Your password or your liberty
The laws involved aren’t new, but a somewhat worrisome use of them appears to be ongoing in the UK. Basically, a High Court Judge that handed down some tough sentences for blackmail to seven animal rights activists/extremists; following that, the Judge’s home address appears on an Indymedia forum exhorting people to contact him to let them know how they felt about it (presumably in such a way that it was clear that what was meant was for some aggro to result).
Anyhow, Indymedia deleted it when they were told about it but the police, wishing to track down the posters, asked Indymedia for the IP address of the poster, which Indymedia said they couldn’t give because the do not store IP addresses to ensure the privacy of their users. First, the server was seized. Then the owner of the contract under which the server is colocated (a colocated server is one which is owned by one person and who pays someone else to host it, providing power and internet connection, etc) was arrested. Some of the server hard disk was encrypted, as was some disks seized from the guy’s house under warrant; this is a sensible way to keep data private even from people that have physical access to the drives in question. According to the Reg story, the police haven’t told the guy to give up the encryption keys (which would allow them to decrypt the encrypted information) but apparently if they do and he refuses to comply, he can get up to five years in the clink (this power to demand decryption keys has been used on animal rights types in another case, though, since the relevant law became active in October 2007).
The implications here are that if you decide not to record IP addresses in order to preserve the privacy of your users against interests of others (people who might break into the system, or the state authorities, for example), the authorities will seize your stuff and arrest and search your technical staff. Furthermore, I’m not clear on what safeguards protect the state from misusing this power to send you to prison for preferring to keep your encrypted data private.
Most of this stuff is news to me. Indymedia are an unattractive bunch in many respects — their brand of anti-globalism irritates me mightily, as well, and we can all agree that my personal preferences are of first-order importance — and it appears that there’s violence associated with some of their users, but the apparatus being used against them in the UK appears to have all the trappings of powers that could easily be used to shut down all sorts of dissent and also the reporting of it. In away, it reminds me of the overreach in the case of Josh Wolf, a photoblogger that spent seven months in prison because he wouldn’t testify to a Federal Grand Jury about what he recorded and saw at a San Francisco demonstration that turned violent and in which the Federal jurisdiction was sourced in the fact that the San Francisco Police Department, who had a car set ablaze, receive some Federal funding. The holding and dissemination of information deserves protection even in the face of fears about terrorism and other violence.