Wednesday, October 13, 2004
Indymedia servers confiscated
Freedom of expression worldwide has been under threat since agents of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) last week seized two Internet servers hosting websites of the Independent Media Centers. In Latin America, Indymedia Brazil and Uruguay are directly affected.
"The incident resembles a Kafka novel," Pablo Ortellado of Indymedia Brazil told IPS in an e-mail interview. "Our equipment was seized and we don't exactly know when, by whom or why."
The servers confiscated on Oct. 7 were located in the UK premises of Rackspace, a U.S.-based company, and hosted 21 sites.
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Until now, nobody seems to know why Indymedia was targeted. The seizure could be related to the publication of pictures on one of its French sites, showing Swiss undercover police photographing protestors. If this suspicion is confirmed, says Ortellado, we will have witnessed the violation of civil rights on a global scale.
"Swiss police, protesting against news on a French website hosted on an English server get the American government to seize the server and take more than 20 independent media sites off-line," he says.
More.
posted by chris at 2:18 PM
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