From: Ricardo Dominguez [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 09 November 2004 15:46
To: Interdisciplinary academic study of Cyber Society
Subject: Who nabbed Indymedia's computers?

Who nabbed Indymedia's computers?
The freewheeling network of Web sites has a history of clashing with
authority.
But usually it knows who is trying to shut it up.

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/11/09/indymedia/index.html
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Mathew Honan

Nov. 9, 2004  |  Hep Sano is remarkably calm. Sipping an iced tea at a
brewpub
in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, she dispassionately recounts Indymedia's
alarming situation -- the unexplained seizure of two of the media
organization's computers by an unknown government at the behest of the FBI.


"We want to set a precedent," says Sano. "The damage has been done to us.
But
we're hoping to get something that says, no, the FBI was wrong. You can't
just
go in and take a server in another country for unknown reasons without
saying
who did it.


The facts of the matter are scanty. On Oct. 7, Rackspace Managed Hosting, an
Internet service provider based in San Antonio, was served with a subpoena
ordering it to hand over two Indymedia servers physically located in London.
Rackspace immediately fired off an e-mail to Indymedia informing them about
the
servers and noting that it was required to comply, according to something
called the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, an international agreement that
sets
out "procedures for countries to assist each other in investigations such as
international terrorism, kidnapping, and money laundering."


In the e-mail, Rackspace noted that it was "acting as a good corporate
citizen
and is cooperating with international law enforcement authorities. The court
prohibits Rackspace from commenting further on this matter."


And that was that. Rackspace refused to provide a copy of the seizure order
to
Indymedia. Noting that it was under a federal gag order, it refused to even
discuss the contents of the order. Indymedia was left wondering which
government seized its servers and for what purpose. To this day, the group
has
no idea what was done to the servers before they were returned, what was
being
searched for, who did the searching, or why. All they know is that for
nearly a
week somebody, somewhere, with the assistance of the FBI, had a peek, and
maybe
more, at their machines.


This kind of thing doesn't happen to Wolf Blitzer.


Indymedia, also known as the Independent Media Center, is a pain in the
establishment ass. It doesn't fit neatly into the box of either journalism
or
activism. Frequently cited and dismissed by the mainstream media as
irresponsible, it also boasts a string of legal victories giving it
important
media protections. It consistently pushes the bleeding edge of what can be
published, and for that, it has landed in hot water again and again.


The promise of Indymedia is that anyone can be a reporter. Forget journalism
schools or internships at hifalutin intellectual magazines. Indymedia is
more
or less dedicated to the same promise as Fox News (minus daily memos from
Roger
Ailes): We report, you decide.


But the "we" in Indymedia's case is inclusive of everyone, everywhere. The
idea
is that the mainstream media isn't telling the whole story, and so the
public
has to pick up the slack. Or, as Sano puts it, "Who really knows what's
going
on in a neighborhood better than the people who live there?"


Like so many other progressive and activist organizations, Indymedia had its
genesis in the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, where
freelance journalists and activists came together to form a new media
organization that aimed to broadcast a message they didn't feel the
mainstream
media was covering. They wanted to present a different picture of the WTO
than
the one typically portrayed in the press. They wanted something new,
something
that wasn't organized from the top down in a hierarchical manner. And before
the protests had ended, IMC was born.


Over the years, IMC has grown to include cities all over the world, with
more
than 100 centers in all. There's no barrier to entry. Once approved, anyone
who
abides by the New Independent Media Center principles can form their own
branch. In the years following the Seattle protests, IMC branches have
opened
from Europe to Uruguay. But true to its riotous roots, IMC has consistently
pushed the limits of acceptable practice.


Which is perhaps why Sano remains sanguine. Trouble with the law is a
regular
occurrence for Indymedia.
In 2001, following the FTAA protests in Quebec City, the FBI and Secret
Service
subpoenaed the IMC to supply the FBI with user logs from an Indymedia Web
server. Indymedia won that fight, and it subsequently ceased logging
identifying data for visitors and posters to its sites.


In 2003, Indymedia made a splash when it took up the cause of the Diebold
memos.
After a group of Swarthmore students obtained and published embarrassing
internal memos from Diebold concerning that company's electronic voting
machines, Indymedia hosted a copy of the memos on its servers. Diebold
claimed
that Indymedia had violated its copyrights and tried to use the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act to bludgeon it into submission. The Electronic
Frontier Foundation, or EFF, provided legal representation to the maverick
media outlet. It won not only the case but, on Oct. 14, a $125,000 decision
against Diebold as well.





More recently, in August 2004, Indymedia found itself in the midst of a
controversy surrounding its coverage of the Republican National Convention.
Prior to the convention, a poster to nyc.indymedia.org published the names
of
about 1,600 convention delegates coming to New York, along with their e-mail
addresses, phone numbers, home addresses and a list of hotels where they
would
be staying. The Secret Service subpoenaed NYC Indymedia's Internet service
provider to try to obtain information that would identify the poster, but as
a
result of the Quebec case, Indymedia no longer kept such logs.




 






 

 



Then, on Oct. 1, the FBI paid a visit to an Indymedia representative in
Seattle
on behalf of the Swiss government. The Swiss were upset that IMC had
published
pictures of undercover agents posing as anti-globalization protesters. The
pictures, though published by IMC Nantes, were physically located on the
server
in Seattle. Prior to the FBI's visit, IMC had already digitally masked the
agents' faces. Since no names or other information was published, this
effectively killed the Swiss government's argument that the pictures
contained
personally identifiable information. During this meeting, according to the
EFF,
the FBI conceded "that they were not contending any laws had been broken,
and
that there was nothing wrong with the photos of the officers, but were
rather
passing on a request from the Swiss government." Again, Indymedia won.


But there's one important distinction between the current case and all
previous
clashes with authority. In the past, at least, Indymedia always knew whom it
was fighting.


"ISPs are not allowed to disclose stored data to the government without a
specific court order," says Annalee Newitz, spokesperson for the EFF, which
is
again representing Indymedia. "The lawyers are jumping up and down saying,
'Sue! Sue!' But we don't know yet who to sue."


Kurt Opsahl, who is wrangling the legal end of the case for the EFF,
concurs.
"So far it has been just a brick wall," says Opsahl. "There are similarities
to
some of the PATRIOT Act powers through which the U.S. can issue secret
orders
to obtain evidence. But in those cases the service provider wouldn't even be
allowed to say they had received the order. So it is extraordinarily unusual
to
say that [Rackspace] had gotten a court order, but to not be able to say who
requested it or any of the other pertinent information."


"There's also a similarity between this and the notorious Steve Jackson
Games
case. In that case the Secret Service came in and seized a computer that was
hosting some [bulletin board system] because they had an interest in a
particular posting on those boards. The EFF was able to go to the court and
show that the court can't go in and seize protected speech in its interest
in
just one posting. It appears that the government has forgotten that lesson,
and
we may need to remind them of it again."


Opsahl is optimistic about his chances of winning a decision for Indymedia.
"The
Electronics Communications Privacy Act sets restrictions on when an ISP can
provide the content of communications. The Privacy Protection Act prohibits
the
government from seizing a server that contains a journalist's work product
or
documentary information that is to be published in the news media."


When Salon contacted Rackspace, the company offered apologies but no
information. Rackspace spokesperson Annalie Drusch, while apologizing
profusely
for her inability to comment, told Salon that "all I can tell you is that we
responded to a subpoena."


Nor was the agency that served the subpoena much help.


"Much as Indymedia would like for it to be, this is not an FBI case. This
was a
request from a third country pursuant to an MLAT subpoena," said Joe Parris,
a
spokesperson for the agency, referring to the Mutual Legal Assistance
Treaty.
"It is not a U.S. case. The FBI, the Department of Justice, are not parties
in
interest. We just fulfilled the U.S. end of an MLAT treaty on serving the
subpoena."


Parris went on, however, to offer a tantalizing nugget.


"I think that the Indymedia site is claiming that it had something to do
with
them publishing pictures of undercover police officers, but I've heard
through
other media sources that it was coming from Italy. But that's not from an
internal FBI source."


Both the EFF and Indymedia are now focusing on Italy. Suspicions center on
Morena Plazzi, a deputy public prosecutor of the court of Bologna. IMC Italy
reported that Plazzi stated in a press conference that she had subpoenaed
the
servers' user logs. (Which, again, Indymedia doesn't keep a record of.)
Salon's
attempts to reach Plazzi were unsuccessful.


"At this point we don't have a whole lot of information," Opsahl says. "But
we
do have what appears to be somebody admitting that they had asked for log
information. So that is now becoming the prime suspect."


To that end, the EFF filed a motion on Oct. 22 to unseal the court order
that
subpoenaed the servers and discover who actually issued it. Meanwhile, in
the
United Kingdom, where the servers were seized, there's been considerably
more
uproar over the seizure. M.P. Richard Allan, a Liberal Democrat, has been
pressing the U.K. Home Office to determine what that government's
involvement,
if any, was, and has been posting the results of his inquiries on his blog.


But the question remains, what exactly were the Italians -- assuming it even
was
the Italians -- looking for?


"I believe it was something to do with the G8 protests in Genoa," Sano says.
"They were very violent. Several Indymedia reporters were caught up in that.
One of them was severely beaten and is currently pursuing a case regarding
that."


Regardless of the cause, the seizure, at least temporarily, effectively
silenced
several media outlets. And that, says Julien Pain of Reporters Without
Borders,
is intolerable.


"We really find this FBI intervention unacceptable," Pain says. "They'd
never
have done that for another media. It shows that Internet publications, and
especially Indymedia, are not considered media. They see the Internet as a
jungle, where they can do whatever they want."


"The worst part is for Uruguay," Sano says, explaining that IMC Uruguay also
kept its data on the London servers, and was preparing for a presidential
election of its own. "They have a huge history of violent media repression
in
Uruguay, even after they achieved democracy. They have no backups. And the
reason they were being hosted outside the country was specifically to avoid
the
kind of seizure that ended up occurring."

salon.com

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