were posted on an Indymedia site and mirrored to this server. That's not journalism. Trying to claim that the police investigating it is an infringement of the free press just undermines the real press and makes otherwise rational people wonder if freedom of the press is really important after all.
Other people's private personal information is not "political content".
Re:so much for (Score:3, Insightful)
Thank. You. For. That. Information. Citizen. Closing. All. Encrypted. Tunnels. From. UK. To. Rest. Of. World. Now...
ENJOY YOUR LIBERTY.
Re:Freedom of the press? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:so much for (Score:2, Insightful)
Which just leaves the single point of failure. The domain name.
Once the authorities yank that, the distributed server network behind it goes away...at least for a while.
The Message Is Clear (Score:5, Insightful)
I have no problem with the police taken the action they have, far from using their powers to "repress" anyone they are taking appropriate action to prevent groups like SHAC from harassing people, blackmailing them and generally making their lives a misery.
In the article linked to in the header they are 'concerned' that the police have been instructed by their political masters to clamp down on anyone daring to threaten 'the corporations'. The author has obviously totally missed the point that primarily the activism isn't targetted at 'corporations' but at individuals who happen to work at them. It's usually not the 'corporation' which is branded as a paedophile in a leaflet campaign in it's neighbourhood, it's not the 'corporation' who has masked terrorists driving around his house at night shouting abuse and making threats and it's not corporations whose dead relatives are dug up and then held for ransom. Usually it's a delivery driver, admin assistant anyone who is unlucky enough to be targetted by these groups.
I personally would not want to be relentlessly attacked in this matter because some random group of nutters took exception to something the company I worked for is involved in and I welcome any attempts by the government or the police to stand up and do something about it.
Re:Well. (Score:3, Insightful)
As a UK Grid customer... (Score:1, Insightful)
...this concerns me. I've just sent off an email to their support division asking for information about their policies for dealing with police requests. I am skeptical that Indymedia is giving us the full story, but if UK Grid handed over physical hardware without a warrant it makes me wary of continuing my contract with them (not that I'm doing anything illegal, but it can be argued Indymedia wasn't doing anything illegal either)
Re:The Message Is Clear (Score:4, Insightful)
Everything you've said is totally beside the point. A judge not wanting his personal details published has nothing to do with his pride and everything to do with not wanting to open himself up to the kind of abuse these groups have routinely subjected people who they disagree with to. Secondly the police had a warrant to seize this server which is totally within the law and absolutely not theft of any kind.
Re:Your freedom stops when you hit my nose (Score:4, Insightful)
From the details available, it appears this may relate to information that could be used to threaten the judge in the SHAC trial, the trial of some pretty unpleasant and violent people http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7837064.stm [bbc.co.uk].
Information does not equate to action.
There is "information" in local us libraries which would show you how to assemble a bomb a-la oklahoma city. I suppose we should seize and burn all books in the local libraries and send the librarians and library officials to prison for 50 years.
Re:Police regarded it as a threat to the trial jud (Score:2, Insightful)
Obviously it can't be to trace the original poster (why seize a mirror, or anything at all since Indymedia does not log ips),
Well, yes, I agree the motivations of the police could partly be to put pressure on a "critical" organization. Putting a check on how eager the police are to investigate a crime like this would be part of the oversight I mentioned.
However, the point about the logs is irrelevant:
"No officer, there's no need to come into my house, even if someone had committed a crime, I keep it so clean there'd be no evidence in there"
If the police believe a crime has been committed, they *have* to investigate it fully, and not ignore potentially useful evidence just because someone else tells them so.
Re:Freedom of the press? (Score:5, Insightful)
Privacy and presumption of innocence are just a couple of the things that must be sacrificed for the job. They are public servants, and we need to remind them of that.
I disagree. A judge is not a political figure, his sole purpose is to objectively "weigh" the facts presented in a case in order to determine its truth value. His personal convictions don't add into it, and he did not attain the position by public means: his office is completely separated from his private life.
If anything, judges need more protection than a regular citizen because they deal with criminals of all kinds on a daily basis.
Pardon me? (Score:3, Insightful)
Freedom of the press does not apply to "journalists" only, because once you start applying it only to an arbitrary and subjective definition of "journalism", you now have a loophole the size of a galactic cluster.
It doesn't matter if it's CNN or little timmy's html experiments, if you kill people's websites and jail them for what they SAY, you are a tyrant!
Re:Your freedom stops when you hit my nose (Score:4, Insightful)
Information like that - information about our world and cultures etc. thats all fine and free. Personal info on the other hand, address, phone number, names of children and family pets etc. Thats sorta stuff is no ones business but your own.
The action the police took here was wrong - but that by no means justifies the actions of the violent individuals who would look to bypass the legal process via threats and intimidation.
With regards to speech (Score:5, Insightful)
Something people forget is that it isn't an unlimited right. Really, no rights are unlimited in a free society. Why? Well for you to have an unlimited right, implies that your right could infringe on my rights to some degree. For example suppose you had an unlimited right to speech. That would mean you could call for me to be killed. You could tell everyone that I should die, explain how best to kill me and so on, and I've have no recourse. You could lie about me continuously to people I care about in an attempt to harm me, you could harass me at every opportunity, and so on. While you having no limits to your right might make you more free, it would make me less free. In fact you find that the only place where people have near unlimited rights are dictatorships. The dictator has the right to do basically whatever they want. However that comes at the expense of more or less everyone else.
Thus in free societies we have to have some limits to rights. We can't have a situation of "You do whatever you want." It has to be more along the lines of "You can do whatever you want, so long as that doesn't interfere with other people." Thus we get laws that restrict rights to an extent. You can say what you like, but not if you are threatening others. You can own all kinds of property, but you can't own other people. You can burn a flag but you can't burn your neighbor's flag and so on.
So people need to get over this idea that you can just say whatever you want and there are never any consequences. No, not the case. You can say a whole lot, speech is one of the most permissive rights in most free countries, but there are limits. A threat would certainly be a limit just about everywhere.
Any time you see a limitation like that, and you think it is unfair, ask yourself how you'd feel if you were on the receiving end. If your life was being threatened, would you be ok with that, or would you then want the person threatening you arrested? Because remember: You can't have it both ways. It can't be ok for you to do it to someone else, but not someone else to do it to you.
Re:Your freedom stops when you hit my nose (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Freedom of the press? (Score:5, Insightful)
That is by far the most short sighted and stupidest (yes stupid) post I have seen in a long long long time.
How on Earth could you state they surrender their "presumption of innocence"? That sounds like public servants should be guilty before proven innocent.
Why should they surrender their privacy in their private lives anymore than a citizen? That does not make sense, and in fact puts them in danger.
What happens when judges must take cases with criminals and other mentally unstable people? We make them all live in a public housing complex with transparent walls and signs with, "Judge Wanker lives here"?
Any single person in a society, whether serving the public or not, should be entitled to conduct their personal affairs with as much privacy and anonymity as anyone else.
What public servants should not be able to do is to keep their conduct in official capacities private from the public they serve. That does not include the location where they sleep.
Re:Well. (Score:4, Insightful)
They sent death threats, they posted leaflets saying people were paedophiles, they phoned in bomb threats. This isn't just protesting, this is terrorism (and no that's not misusing the word, they're trying to achieve political goals by violence and spreading fear).
Re:Your freedom stops when you hit my nose (Score:5, Insightful)
Information does not equate to action.
There's a bit of a difference between "this is how you make a bomb", and "This is where he lives, let's get him".
Please do try to bear in mind that the SHAC "activists" are violent criminals, who have launched physical attacks on people involved in animal testing. Whether you believe animal testing is right or wrong, that is not the way to go about protesting it.
The SHAC protesters broke the law, and are now - rightly - in jail. The person who posted the judge's personal information and a death threat against him also broke the law.
If a poster on a forum posted information on where to find Barack Obama, and a death threat, would you expect the server that hosted that forum to be seized?
Re:Your freedom stops when you hit my nose (Score:3, Insightful)
It does equate to evidence though. The seizure wasn't to censure the information, it was to study it for the process of finding who sent the death threats. That's the opposite of censorship, that's putting the information in the hands of the people who find it useful. Feel free to take a copy first.
Democracy demands tolerance. (Score:2, Insightful)
Democracy per definition demands tolerance to non politically correct views and beliefs. Democracy cant exist without totally free speech since whats forbidden today is totally ok tomorrow. Just step back twenty years and there is plenty of stuff that was forbidden to talk about then thats just plain PC nowadays.
A democracy without free speech is just a scam and not a single bit better than communism, nazism, monarchy or dictatorship. I hate it when people try to redefine free speech to be some quasi-free expression where you can only express politically correct stuff and nothing else. Thats not free speech at all.
Re:The Message Is Clear (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed. These people are terrorists
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=42 [splcenter.org]
A Chicago insurance executive might seem like one of the last people who'd be opening a letter with this succinctly chilling message: "You have been targeted for terrorist attack."
But that's what happened last year, when a top official at Marsh USA Inc. was informed that he and his company's employees had landed in the crosshairs of an extremist animal rights group. The reason? Marsh provides insurance for one of the world's biggest animal testing labs.
"If you bail out now," the letter advised, "you, your business, and your family will be spared great hassle and humility."
That letter â" and the harassment campaign that followed, after Marsh declined to "bail out" â" was another shot fired by Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC).
This British-born group, now firmly established in the United States, is waging war on anyone involved with Huntingdon Life Sciences, which tests drugs on approximately 70,000 rats, dogs, monkeys and other animals each year. In the process, SHAC is rewriting the rules by which even the most radical eco-activists have traditionally operated.
In the past, even the edgiest American eco-warriors drew the line at targeting humans. They trumpeted underground activists' attacks on businesses and laboratories perceived as abusing animals or the environment â" the FBI reports more than 600 incidents, causing $43 million in damage, since 1996.
But spokespeople for the two most active groups in the U.S., the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), have always been quick to claim that their underground cells have never injured or killed any people.
Since 1999, however, members of both groups have been involved with SHAC's campaign to harass employees of Huntingdon â" and even distantly related business associates like Marsh â" with frankly terroristic tactics similar to those of anti-abortion extremists.
Seized? (Score:2, Insightful)
Sounds like the police turned up without a warrant, asked the people running the hosting company, and they just handed it over.
Not a "freedom of speech"/"police"/"big brother" issue. More of a "watch out who hosts your servers".
If I had hosting with that company, I would remove it immediately for that.
Re:Freedom of the press? (Score:2, Insightful)
EU data protection laws. Personal information can't just be copied freely.
Re:Well. (Score:2, Insightful)
SHAC/ALF are not a group protesting animal cruelty. They are a bunch of anti science luddites hell bent on hurting scientists and engineers.
I don't understand why you keep saying this. Do you have any proof that these people target scientists and engineers outside of fields that involve animal testing?
P.S. Read up about the Luddites sometime. They weren't anti-technology for its own sake, but rather because it took away people's livelihood.
Re:The Message Is Clear (Score:3, Insightful)
The UK government has acted against SHAC in the way that governments are good at: the people who committed the harassment will be in jail for some time.
I find it very difficult ever to justify confiscating servers, because of the huge other-nonoffending-use argument; I'd be entirely at ease with a court order requiring the cooperation of the sysadmin with the police in investigating the origin of the illegal posting while keeping the machine up, but taking the machine away seems a disproportionate impact on everything else hosted there.
You don't tend to demolish the building in which a murder was planned.
Re:Police regarded it as a threat to the trial jud (Score:2, Insightful)
They seized a *mirror* of the main server (the main site is still up a running just fine), in order to try to trace the original poster.
Yet the original poster can not be retrieved from the "mirror" (or from the main site for that matter).
Thanks to your insight, I have developed a foolproof method for the Perfect Crime:
1) Commit crime
2) When the police ask you whether or not anything in your possession implicates you in said crime... (and here is the genius bit): tell them "NO!"
3) !!!!
4) Profit!
Re:Your freedom stops when you hit my nose (Score:5, Insightful)
If a poster on a forum posted information on where to find Barack Obama, and a death threat, would you expect the server that hosted that forum to be seized?
Hardly. I would expect a judicial order requiring the post to be removed, and then that the Secret Service would monitor that service to see if any further posts were made by that individual. By seizing the server (and shutting down the service), the police blocked a potential source of further leads as to the identity of the person. In short, a panic reaction, rather than a reasoned reaction.
The SHAC protesters broke the law, and are now - rightly - in jail. The person who posted the judge's personal information and a death threat against him also broke the law.
The SHAC protesters are in jail. The poster will be in jail, if they can find him/her. Fine. Now explain to me what law the server owners/operators broke, that resulting in their server (and service) being "thrown in jail".
Re:Freedom of the press? (Score:3, Insightful)
You are aware I assume that California is not part of the United Kingdom?
Then you clearly wouldn't.
Re:Your freedom stops when you hit my nose (Score:5, Insightful)
If a poster on a forum posted information on where to find Barack Obama, and a death threat, would you expect the server that hosted that forum to be seized?
I bet if the post had been made on timesonline.co.uk (The Times' website) it wouldn't be seized.
Re:As a UK Grid customer... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Freedom of the press? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Police regarded it as a threat to the trial jud (Score:2, Insightful)
But so what. I have a business, and we allow people to post messages in a mostly anonymous way. Kinda like a big corkboard outside a grocery store where anyone can post a flier. If someone posts something illegal, the government shouldn't be allowed to take the wall because we already pressure washed the fingerprints off.
The grocery store should not have to keep a record of every person that may potentially post an illegal message. And a website should not be subject to search and seizure because of an anonymous post. We the people do not want to be tracked all the time. We want anonymity. Anonymity cannot be stopped.
This article makes me imagine a scenario like this:
Cops: Give us your surveillance tapes.
Business: We have no security cameras, or tapes.
Cops: We will decide who has cameras or not by seizing everything in your business indefinitely.
Re:Your freedom stops when you hit my nose (Score:5, Insightful)
Says who? If you believe in something strong enough, why rule out certain kinds of actions?
Nietzsche, "Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one." Of course the obvious result of your thinking is, it's ok to do anything to anyone as long as you believe in something strong enough.
Re:With regards to speech (Score:3, Insightful)
How would I feel about about being threatened? I would say, bring it on, bitch. I'll fucking kill you.
Good for you, Internet Tough Guy.
Now how would you feel if they were threatening your 6 year old instead?
Re:Your freedom stops when you hit my nose (Score:2, Insightful)
Feel free to take a copy first.
Are we, though?
My understanding is that, in a search, police will typically take all sorts of electronic equipment you have. Are you allowed to take a copy of information on that equipment, before they take it away? (Not an unreasonable request, since the equipment may be confiscated for many months, and the information on it may sometimes be destroyed.)
(If you mean, take a copy in advance, this obviously doesn't help if they march off with all your computers/hard disks/thumbdrives.)
Re:Your freedom stops when you hit my nose (Score:2, Insightful)
That's the point.
The content would be taken down.
And that's what happened.
The question is whether the site should be shut down if this happened and the content was then removed?
Should the police have the right to seize every single server that is mirrors the offending bulletin board?
Re:Police regarded it as a threat to the trial jud (Score:3, Insightful)
If someone posts something illegal, the government shouldn't be allowed to take the wall because we already pressure washed the fingerprints off.
Says you, but how would the police know that you actually did this or actually know how to make it forensically "clean"? They don't and therefore should examine that cork board. They'd be negligent if they didn't.
The grocery store should not have to keep a record of every person that may potentially post an illegal message. And a website should not be subject to search and seizure because of an anonymous post. We the people do not want to be tracked all the time. We want anonymity. Anonymity cannot be stopped.
No, they shouldn't, but they should also be prepared to have their board examined if someone does post an illegal message.
This article makes me imagine a scenario like this:
Cops: Give us your surveillance tapes.
Business: We have no security cameras, or tapes.
Cops: We will decide who has cameras or not by seizing everything in your business indefinitely.
Now imagine this one:
Cops: Can we inspect your hunting knife? We suspect it was used in a murder.
Murdering bastard: I have no knife! You're mistaken.
Cops; oh, OK, sorry to have bothered you Sir.
The police have to follow up on potential evidence or they'd just be taking every bodies word for it.
the police still have to obtain a warrant to seize property without the owners consent. A scenario like yours requires the judicial system to become completely corrupt (yes, yes, people already say it is but many judges still believe in the law) and when that's happened we've got more problems than property seizures.
Re:Your freedom stops when you hit my nose (Score:3, Insightful)
I hope the police acted within the law. But I have every sympathy for their action. The court case in question was about a group of people who harassed individuals over a period of many years in violent and intimidating ways. There was every possibility that the threats would spill over into death or injury at any time.
The perpetrators got up to 8 years in jail for these activities so I am not at all surprised that the police have taken a keen interest in the publication of the judges address on an underground political activism bulletin board. If the pattern is followed the judge can expect bloody hypodermic needles in his post and excrement through his letter box for many years to come. Animal liberation groups are watched by the same law enforcement agencies as international political terrorists because they have used terrorist tactics like bombs in the past.
The animal liberation front people are sick and very dangerous, not to mention misguided at the end of the day - they don't seem to have any interest in millions of animals subjected to factory farming but attack people doing medical research who experiment on a few dozen animals.
If I was Indymedia I would entrap the poster of the threat and help the people of the country get a very nasty antisocial person locked up before they hurt anyone. I have no sympathy for Indymedia, if they can be shown to be colluding with the animal liberation front people then they should go to jail as well and good riddance. Just because you grok computers does not give you the right to enable terrorists to hurt and maim ordinary citizens going about their lawful business. Screw the stupid animals, people come first.
Re:so much for (Score:2, Insightful)
Insightful? Shit .. I was going for funny. We really are screwed.
Re:Your freedom stops when you hit my nose (Score:5, Insightful)
but yea, you should look up what exactly your rights are regarding addresses, etc. I think you will be pretty shocked.
It's kinda sad when people post this sort of nonsense, so I'm not surprised you posted as AC.
In the UK, there are various privacy and data protection laws that do cover the handling of personal information (principally under the Human Rights Act and under the Data Protection Acts), and they are considerably stricter than in some places. There are also laws to deal with how you act based on that information, e.g., protection from harassment or various forms of unsolicited marketing. Oh, and as a topical note, making death threats is illegal, too.
I personally completely disagree with your claim that such information is not personal or private. It is clearly both, and in a world that values freedom, in a world where identity theft is a fast-growing crime, in a world where there is a genuine risk of violence against officials undermining the justice system, it is reasonable and common sense that the information should be protected. There is no free speech argument here, and no censorship: why do you think you have some God-given right to know everything about someone else?
Now, this sort of action should obviously be handled by the book, with the proper warrants issued and the proper data obtained. If that is not the case here, then someone screwed up. But it does seem that a serious crime was committed, and indicated a genuine threat of a much more serious crime, and the police asked for reasonable cooperation from the service provider in order to deal with that. That is their job, and if the provider gave them some cute "freedom of speech" response then I'm not surprised that the police took more direct action, nor do I blame them for doing so. This sort of "defence" of freedom is exactly why the government is now pushing for mandatory logging of all such activities by all ISPs for everyone, which is a far worse thing for freedom than having the police make reasonable requests on a case-by-case basis. The fact that Indymedia seem to be proud of the fact that their service can be used for making anonymous death threats and they won't cooperate with lawful authorities to help identify the source doesn't exactly raise my opinion of them, either.
Re:Freedom of the press? (Score:4, Insightful)
More like someone commits a crime on your premises. You stop the crime. Police ask you for video tape and you honestly tell them "I don't have a video camera". So they seize your cash register.
Re:Your freedom stops when you hit my nose (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting.
Anyways, I doubt that the police will find anything, I just wanted to note that there was the slim possibility. IF they used the mod your talking about, the slimness went from almost nothing to even less assuming that something else doesn't trap the IP first like a load balancing software/service or something.
Total anonymous should never be expected as a user regardless of what the site clams because it doesn't really matter what software your using, if the government wants to know something about you the user, they can trap your communications from the local ISP level including encryption tokens from TOR sessions and so on or just plant a trojan/keylogger onto your computer. Of course that takes a considerable amount of resources and wouldn't be done on a random basis but if you think the government, or any government might be watching you, you can never expect total anonymity.
Re:Your freedom stops when you hit my nose (Score:3, Insightful)
They should be proud that their service can be used for making anonymous death threats, because that also means that it can be used to express unpopular political ideas. That you don't understand this means that you don't understand freedom of speech.
I don't believe in absolute freedom of speech, and neither does the law in any country in the western world that I know of.
As for "won't cooperate with lawful authorities" I'm not really sure where to start with the incredible wrongness of this sentence, so I guess I'll begin at the top; they don't keep logs, so there's no cooperation.
And this is where the problems start. By actively choosing (it's not the default, nor common practice) not to keep logs that can be accessed as a one-off with a good reason, they are providing more ammunition for the case that government should have unrestricted direct access to logs and keeping them should be mandatory. I'd rather have practical, proportionate access available where it's justified than draconian rules imposed on everyone that give the government more power and less oversight.
Finally, "lawful authorities"? Something can be legal and still be wrong. This act is only the latter.
Ah, I see: you're an idealist, who would rather everyone can speak their mind and do as they wish with no legal authorities at all to interfere with his life, regardless of how damaging his actions might be to others. I imagine your point of view might be different if you were either the judge whose life was threatened, or anyone with an interest in seeing a fair and just outcome of the case before the court where that judge sits. In a civilised society, the answer to bad laws is to get them changed, not to threaten the lives of the judiciary whose task is merely to rule objectively according to those laws.
Re:Even if you never saw the criminal? (Score:2, Insightful)
When it comes to anti science terrorism I'm prepared to give the police the benefit of the doubt until I hear evidence otherwise.
What's with all this "anti-science" nonsense?
Where does it say to be pro-science you need to believe in the torture of animals?
I'm a pro-science as anyone, and I think anyone who denies the blatantly obvious fact that animals are sentient beings that feel pain is clearly putting their own prejudices and bigotry before scientific reality.