It would seem that after posting an article offering advice to students on how to make getting arrested after committing criminal acts the site Fitwatch has been taken down at the request of the police. Unlike Dizzy I don’t think Fitwatch consider all police to be “brutal bastards” and quite liked what they were doing. Overt surveillance of peaceful demonstrations does have a chilling effect on protest, and the compilation of dossiers of protesters who haven’t broken any laws is not acceptable. So hampering police operations when they’re doing this, and playing them at their own game seems fair enough to me. According to reports at The Register the police made a fairly usual request to the ISP to take the site down and the ISP complied – the ISP could have asked for a court order but that hits the bottom line so few ISP’s would bother, especially when you’re competing in the cheap hosting market (£1.95 a month isn’t worth fighting over).
Unlike the claim by IndyMedia this isn’t an attempt to silence criticism of the police, if it had been that they’d have done it months ago if not longer – nor would I say (as others have described it) is it tantamount to the censorship in China. From the cached content of the page that caused problems it seems a quite reasonable, albeit misguided, attempt to prevent the site providing advice to wanted persons on how to avoid capture. The reported response of fitwatch that:
“Nothing in that post [giving guidance to student protesters] has not been said before on our blog or on other sites”
Is really rather silly, as they were offering advice to an explicit group of suspects, rather than general advice, and whilst it could all be gleaned from CSI and the like, and other web sites that isn’t the same as explicitly offering advice to a distinct group of people. Also quite frankly their defence is pretty much:
“Well other people do it”
which didn’t even work in kindergarten. Their further saying that it was “tantamount in my view to a lawyer saying to their client: you can say ‘no comment’ in the police interview.“, misses the rather relevant matter of legal privilege. Mind if any of the students involved actually need a web site to spell out such basic advice to them, then they really shouldn’t be at university. All that said I think the police were mistaken to get the site taken down as the information is now even more wide spread and the usual “Barbara Streisand” effect is in action. The take away lesson for people running websites though is that if you think you’re going to annoy the police use a decent hosting provider in another jurisdiction and also use a domain from another jurisdiction.
That aside as I said previously if these students were committing these acts for political purposes surely the point would be far better made by standing by their actions and having a day in court as a political activist rather than waiting to be dragged there like any other thug?
Update Just going to paste a comment I made over at Longrider‘s blog.
“To be honest I’m amazed it’s still news worthy, you could get pretty much any site/blog you like shut down in the UK, thanks to the Lawrence Geoffrey case (years ago) and our wonderful libel laws and the like. The ISP/Hosting provider counts as a publisher once they’ve been notified by the police/lawyer/anyone that they’re hosting something which might be a bit naughty.
They then have the choice to fight it and be liable, or pull the site, whilst you contact people (or not)to check the facts. If you’re charging a fiver a month for hosting guess which makes economic sense. Pretty much any ISP will do the same thing based on any complaint from anyone – at least if they’re based in the UK.”
But also add that I’m rather surprised that more pressure groups on all sides aren’t getting sites/blogs pulled down left right and centre ultra cheap hosting makes it a comparatively trivial thing to do.
