It's all getting very real. The administrator of flag.blackened.net, a major anarchist internet host, has gone public with a harrowing account of FBI thuggery.
According to the report on their discussion forums, two comments were posted to subdomains hosted by the server, including Infoshop.org, which claimed responsibility for "propaganda of the deed." Although the administrator "Dave" is under some kind of government gag order, he did say this: "Both incidents involve topics which are completely out of line for consideration here at flag and really I can only view them in two ways. Either people are simply ignorant about the murderous history of the FBI, or, as is my belief in one case, they are trying to make flag vulnerable to government intrusion."
Under threat of imprisonment, the administrator appears to be leaning towards cooperation with the FBI. He is the sole provider for his family and is afraid of losing his home. He has also chosen to go public with this decision. Regardless of the right or wrong in his cooperation with the FBI political investigation, the administrator must be commended for his public honesty about the situation.
"I feel like a coward and traitor to my comrades, even in the face of what is essentially a coerced decision. I'm the last one who will criticize or disagree with any of you who want to deride me. I'm also aware that this will probably cause quite a few of you to lose faith in me, flag, and it's subdomains. This can't be avoided and it's something I weighed into my decision. I post this mainly to inform you all and give you opportunity to make your own decisions as to whether I've handled this correctly and whether you wish to use flag or it's subdomains in the future."
Infoshop.org, the Institute for Anarchist Studies and the Institute for Social Ecology are all hosted by this server. There are also significant international anarchist sites and archives.
Government coercion is real. That said, concern for personal property is not a justification for cooperating with political police. Just because it is understandable does not mean it is justified or acceptable. If these are the times we are living in, it's time to get straight on the basics. Don't talk. Comrades must look out for each other, and that includes caring for the family of people who go to prison. It's been done before by people in harder situations that we've had to face yet. Nobody said this would be easy.
Web sites are sources of *public* information, if there is private data on the server that's a problem and this should be a message to all administrators that private data (such as IP addresses in logs) should be scrubbed.
If aliens come and grab your server in the night it doesn't matter if you cooperate, be sure your server is clean!
see http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Sysadmin/ApacheLogsWithoutIPs for basic info
Posted by: Jon | April 01, 2005 at 10:52 AM