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[The Blogging of the President]
by Ian Welsh

On October 7th the hard drives from two Indymedia servers in the UK were seized. They have since been returned but here’s the interesting thing - to this day we don’t know why they were seized. The company running the servers, Rackspace, has been forbidden by court order to say - and Indymedia has never been told. The UK government claims they had nothing to do with it - all that is known is that the FBI was behind it.

The two possibilities that leap to mind are a terrorism related investigation or a money laundering one, with hard drives seized to find information on people who were allegedly communicating through Indymedia.

But if there’re are principles of a just legal system it’s these - you have a right to know the charges against you; you have a right to face your accusers and there can be no punishment without the accused having their day in court.

“Trust us” law enforcement is a contradiction in terms. There can be no justice without transparency and due process and laws that mandate secrecy are almost never justified (and are never, ever, justified without automatic sunshine provisions so that people know they will eventually have to air their dirty laundry.)

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