When I was an Indymedia mirror operator I used to get weekly calls from concerned police officers worried about “dangerous content” on “my site”. It’s the nature of the project that it attracts all kinds of people who often post very foolish things in public view, however I’ve noticed that police find dealing with IM very confusing and this makes normally sensible investigators try some very foolish things:
Recently Kent Police confiscated one of IndyMedia’s servers because they believed it contained information pertaining to some threatening comments posted by an animal-rights activist. They had previously approached the server’s operator with a request for information – this request was denied not out of malice but simply because the information did not exist on that computer.
The police grabbed the sever based on the theory that all web-servers generate log-files and that all log-files contain a list of IP addresses of visitors to the site. This, they believed, might be used as evidence to discover the identity of the rogue activist. There are a number of flaws in this theory:
Firstly, the standard IndyMedia configuration requires that web-logging is switched off. There are no logs.
Of course this is done on purpose: IndyMedia want to preserve their reader’s anonymity. They also want to prevent the long-running mirror-servers from filling up with gigabytes of useless web-logs. Even if logging were enabled it is unlikely that there would be any useful information beyond what police have already seen on IndyMedia’s public web-pages.
Secondly, the machine used to generate the content which has so irked Kent’s finest is unlikely to have been the same machine from which the page was eventually accessed. The machine they confiscated is likely to be one of the hundred IndyMedia mirrors worldwide. The mirrors are an international network of computers donated by supporters which exist to distribute the IndyMedia content around the world. Any machine plucked at random would typically contain content which originated elsewhere. It would be impossible to determine who or where that content originally came from by looking at the content because that information is not stored.
Unfortunately the consequence of this confiscation will be the opposite of what the police intended: Since IndyMedia has no central editorial board, other IMC groups internationally are free to mirror what they like from the UK. Usually an attempt to censor any part of IndyMedia meets with a dramatic increase in the amount of international mirroring, effectively putting the content out of reach of both British police and UK based IndyMedia editors. Once this happens there will be nothing that anybody in the UK can do that will cause the content to be taken-down.
There is another, much easier way to deal with this problem. Indymedia does have an editorial policy and will usually remove obviously illegal content. You just have to ask them to remove content. The editorial moderation channels are public forums whose addresses are listed on the IndyMedia sites and contrary to popular belief the IMC edtors have better things to do than to pick fights with police. If properly notified offending content can be removed in less than 24 hours and everbody stays happy.
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