Now on https://www.indymedia.org.uk/ all changes now through lists….

Police Seize UK Indymedia Server (Again)¶

On 22 January 2009 an Indymedia server was seized by the Police in Manchester. The warrant was issued by a Judge to Kent Police. This was probably related to postings about the recent SHAC trial.

Kent Police had e-mailed imc-uk-contact in the morning requesting that two comments containing the address of the judge in the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) trial be removed from the site. However this information had already been quickly removed in line with IMC UK policy. The e-mail also requested information relating to the poster be retained. Indymedia as an open posting news service does not log such information about its sources.

The warrant was specifically for this one server collocated in Manchester which is just a mirror of the site. So it can only be concluded that the judge didn’t check the legality and validity of the request to remove it, and that the police wanted to attack the infrastructure.

Other sites that have been affected as a result of this seizure include London Indymedia, the global Indymedia documentation project server, la Soja Mata – an anti-GM soya campaign focusing on South American development, Transition Sheffield and a Canadian campaign against the 2010 olympics.