Attorneys for the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed last week to unseal a secret federal court order that allowed an Internet news collective’s American servers to be seized.
The EFF said they believe the order to seize Independent Media Center’s (Indymedia) servers originated in a western Texas federal court. The seizures involved hard drives from the London offices of U.S.-based host Rackspace. Indymedia believes the seizure was ordered by the U.S. Justice Department at the alleged behest of Swiss and Italian prosecutors after stories on member related news Web sites were said to have irked the government.
"When a secret order results in the unconstitutional silencing of media, the public has a right to know what happened," said EFF attorney Kurt Opsahl, announcing the motion. "Freedom of the press is an essential part of the First Amendment, and our government must show it had a compelling state interest to order such an extreme intrusion to the rights of the publisher and the public."
The filing said there is a clear, compelling interest for the public and the news media to learn “under what authority the government was able unilaterally to prevent Internet publishers from exercising their First Amendment rights." The filing claimed such secret orders circumvented due process and blocked any legitimate redress.
"Silencing Indymedia with a secret order is no different than censoring any other news Web site, whether it's USA Today or your local paper," said another EFF attorney, Kevin Bankston. "If the government is allowed to ignore the Constitution in this case, then every news publisher should be wondering, 'Will I be silenced next?'"
Rackspace declined to reveal the seizure order contents as applied to them, the EFF said, the company citing a gag order that would not allow it to confirm which court handed down the order. That seizure blocked over 20 sites and over 10 streaming radio feeds connected to Indymedia.
The EFF said the seizures were pursued by a foreign government, though which government isn’t yet known. Several U.S. government agencies including the FBI, the State Department, the Justice Department, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Antonio, have denied responsibility for the Indymedia takedowns, EFF said, while the group said Swiss and Italian prosecutors acknowledged investigating Indymedia-printed articles but denied asking for the server seizures.
The server seizures affected sites serving Uruguay, Poland, Massachusetts, Italy, Yugoslavia, Portugal, Brazil, Britain, and Germany. Indymedia has said the server hard drives were returned on October 13, but that a near-total information blackout remained in place. The collective also said they don’t know for certain whether similar seizures might happen again in the near future.
A senior Swiss prosecutor has since confirmed launching a probe into Indymedia but denied asking for the collective’s servers to be seized, while an Italian judge confirmed asking American authorities for server logs regarding certain items published on Indymedia’s Italian sites, but she, too, denied asking for server seizures.
