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Indymedia.us is happy to announce that we've managed, after nearly a year of legal action on our behalf by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), to successfully fight back against a bogus subpoena request issued by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in conjunction with a grand jury investigation. The request demanded we turn over all IP address logs for a day in June of 2008 - not only did Indymedia.us object to this blatantly illegitimate and overly broad request, but, per accepted Indymedia best practices, we do not keep such logs in the first place, in order to maximally ensure the privacy of our site users. Also troubling was the fact that the indymedia.us sysadmin who received the subpoena was also bound by its gag order provision, making her unable to discuss the legal issue with the broader network of collectives cooperating on the indymedia.us site. We're happy that the EFF was ultimately able to get this demand for silence shown to be illegitimate as well --- one can only wonder how many ISPs silently capitulate to similarly broad and unconstitutional requests.

More information: From EFF's Secret Files: Anatomy of a Bogus Subpoena --- How the Government Secretly Demanded the IP Address of Every Visitor to Political News Site Indymedia.us | Interview with Indymedia sys admin Kristina Clair | Interview with EFF lawyer Kevin Bankston | List of previous incidents of legal repression of Indymedia centers | US-Behörde wollte illegal an Nutzerdaten von indymedia.us gelangen