The great server heist

Great many funny & ridiculous things have occurred in this our Carpathian Jamahiriya these past few days, most of which were a result of someone’s stupidity or incompetence, as usual. I am not going to enumerate them here, suffice to say that laws were proposed & passed, prime minister hath spoken (on numerous occasions) and the Fist Lady outdone her moronic husband by suggesting that playing golf is ideal to keep children away from drugs, crime and other nasty deeds, e.g. watching TV.

But by far the most brazenly stupid action of last week (as well as the most noteworthy because of the reaction it provoked) was the police seizure of servers of a private IT firm in connection with a year old hacker attack on the Slovak National Security Bureau I briefly mentioned here. By seizing all the servers (and the technical incompetence they displayed in the course of this seizure) they violated the rights of thousands of clients of the webhosting firm and filled the Slovak 'blogosphere' with critical amount of ire.

The rub of the matter:

Slovak police raided the offices and seized ten web servers of the IT company Websupport on June 27. According to the Sme daily, the company hosts the websites of 3,500 clients, or almost three percent of the Slovak internet. Clients were left without internet connections and were unable to send or receive emails. Losses were reported particularly by online shopping sites.
The order came from the Special Prosecution branch as part of the final phase of an investigation into hackers' attacks on the National Security Bureau's (NBÚ) network in April 2006. The police hope to find some evidence of the attacks on the servers.
The company has protested the police action and announced on its webpage that it does not know the reasons behind the police raid. The company wrote that it considers it to be unbelievable that police have seized servers of a commercial web-hosting company without warning. The company had still not resumed normal operations by midday on June 28.

This action caused an unprecedented amount of activity in the Slovak 'blogosphere'. Many bloggers were clients of the firm in question and were unable to voice their frustration, but good old blogger solidarity kicked in and police incompetence in this case became the most debated topic of the week. Until one blogger suggested (SK) an impromptu protest, throwing old hard-discs, keyboards, cables, CDs etc. at the steps of the Ministry of the Interior. Impromptu soon turned into promptu as other people joined in with their suggestions and already a day later, Friday 29th, The Ministry witnessed an orderly protest (SK) (some photos).

Thus the first great Slovak blogosphere venturing into teh real world on record came about. (As luck would have it, I was away at the time and could not attend. Bugger!) Simultaneously a petition protesting the police actions was started. Though it’s great to see web-based activity on this scale finally happening in Slovakia, it remains to be seen what it actually achieves.

Slovak Keystone Kops’ spokesman, befuddled what the fuss is all about, said that the police actions were in accordance with the law. They really don’t get it, do they? As one netizen commenter observed, it very well might have been in accordance with the law, but is the law in accordance with 21st century? It’s not about being unlawful, but about being inconsiderate, impractical, ineffective, heavy-handed, rude, incompetent, negligent, damaging, burdensome, vexing, and, well, obtuse. Slovak Police: to patronise and annoy.