Free press hints that Internet could be shut down as tight as Big Media have been evident. Dan Gilmor, Lawrence Lessig, the EFF and others suggested that it was only a matter of time before Big Media or Big Government put the squeeze on the "free' Internet. Here it is. The story is just breaking, ironically enough on the same day as final debate of this USA presidential race. The news in brief is that the F.B.I. issued an order to Rackspace, the ISP for indymedia, and took away several of its servers. This took down some Internet radio stations and some indymedia sites are down. The servers were physically located in the U.K. The order was served on Rackspace, so indymedia doesn't know exactly why the servers were seized. The story is breaking across the indymedia sites, and in slashdot and other tech publications, however it is also beginning to enter Big Media in Australia, U.K. and Canada. Will the press in the U.S. present this story or just ignore it? Time will tell. The International Federation of Journalists has spoken out about this action, claiming it is harassment, not law-enforcement. In recent months, the FBI tried to get indymedia in Nantes to remove a photo of an undercover agent from its server. The New York police served indymedia with subpoenas designed to prevent problems with the Republican National convention. Another brush with the Feds " may be linked to a September 30 court case in San Jose California, in which Indymedia San Francisco and two students at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania successfully opposed an application by Diebold Election Systems Inc to remove documents claiming to reveal flaws in the design of electronic voting machines which are due to be used widely in the forthcoming US Presidential election." says the IFJ statement. International Federation of Journalist's statement about the server confiscation. Type "indymedia rackspace server fbi" into Google news to follow the story as it moves from the e-world into the blogosphere and beyond. OOPs, while I was posting, the first mainstream media story was posted Star-Telegram in Texas.