The Poet's Eye – 10/14/2004

	The Poet's Eye commentary by Lightning Rod the Poets' Eye is skeptical without being cynical, innocent without being naive and critical without being judgmental

	Leggo My Server for release on 10-14-04 It is easy to understand why the large media outlets have been ignoring the story of the seizure several days ago of servers belonging to an Anglo/American company in England called Rackspace. These servers were used by Indymedia.org which is a world wide independent media organization that was formed in the late 1990's to directly report on events on the ground at IMF and G8 protests. As you probably haven't noticed due to the dearth of mainstream media coverage of these protests, they many times become quite spirited. The tossing of bottles and rocks is not unknown. Wherever the G8 meets these days you will see the erection of chainlink fences and legions of cops in riot gear. My first encounter with Indymedia.org was during the IMF meeting in DC last year. This reporter lost his taste for direct head cracking and the smell of tear gas sometime around August of 1968 (Democratic Convention in Chicago.) So, even though I was in Washington during these protests, I elected to stay out of the areas where the rubber was meeting the road but I wanted to follow the action, so I tuned in to the DC Indymedia outlet. There were minute by minute accounts of the demonstration events placed on line. "The police are now herding demonstrators into cages on K Street..." this was live coverage coming directly from eyewitnesses who were reporting via handheld computers. It's a revolution in news coverage and it's easy to see how this might be unsettling to the major media companies and the governments who are in bed with them. According to The Guardian: American authorities have shut down 20 independent media centres by seizing their British-based webservers. On Thursday a court order was issued to Rackspace, an American-owned web hosting company in Uxbridge, Middlesex, forcing it to hand over two servers used by Indymedia. The websites affected by the seizure span 17 countries. The current brou hah hah began when a French outlet of Indymedia, Nantes Indymedia, published pictures of two Swiss undercover policemen on the site. It is not unknown at the G8 demonstrations for police to insert agent provocateurs among the protesters. This is an established cop tactic. Our own FBI did it during the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement. And one thing that secret police really hate is getting outed. It makes it harder to do all manner of illegal things while blaming the behavior on their adversaries. So, when Indymedia published the pictures of the Swiss narcs, the attorney general of Geneva, Daniel Zappelli opened a judicial investigation in the framework of the Mutual Judicial Aid Treaty (MLAT), by which the participating countries assist "in investigations on international terrorism, abductions and money laundering." It is not clear to this reporter just what political protest and the posting of news on the internet have to do with terrorism, abductions and money laundering but this is the authority that was cited to engineer the rather murky deal that migrated from Swiss to Italian cops then to a court order issued in LA and finally to the seizure of Rackspace servers in England by American secret police. The internet is the closest thing we have ever had to free speech. News can move from the bottom up, not just strictly from the top down as the oligarchs would prefer. Since the cop class can't seem to figure out a way to shut the whole internet down, which I'm sure is a choice they would choose if it were an option, they will try to selectively intimidate and harass those who are causing them the most trouble. This is the case with Indymedia.org. The only way they'll get my server is to pry it from my cold, dead internet connection.
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