Servers for North Shore Counter-Info and Montreal Counter-Info Seized by Dutch Police -- Both Sites Down

from https://raddle.me/f/Anarchism/128874

We have learned that Dutch police have seized the servers of the NoState tech collective, which hosts North Shore Counter-Info as well as Montreal Counter-Info and several other anarchist sites. We know it is in the context of a criminal investigation but not much else.

North Shore Counter-Info is inaccessible for the time being, but the project is not dead and we will be migrating to new servers in the coming days. In the meantime, we will still be accepting submissions by email at northshore at riseup dt net and we will repost them on our twitter (@nscounterinfo) and on raddle.me/f/Canada.

Although this most recent attack on anarchist online infrastructure is disappointing, it is not surprising. Our goal as a project is to allow for communication between anarchists across Ontario and more widely, with the goal of developing our ideas and practices to build a world without domination and based on autonomy. This simple goal will always be opposed by those in power and our task now is to find ways to carry on, as anarchists have always done in the face of repression.

We will post further updates on both those platforms as we receive them. In the meantime, it is useful to share this update widely.

-North Shore Counter-Info collective


Dutch police have seized the server hosting several anarchist projects, including Montreal Counter-information, as part of a criminal investigation. This is the reason that our website is currently not accessible. We don't have more information at this time. Our first objective has always been and will always be to provide a secure platform for anarchists of our region to share their ideas and practices.

La police hollandaise a saisi le serveur hébergeant plusieurs projets anarchistes, y compris Montréal Contre-information, dans le cadre d'une enquête criminelle. C'est la raison pour laquelle notre site est présentement inaccessible. Nous n'avons pas plus d'informations en ce moment. Notre objectif premier a toujours été et sera toujours de fournir une plateforme sécuritaire pour les anarchistes de notre région pour diffuser leurs idées et leurs pratiques.

-MTL Counter-info

There are 8 Comments

Act For Freedom Now! and 325 are down as well. From what's been heard on the grapevine, this is an international repressive operation manifesting itself.

Who would have thought that a soft cyber-totalitarian regime like NL would storm the NoState servers where no one's looking!? /s What was the idea to centralize servers in such an awful country? And no mirrors? WTF

Tho my biggest question on top is "Why now?". Europol could have done it at any point in the last 10 years or so. Autistici might be the next target.

Wonder if this is connected to the UK arrest.

What strategies might work in terms of server hosting? There aren't really any liberal democracies left to host in. We could try to set them up in countries hostile to the west, but a lot of these are anti-anarchist. Then there's "bulletproof" web hosts and Tor. And finally, the new distributed hosting systems people keep developing and nobody's using yet.

I got the feeling tech geeks aren't as intelligent as their online display of arcane language and code mastery makes us believe... or perhaps they just don't think out of the box enough. Why is self-hosting through distributed (or federated) services still not being done on a large scale for such a thing as insurgent anarchist sites? Also when Wordpress was still big I had a few radical blogs put up there and they never got shot down. It was possible to log in through Tor and I still didn't go to jail for running these sites.

Let's look at how pirate sites like TPB has managed to stay up all these years... they didn't had it always easy and they literally had to move their hosting to like the Bahamas at some point I think. The big data servers in Netherlands are all controlled by the NSA... the country's one of Europol's and NATO's bastions. Doesn't matter how NL is "liberal democratic"; that's just a nice political cover for keeping the people pacified, and HELL this is a pacified society over there. Clandestine squats got raided and shut down with near-zero opposition for years.

Normally, an encrypted server is useless in resisting raids because it is running when the Enemy arrives and disk keys can be extracted from RAM by a variety of means. Some years back I came up with a potential countermeasure, based on the fact that when power is cut the contents of RAM "decay" in seconds to minutes. This will NOT work with any cloud server, you need a physical box in a space you control.

Pick a windowless room to be your server room, with only one way in and out. That door will be rigged with a trap that cuts power while making the raid team shit in their pants-and DELAY. Pressure plates in the floor can be rigged to short-circuit both the AC mains supply and the UPS (uninterrruptable power supply). Shorting the mains will probably make a loud snap while plunging the room into darkness. This can be accented with say, a photoflash bulb and any kind of noisemaker that makes a loud boom. The team entering the room hits a pressure plate and is met with a flash and a bang, followed by darkness. They shit their pants, and then have to decide when it is safe to enter the room. They are now very nervious. By the time they get to the box, the contents of RAM are long gone and they have no way to recover any information whatsoever. Hell, it might be an hour or more before they grow back enough courage to go back in the server room!

Meanwhile, the backup server in another, similar location goes online immediately. If raids are repeated, you might have to go .onion acces only to conceal the location and halt the attacks, but that has to become common enough to force readers to get used to using Tor if they want news or you get cut off from most of your audience.

yourself without triggering the booby trap? Or is the idea that you just hope the server has no issues and you don't need to access the hardware?

Some commenters here definitely have no brains for themselves.

Shows how only a fool like you would set up a booby trap they can't secretly deactivate from the outside.

Any of the methods used to disarm alarm systems could be used to turn the shorting pressure plates off when you yourself need to enter the room. A particular set of settings of some dummy light switches as a combination lock would work well and not be visually evident. A fake keyswitch on anything else that actually is the real switch for the pressure plate circuit could also be used.

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