Indymedia asks: "Who took our servers?"

Two weeks after the hard drives of two Indymedia servers were seized from the London office of a US-owned web hosting company called Rackspace, Caroline Flint, UK Home Office Under-Secretary, answered parlamentarian questions by stating that "no UK law enforcement agencies were involved." (1) The seizure shut down around 20 Indymedia websites, an internet radio station, and other projects. The servers were returned a week later because "the court order had been complied with", but still no information is available to Indymedia as to who seized them and who now might have copies of all the public and personal information they contained.

An FBI spokesperson originally suggested to Agence France-Presse that the FBI issued a subpoena to Rackspace, but that it was "on behalf of a third country." Later he denied that the FBI had any involvement whatsoever. (2)

A few days after the seizure, a senior federal prosecutor for Geneva, Switzerland, also confirmed that she had opened a criminal investigation of Indymedia. - But that she had not asked for the servers to be seized.

A Italian judge from Bologna confirmed that she issued a request to U.S. authorities for the server's IP logs concerning certain posts published on Italy Indymedia. - But she says that she did not request the seizure of the server hardware, either.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), who is representing the interests of Indymedia, has contacted all the likely suspects in the U.S. - including the FBI, the State Department, and the Federal District Court in Texas - that could have issued the subpoena referenced in Rackspace's public October 8 statement concerning the Indymedia server. But none of them did claim responsibility for the seizure.

"Were our servers abducted by aliens?", asks Clara, an Indymedia volunteer from the Netherlands. "Two weeks have passed and we are no step closer to knowing who took our servers, why, or even on which continent they were."

The only thing that is known is what Rackspace volunteered in their statement: that they received a court order in the U.S. Efforts are now underway by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to unseal that court order.

Meanwhile, the international outcry continues. 5,000 individuals have signed on to Indymedia's solidarity declaration (solidarity.indymedia.org.uk), and numerous others continue to contact Indymedia offering their support to help insure that secret court orders and mysterious government agencies don't shut down Indymedia's websites ever again.

For more information, visit www.indymedia.org, solidarity.indymedia.org.uk, email press(a)indymedia.org, or call:

Tomasso at +39 3383903806 (Italy) Andrew at +44 788-4282-077 (UK) Hep Sano at +1-415-867-9472 (San Francisco) David Meieran at +1-412-996-4986 (Pittsburgh)

Notes to editors

(1)  http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmhansrd/cm041020/text/41020w14.htm#41020w14.html_sbhd2 Indymedia

(2)  http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/21/indymedia_home_office_denial/

(3) Indymedia is a global media network consisting of 144 autonomous Independent Media Centers that provide openly accessible newswires with the capacity for anyone to publish texts, images, audio, and video, particulary concerning political and social justice issues.

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