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Thursday, October 07, 2004

FBI Raids US & UK Independent Media Servers
By Stet at 9:48 PM / / / Link / Edit /


NYC Indymedia:

The FBI took the hard drives of Global IMC servers in the USA and the UK. It appears that a court order was issued to Rackspace (Indymedia's service provider with offices in the US and in London) to physically remove the hard drives from Global Indymedia servers (backup servers are now in place). Rackspace was given no time to defend against the order before it was acted upon and turned over the hard drives, both in the US and the UK. [...]

During the Republican Convention, the ISP of the NYC IMC was informed that it was the subject of a Secret Service / FBI investigation into an article submitted to its Open Newswire identifying delegates at the RNC. While the FBI has made it clear to members of the press that the investigation is ongoing, there is not necessarily a connection between events in NYC and the FBI's seizure of the Rackspace servers. Currently, much of the speculation about the reasons for the FBI's move centers around photographs posted to the IMC-Nantes website.

The only information about those photographs I can find is from a commenter on Slashdot:

Another theory is around some pictures of undercover Swiss police (photographing protesters) that were posted on an IMC site (IMC Nantes) - Indymedia got a request to remove 'identifying information' from the site (apparently the FBI got involved 'as a courtesy' to the Swiss authorities). Since there were no identifying details, Indymedia didn't do anything in response.

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