Second Indymedia Server Seized in UK Within a Year

GarconDuMonde writes "For the second time within the past year, an Indymedia server has been siezed in the United Kingdom. This time it is the Bristol Indymedia server (currently redirected to the United Kollectives IMC site); this follows on from the Ahimsa siezure last October. The current siezure was carried out using a search warrant by the UK police at approximately 16:30GMT on June 27th, 2005. This was despite being warned by lawyers "that this server was considered an item of journalistic equipment and so subject to special provision under the law" (press release). Bristol Indymedia is currently being supported by the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), Liberty and Privacy International. Other media organisations have declared their support."

Speech isn't as free in England as the U.S.

AFAIK, and IANAL, the UK does not have the same protections for free speech and a free press that the U.S. has. In fact what freedoms the press has are more a matter of gentlemen's agreement (the king agrees not to shut down our newspapers and we agree not to behead the king) and some common law foundation (relying on prior judicial decisions rather than a constitutional edict). In fact, the Crown's ability to squelch and silence voices of dissent was one of the reasons the right to a free press was amended into the U.S. constitution.

While we may think this is terribly wrong from a moral/ethical standpoint, it may well be completely legal in the U.K.

Remember, I'm not saying this is right, but if you post a comment where you judge its legality by U.S. standards, you may be very wrong.

Greg

Re:Speech isn't as free in England as the U.S.

Putting AFAIK at the start is a license to write any half-baked bullshit really, I think you might find that we have a very free press (and some of ours isn't even owned by McDonalds and Microsoft) and as for the Crown interfering with free speech (we have a Queen at the moment not a King by the way) I think you may find you are a few centuries out of date.

This was nothing to do with free speech but it was everything to do with someone bragging on the internet about a £100000 vandalism they'd committed and the Police duly investigating it.

Re:Speech isn't as free in England as the U.S.

I thought only a court injunction can prevent publication of material in the UK, and judges are often loathed to issue these except where personal privacy or safety is at stake. As far as I understand, there isn't even a Government mechanism to legally force newspapers to keep quiet over military secrets; the "D-notice" mechanism is an advisory system, based upon mutual agreement.

Re:Not true

How about quoting the entire article instead of just the first paragraph:

ARTICLE 10
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. this right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.

2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or the rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.

Article 10 isn't a carte blanche to publish anything you want, it comes with responsibilities too. In this case, "for the prevention of disorder or crime" seems applicable, since someone apparently boasted about their own violent criminal behaviour on the site.

Well....

on approx 17 June an anonymous post to the Bristol Indymedia

I hope they get their kit back, but I think this "journalist" defence won't have any legs. There may well be excellent journalists working for indymedia, but responsible journalists do not allow anonymous, unchecked "facts" into their news output.

In fact, that just encourages scurrilous rumor mongering -- which is diametrically opposed to good journalism.

"One cannot hope to bribe or twist,
Thank God, the British journalist.
But seeing what the man will do
Unbribed, there's no occasion to."

Re:Well....

responsible journalists do not allow anonymous, unchecked "facts"

I do not think the law does (or can) differentiate between responsible and iresponsible journalists.

In any case if you think that, you could not possibly have read the British tabloid newspapers any time in, say, the last century or so.

Re:Well....

Seizing servers without a judicial verdict is kind of iffy.

Lucky that didn't happen in this case. FTFA:


On Tue 21st June, the police contacted an IMC Bristol volunteer asking for IP logs.

They didn't get the logs, so they contacted a judge and received a search warrant.

Fool me once...

Fool me once, shame on you...
Fool me twice, use an encrypted filesystem fool...

Was that so hard? And random bits are so much fun :)

Re:Fool me once...

not handing over your password will get you a spell at Her Majesty's Pleasure

Encouraging stupid posts?

Thanks for the heads up, but perhaps it's a good idea to mention the reason for these seizures alongside the fact that it just happened.

For those of you left wondering by the initial post these seizures are apparently related to an investigation of a bit of vandalism that cost somewhere around a hundred grand...

That's a little background, it's not like some evil government was seizing their servers simply because of a difference of opinion (although, depending on who you listen to, that may be the case)...

Re:Encouraging stupid posts?

A reasonably close analogy here would be if an anonymous coward on Slashdot bragged about a crime they'd committed, and the FBI responded by seizing all the Slashdot servers.

There is no evidence that the crime in question was committed or endorsed by the owners of the server. Instead, the server was seized because they refused to give the police access to its logs, claiming journalistic privilege.

Yes, the police seized the server because they were legitimately investigating a genuine crime. But this is basically getting back to the question of whether the media can be forced to reveal their sources. There is a real freedom-of-speech issue here. While you are right to try to forestall many of the predictable kneejerk reactions, it is equally the case that nobody, whether British, American, or from any of the other many countries where people read Slashdot, can afford to dismiss this story without first considering the real issues at stake here.

Indymedia are not going to be prosecuted here...

The police nabbed the server because someone boasted of violent criminal behaviour on it, and the police want to trace them.

Suppose a kidnapper used my typewriter to write a ransom note. Would my freedom of speech be curtailed if the police took it down the station to dust it for prints?

Don't get your panties in a wad, folks.

Re:Indymedia are not going to be prosecuted here..

The police nabbed the server because someone boasted of violent criminal behaviour on it, and the police want to trace them.

It is not necessary to seize anything to do this. At most all they need to do is mirror the drive, which can be done without even removing it. In the previous case all they really needed was the cooperation of Rackspace in supplying the needed data.

Seizing of computer equipment not actually needed for evidence is very simply a means of discomfiting and intimidating the owner and the case of the siezure from Rackspace itself illustrates that they only really need the drive at most, not the entire computer, as only the drive contains the evidence in question.

Would my freedom of speech be curtailed if the police took it down the station to dust it for prints?

Why don't they just dust it where it is? They're perfectly capable of doing the job. In any case, as per above, this particular case is more like they impounded your typewriter, your desk, everything in it, all of your files and all of your customer's files.

KFG

Whatever happened to the idea of back up servers?

One would think that as soon as the Bristol server went down, a secondary mirrored server in, say, Paris, would be right back up. It's not like a given indymedia node has terabytes of data to serve up or store.

And given they could easily build their own server for PEANUTS that would at least be able to get the minimum news out the door, they would have done this kind of redundancy the day after the last time this happened.

I'd be inclined to call them Stupid Hippies, but they're not Hippies or Stupid. I just guess they don't have the few hundred pounds per node to set up a back up server somewhere.

RS

Timing

Did anyone else notice the timing co-incidence here?

From Indymedia.com: "The UK Indymedia site will be facilitating independent coverage of the actions and events. - G8 summit is running 6th-8th July.

Now I don't want to sound paranoid or suggest a conspiracy, but come on, the timing of this seizure is extraordinary. And there's about 0.00% chance of getting the server back before G8.

If I could mod the article 'troll' i would

Nowhere in the article does it highlight the reason the server was taken, which can eventually be found buried in the links, but the response by Indy is: "As the G8 summit approaches, threats to our freedom of expression, and action, appear to be increasing rapidly." So, Indymedia contacted the Police in the firstplace, and now something is being done, they're crying about it.

Re:Umm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indymedia [wikipedia.org] All hail the wiki.

I was hoping for more information

But all the links lead to either Indymedia or pro-Indymedia sites.

It would be nice to get an unbiased source of this news, especially since Indymedia can't be expected to report on itself without bias.

Re:Umm

Long story short, it's a worldwide network of internet resources for communists and anarchists usually located around local indymedia pages. They use these resources to organize social events and stuff like that. Sometimes I participate of such events, they are mostly orientated to civil rights and antiglobalization stuff.

Apart from that, they also provide hosting solutions to social and radical groups, specially local Hacklabs on which I partitipate frequently.

Re:Nice job injecting opinion into your review.

If you agree with their ideas then go ahead and listen to them, if not then keep watching FoxNews.

I don't get it. Why does it have to be either indymedia or foxnews? Why impose the arbitrary limit?

IMO it can certainly be neither.

Both indymedia and foxnews are equally nutty.

indymedia is full of cranks and wild-eyed woo-woos, but at least they dont try to hide their bias (honest cranks? heh.)

Non-nutty news coverage

Choose the BBC. It's not perfect, but it's a huge amount better than the alternatives. The World news site does indeed cover many stories that aren't otherwise in mainstream attention.

Having the stories edited professionally is a big plus. Also, while some stories can be biased, one is likely to see differing points of view, particularly in the editorials, and ever-increasing comments sections. The "Have your say" articles are perhaps more interesting because all comments aren't published, but rather a selection of differing views from people in different locations.

They are quite accountable, with a "Newswatch" section where corrections and responses to criticism are published. Readers can email and offer comments on or corrections to any story - indeed I have done so in the past myself, and the response (changing the article) has been swift.

For a mainstream news organisation, that hails from one country, I don't think you could expect anything of a higher standard than this.

Re:Nice job injecting opinion into your review.

But yes, many of us believe its much more honest to be up front about our biases.
And EVERYONE has them.

Everyone might have them, but it's what you DO with them that makes you who you are. That's why Fox News is horrible and indymedia (huge generalization) is just as bad. If you could seperate your bias from your journalism then you'd be...a professional.

Re:Umm

Perhaps we should try and persuade google to link "WTF is" with "define:" on google. Would make it a lot more natural.

Don't be so melodramatic...

Someone commits a crime, and boasts about it on IndyMedia. The police haul in their server, probably hoping to arrest the dickwads who dropped concrete from a bridge onto a train, endangering lives in the name of "protest".

I'll bet you $100 dollars this has been seized for evidentiary purposes, in an attempt to trace the IP addresses of these hooligans, so they can be arrested. And I say "good", because the sort of cocksuckers who drop concrete weights onto trains deserve to go to prison.

Re:Mixed feelings...

"leftist media stations of the US"

Most Americans don't seem to realise that they have one of the most right wing societies in the west. You 'liberal' democrats would be considered rather right wing in most European countries. Just like most of your media. This is most likely the same with your 'leftist' stations.

"the sole purpose of pushing leftist heart string stories to gain the support of the global public. This kind of manipulation outrages me."

I don't really see how a heart string story can be considered left or right. If a newspaper prints a story about Timmy losing his pet cat, does that make it leftist? Similarly, if a website wants to print the views of ordinary Iraqis or Afghans, that does not instantly make it a leftist website?

I take it your outrage at manipulation doesn't stop there. You must hate any sort of biased media. Given that, do you watch Fox News?