Last Straw

Pomegranate, an admin at flag.blackened.net, has been ordered by the FBI to sub­mit IP info on two sep­ar­ate incid­ents hav­ing to do with sub­do­mains hos­ted on flag.blackened.net, both in regard to claimed or threatened respons­ib­il­ity for acts of pro­pa­ganda by the deed. Essen­tially they’re order­ing him to dob in someone who has been mouth­ing off. Of course that someone could be any­one, includ­ing a spook.

Pomegranate saw his choices and took them as follows:

1. Do not com­ply with the wishes of the FBI. This will most likely lead to the seizure of flag and a com­prom­ise of all the sites and inform­a­tion online. It will prob­ably also lead to me being imprisoned, I would guess. I per­son­ally do not fear this, but I am the sole sup­port for my wife and infant daugh­ter. There can be no doubt we would prob­ably lose our home as a result.

2. Com­ply with the wishes of the FBI, provide the IP addresses, and count on the fact that I will catch a lot of heat and hatred from my com­rades in the anarch­ist move­ment worldwide.

Though it pains me to com­ply with the State in any man­ner, I have to choose option #2. The people who have fool­ishly com­prom­ised us all will shoulder the bur­den for their selfish actions. Frankly folks, they know bet­ter — we all know better.

I have to admit to being dis­ap­poin­ted. Maybe what’s even worse is the num­ber of those clam­mer­ing over them­selves to com­fort Pomegranate in his decision. Com­fort, as it ever is for those of us in the West, appears to be the object­ive. What use is all this talk­ing about a bet­ter world if we are not pre­pared to stand up for it with our lives? That we get to con­tinue to bare per­petual “moral wit­ness” to the world around us?

In any case, put­ting such cri­ti­cism aside, and bear­ing in mind the stu­pid­ity (or spooks) that Pomegranate is now hav­ing to deal with, it seems to me the biggest les­son to come out of this mess is that IP logs shouldn’t have been kept in the first place.

Update: Pomegranate writes:

none of the inform­a­tion provided is from an http log. when you post to phpbb, medi­awiki, geeklog etc. etc., your ip is recor­ded with your post. it’s not a log, it’s built into the soft­ware. admins can see it.

if you post here anonym­ously, i can still see the IP you used every time i read the mes­sage. it’s per­man­ent and it’s not some­thing i can change without chan­ging to dif­fer­ent software.