[widdershins] Amazing... and yet we still survive...

[drag sidious]

Well if your going to end up arresting someone or convicting them of
something or other then yes you HAVE to tell them what the charges are.

But this wasn't a supoena against Indymedia, this was a supoena against
Rackspace. 

see for definition of supoena:
http://www.lectlaw.com/def2/s083.htm

So what that is is that Rackspace is being called to submit documents in
a ongoing investigation. If they ignore the court order or whatever they
will be held in contempt of court. It's like if they are doing a
investigation against a money laudering sceme and need to get bank
records, so they issue a subpeona and the bank is compeled to release
the documentation to the court. In this case the docuementation the
court is looking for is one the physical media of the harddrive itself.

In a ongoing investigation the police do not have to tell you what is
going on. It's when they go to arrest you that's when they have to let
you in on everything and tell you the charges and the hows and the why's
behind what they are doing.

That's my understanding of the situation. You could argue that the data
was Indymedia's property and it wasn't up to Rackspace to submit it and
that the subpeona should of been against Indymedia itself. But so far it
seems that once you put data on somebody else's server it becomes the
responsibility of that person. 

That's the way things are going. Makes sense in a certain way. Say you
left a bunch of documents over my house in my possession that the FBI
wanted to see. Would they issue a subpeona to me? or to you?

I am not a lawyer or anything and I would like to have any clarification
on any missunderstandings I may have, definately.

Stuff like this takes time, we are still dealing with a legal framework
that is built over a century ago... Indymedia will probably be told what
exactly is going on. If nothing happens then eventually Indymedia's
lawyers will find out the details behind it and probably a press
statement will be issued. But it probably won't be months from now. This
is something to keep a close eye on, though. Especially if your going to
involve yourself in international law and politics.

One thing that I do find disturbing though is how FBI is able to compel
people in london to surrender documentation. Maybe they could of fought
it, maybe not. I don't know. The lowering of legal boundries between
countries is a bad thing, IMO. I live in the US. I have a hard time
enough dealing with my own government without having to also submit
myself to the EU or China's government myself. I can do and say things
in this country that would get me arrested in countries with lesser
garentees on free speech, such as Germany or France. Stuff that.

I am not convinced though that this was a attempt to shutdown Indymedia
or intimidate them to silence or anything like that. What is stopping
them from restoring from backups and running their servers under a
different company? If they don't keep their own backups, then they are
stupid anyways. (What if those HD's failed instead of being seized?)

I can understand why the FBI/Courts wanted the HD's themselves
immediately. If someone that had information to protect found out what
was going on thru a third party, they could maybe do a "rm -rf *" and
try to stop them from recovering the information.

Still, If I were Indymedia I would be pissed right now. I'd be doing
everything I can to find out exactly what is going on, definately.


On Tue, 2004-10-12 at 16:44, madsaxon wrote:
> At 03:28 PM 10/12/2004, drag sidious wrote:
> 
> 
> >Suppossedly this seizure was done because people were trying to use
> >Indymedia servers to publish pictures of undercover Swiss agents, which
> >apperently is illegal.
> 
> Fine, but why wouldn't they let Indymedia in on this simple fact?
> If you're going to accuse someone of harboring criminal behavior,
> you could at least tell them what crime they're supposedly committing
> or abetting.
> 
> m5x  
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> widdershins mailing list
> widdershins at attrition.org
> http://www.attrition.org/mailman/listinfo/widdershins