**ominous official attacks on indymedia

See below for reports and links to information about the

recent campaign of official US government harassment of

Indymedia.

I'm sure I'm not the only one to find the reports of raids,

censorship, and gag orders against Indymedia extremely

disturbing. I can't fault Sherry Herndon and her colleagues

at Seattle IMC for presumably complying with their legal

advisors and abiding by these gag orders, and I trust that

they are receiving excellent legal counsel and defense from

the Center for Constitutional Rights, and lately, I hear,

from EPIC. I suppose cannot, afterall, arbitrarily demand

that someone risk months in jail for contempt of court.

However, this cooperation with ostensible prior restraint

threatens to enormously erode confidence in indymedia as a

source of uncensored information. As someone inspired by the

principles that indymedia stands for, and a new indymedia

worker myself, I look forward to hearing a complete airing

of the matter, hopefully at the upcoming Project Censored

conference in San Francisco, which many progressive and

alternative media activists will attend.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Source: http://urbana.indymedia.org/active/news/

FBI Raid of Seattle Indymedia Center Confirmed

At 10:17 EST late Saturday night a sketchy report of an FBI

raid at the Seattle IMC rippled across Indymedia web sites

across the continent and was reported on the live streaming

radio station out of the Quebec CMAQ/Indymedia Center. This

first report erroneously said that FBI agents came with

a warrant for the arrest of the person who holds the

registration for the indymedia.org domain name. Not long

thereafter all mention of the raid was missing from the

Global Indymedia FTAA report page where it had originally

appeared. However the report lasted long enough to spawn

repostings of the news along with conjecture and debate

about the reason for the raid and conspiracy theories

about why the report of the raid was removed.

On Sunday morning the U-C IMC Tech Team received an e-mail,

apparently from the Global Indymedia web team, requesting

that we remove any mention of the raid from our front

page and replace it with the following message that had

appeared on several other IMC sites: "Notice: Everything

is fine at the Seattle IMC. There are no problems with

operations of any IMC. We will keep you posted on any

further developments." (Note: most of the IMC websites are

hosted out of Seattle, and therefore their web team was

able to post this message themselves to most websites. The

U-C IMC hosts its own website locally, and so our local

intervention is necessary to make a post to our front

page features).

Tuesday's Seattle Post-Intelligencer cleared up the

confusion, reporting that an FBI raid had indeed happened,

stemming from official security plans for the Summit

of the Americas that had been stolen and allegedly

posted on a Seattle-based IMC site. According to the

Post-Intelligencer Seattle IMC were unable to comment on

the situation due to a court order. In response to the

situation the Progressive Review published a quick comment

calling the lack of "further notice" from the Seattle or

any other IMC on the raid a "disturbing development."