Question Wrangles
I have been trying to put another question to the Home Office to ask directly which UK law enforcement agencies were involved in the Indymedia server seizure. The answer to this may be “none” which would be revealing in itself and worth getting on the record. This led to several phone calls yesterday to establish whether such a question would be “in order”. For this to be so it has to not be “sub judice”, i.e. subject to ongoing action in the law courts.
The Parliamentary clerks have put a call in to the Home Office to confirm whether this is the case or not and subject to being given the all clear the question will be accepted. I hope that this action in itself will have stirred things up a bit as the Home Office will now be aware of the Parliamentary interest in the case and will have to do the research.
Keep up the good work, Richard!
This case is much bigger than Indymedia but has implications for civil rights in the UK and the US and is of concern to anybody running a web site anywhere in the world.
United Kingdom’s National High Tech Crime Unit – they deny any involvement.
Since they are the UK expert’s on seizing computers legally and preserving computer forensic evidence, it is unlikely that the local London Metropolitan Police would have been involved without them, especially as these are servers rather than home or office PCs.
If the disk “cloning” was done by Rackspace employees and/or the FBI, then the results are almost certainly worthless as evidence which will stand up in a British court of law. It is therefore very unlikely that it can be used in Italian or Swiss courts either.