The servers have been returned, but still with no information about what was going on or who actually ordered the computers be seized. Go here to sign a petition in solidarity with Indymedia arguing against this violation of press freedom.
As a journalist and editor, I abhor this blatant disregard for press freedom and the implications of this growing cavalier attitude the US has to safeguards designed to protect us from a police state. First they torture and ‘disappear’ people, now they want to control our ability to reveal that repulsive behaviour to the world. Shame on them.
I’m not kidding about the disappearing either. I’m currently reading Seymour Hersh’s Chain of Command: The Road from 9⁄11 to Abu Ghraib. It’s very full on. Hersh is the guy who revealed the My Lai massacre back in the Vietnam War days and then he broke the Abu Ghraib story. He’s an amazing journalist, one of those guys that made me want to become a journalist (the others being Woodward and Bernstein of Watergate fame).
There’s heaps more to tell: I just got back from the Living and Loving in Diversity conference where I presented my first paper out of my thesis. It went really, really well. It was pretty provocative and I think I challenged a few people, but the questions after the session were vibrant and interesting and Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli, who is one of the organisers and a fantastic woman who interviewed me years ago for research she was doing on partners of bisexual men, thought it went fabulously too. She gushed a lot which was just so flattering. That will now be published as part of the conference proceedings, so that’ll be my first publication out of the thesis too.
And then a bunch of us went to dinner, including Maria, an old acquaintance from Sydney named Kali, and this stunning Spanish transguy named Juan-Alejandro… Lots of red wine, lots of good conversation.