BoingBoing reader Micah at indymedia says:
A few minutes ago our host (Rackspace) in London received a federal order to turn over the hardware that hosts several Indymedia websites to the FBI.
Rackspace complied and handed the server over to the FBI, but they must have felt bad because they are building us a new server that will be online as soon as possible, oh and they apologized for the abruptness because they think that they are "required to comply with all federal orders of this nature". The servers hosted numerous local IMCs including Belgium and African imcs, Palestine, UK, Germany, and Brasil, Italy, Uruguay, Poland, Belgrade, Portugal, and more. We are unaware as to the reasons for this at this time. We suspect it has to do with an FBI request that we take down a post on the Nantes IMC that had a photo of some undercover Swiss police. They claimed there was threats and personal information, but there was nothing of the sort. The undercover police that were photographed on the page were photographing protesters. Rackspace is a US company, but have colocation in the UK where these servers are (err, were) located. So this is about Swiss police, on a French site, on a server in England, taken away by American federal police… can I be the first to say WTF?!
Also on the IMC servers stolen by the FBI were a lot of icecast radio stations, the Indymedia PGP public keyring and BLAG (an Anti-corporate GNU/Linux distribution with a suite of media tools designed to be used to overthrow corporate control of information and technology through community action and free software… put out by the Brixton Linux Action Group). Rackspace has been asked by the EFF for a copy of the order, but Rackspace claims they dont know if they can give it up.
I have been in contact with [Rackspace's] regional director responsible for the federal order. He has stated that [he] can not provide any information regarding the order. I am going to follow up with our law enforcement liason to verify this.
