Party Vibe

TBH I’m amazed indymedia lasted this long without something like this happening… and I don’t think there’s any real legal case for the FBIs actions but its more an attempt to spread FUD amongst the progressive movement, and to look for (or plant?) information “linking progressive activist movements with trrrsm” as Dubya would say..

BTW the FBI have been doing ops like this for some time; albeit mostly to disrupt hacker/warez groups which operate across national borders, and more recently to shut down “al-quaeda” friendly websites.

At least a lot of indymedia still appears to be up and all this does is show America’s true colours – so much for the 1st Amendment…

On a similar note I reckon we are increasingly heading towards a regulated and censored internet if hosting companies and ISPs can be leaned on in this way; although the net can be made up of small interconnected nodes (the original idea) nowadays much of its power is consolidated in the resources of a few large telecoms and infrastructure companies who are fairly likely to cave into the demands of Uncle Sam if the FCC threaten to revoke their licenses!

Let’s look at the stark facts; the same companies which stop people looking at pr0n or rinsing MP3s from peoples work internet links are hapilly working with less than democratic governments such as China and Singapore to provide filtered broadband connections to the home. It would in fact be fairly trivial (from a technical POV) to apply content filtering at ISP level on some ISPs ….

Perhaps its time to “reclaim the internet?”

I don’t really think the sites serving the rave scene are going to be that heavily targeted – its not as politically active as many think!

Cops also know that closing down party sites would not stop parties; (otherwise they would have tried it years ago) and they are perhaps “better alive than dead” for intelligence gathering purposes. Even though people are careful about locations I’ve seen other info being given away as people try to “score points” in the heat an acrimonious debate…

Although there is a crossover and most ravers (not all though!) support progresssive political movements, much of the energy on this scene is dissipated through the after-effects of drug use.

IME about 70% of people at parties couldn’t care less about the political issues (until parties in their areas get violently shut down by the police) and often avoid both conventional and alternative news media as its “too depressing”, particularly on comedowns.

That said its worth having these backups anyway in case of technical problems and other events that may lead to this sites data having to be restored or swiftly moved elsewhere.

Originally posted by USE
this is some scary gubbins- the first hard evidence i’ve seen about policing the net – which should NEVER be allowed…i am in favour of free speech in all forms… so long as everyone has equal power-

thats a big problem – everyone does not have equal power on the net. I’ve been using it since the very early days and it was an idealistic vision in the early 1990s that this would the case – 10 years later the reality is very different.

Despite attempts to change things, it is clear to anyone who has spent a lot of time on the net that it the so-called “net community” is male-dominated with a rather large proportion of sociopathic types; the net is used as much (if not more) for spreading racism, misogyny and other hate and anger as anything positive, as well as a myriad of other crimes and other incitements to violence.

There is no need for the level of heavy handed enforcement against indymedia – OTOH there does need to be some monitoring of this common resource for public safety. I’ve known friends to have received serious personal threats following internet arguments… its also easy enough for an angry or sociopathic person to flood a message board or even crash its servers if they are that determined, thus stifling any “debate”.

Incidentally both SJ and PV have been attacked on occasions, when PV got turned over a lot of party crews websites were destroyed. To this day I can’t work out why people would do this, there was a time when hackers had a code of conduct..

Consider the road system as an analogy; like it or not we need traffic lights, markings, signs, and traffic cops to stop people being killed to often.

But we do not need checkpoints which stop all people in red cars or green mountain bikes from proceeding..