Five years of Indymedia linksunten

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From the 24th to 26th of January the 13th reunion of Indymedia linksunten will take place at the Autonomous Centre KTS Freiburg. If you would like to participate in the semi-public part of the meeting please send an e-mail to our contact address linksunten at indymedia dot org or even better an encrypted email to linksunten at lists dot immerda dot ch. You can find our public pgp key on the linksunten contact page.

 

Indymedia linksunten is a vibrant website that is moderated by real people. We hope that more people will help us with the daily moderation work in the future. According to Alexa, five years after its launch linksunten.indymedia.org is the second-most visited Indymedia website worldwide after athens.indymedia.org. The amount of work is rising and we need your help and active participation in the moderation process!

 

Due to the high quantity of daily users the financial demands have increased as well. Despite our previous calls for donations [SPE] only very few people and political projects have contributed to the funding of linksunten's infrastructure. Therefore, we ask you once more forthrightly: do organise fundraising events and donate the money for bandwidth and infrastructure of Indymedia linksunten! Please get in touch with us and help May First/People Link and Tachanka!

 

We are really excited about the big range of topics and movements within the radical left that make up Indymedia linksunten. We think of anonymity as an important precondition for free speech, but unfortunately the authorities don't share this point of view. As they are regularly trying to identify authors of Indymedia linksunten we try to implement plausible deniability. We cannot identify authors ourselves, since we disabled logging of IP addresses on three cascaded points at our network stack. Our web accelerator Varnish has all logging disabled, at the web server Apache a module removes all IP addresses and we configured our Content management system Drupal not to save IP addresses, as well.

 

We work on protecting our users by technical means. Since about two years, Indymedia linksunten can only be reached by using an encrypted connection. As the Snowden Documents showed, Perfect Forward Secrecy is very important when using TLS encryption and some encryption algorithms are considered insecure. This is why we updated the configuration of our server to implement those requirements. But, for example, many internet cafés only provide outdated software. So we have to make compromises – the website has to remain useable, after all.

 

But there are many more possible ways of being attacked by the repression apparatus. One especially sophisticated example was a raid following the police investigation against a Nazi forum called thiazi.net. The German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) used a faked phone call in the middle of the night on June 14th, 2012 to lure the Nazi chief of thiazi.net into booting and decrypting his computer. Right at this very moment special police forces burst into his flat and confiscated the decrypted computer.

 

We advise you strongly not to rely solely on our precautions to secure your privacy. Protect yourself by using TOR and VPN, encrypt your disk drives, email and chat communication and use Linux. Whether you're editing an Advent calendar, publish a claim of responsibility or a documentation of your last campaign: be careful and don't get yourself caught!

 

¡El bien más preciado es la libertad!

 

Indymedia linksunten

Communiqué from 10.01.2014