The seizure of 20 servers for the alternative Independent Media Center on Oct. 7 has drawn the attention of the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the interest of government officials in Great Britain and other European countries. It is still unclear exactly why the servers, which were returned on Oct 12, were seized in the first place. More here from an AP wire story and ongoing updates from Indymedia.
“The significance of this is that apparently, a foreign government, based on a secret process, can have the U.S. government silence independent news sources without ever having to answer to the American people about how that kind of restraint could happen,” said Keith Bankston, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which drafted the motion. “Every press organization should be asking, ‘Am I next?'”
Correction
There were two hard drives turned over to the legal authorities, not twenty. It was twenty to thirty web sites that were affected.
More and more this is looking as if it’s a case of really lousy customer service. At the moment I’d say that Rackspace acted precipitously and turned over the hard drives without giving their clients the chance to back-up and create alternate sites.
Re:Correction
Yeah, I wondered why THEY didn’t backup the drives themselves. It does seem that there are more questions than answers still. The volokh web site doesn’t do much to help either, really, as it’s almost entirely conjecture.
Re:Correction
They probably did their work directly on the web pages. What I do is to update the files on my own computer and then twice a month I upload the changed files to the host.