Netherlands: Police threatens websitehost without court order

[PRESS RELEASE] – Thursday evening, september 27th, the Utrecht police called PUSCII, the hoster facilitating the Bikefest 2012 website. In this call the hoster was put under pressure to take the site offline. The officer mentioned he had a court order to take the site down as it was calling out to disturb the peace. No such order was ever shown.

Bikefest is an event focused on durability, bicycles and ‘Do It Yourself’ bikerepair and maintenance. The fourth edition of this event was planned to be held in Utrecht for the first time. Previous editions in Scheveningen and Amsterdam have never led to any troubles, nor did they disturb the peace.

On friday the municipality of Utrecht sent a letter to the location where Bikefest was to be held. Herein it orders the eviction of the building, based on firesafety regulations. It seems unlikely this is the true reason, as the building is a stable construction of steel and concrete, has many escape routes and has several extinguishers placed throughout the building. [Read More]

Dutch government wants to silence critic on queen

Comrades,

Today saw our dear server Squat!Net unreachable for several hours due to a court order directed at http://grotebroek.nl. The public prosecutor didn’t take kindly to a picture (mirror) of a poster announcing the Hang The Queen Party at this legalised squat in Nijmegen (NL). Considering this an insult to the monarchy and thus a felony offense, they ordered the datacenter colocating our server, Leaseweb, to take down the site.
[Read More]