Following the publication of the story about government gateway 303 publishing to UK Indymedia, we feel it is timely to make our position clear on the issues that have arisen.

Note first that the Schnews article contained a number of inaccuracies and assumptions. We believe thatthis article provides a more measured and accurate account of the situation. The revelations about UK indymedia's anti abuse measures have caused some concern amongst activists that IP address information was being collected.

Whilst BIMC operates on a totally different software platform to UK Indymedia, the Oscailt software platform that we use, does have similar anti abuse measures built in. However we have elected to disable those features. Amongst other measures we use the software mod-removeip to do this. We encourage all other IMC collectives to make use of this software. We are confident that our server cannot provide IP information to anyone. Indeed when the Police seized our old server specifically to look for IP data they were not able to find any such data, and confirmed this in writing. However given the way the internet works, we do not control the routers and network hardware between you and our server. We would therefore recommend using TOR when posting sensitive information. We also suggest that all activists read Tech Tools for activists.

Whilst a article about the posting to UK IMC from Gateway 303 was being actively worked on by UK IMC activists, and we believe that it would have been published, it was proving difficult to reach consensus. This is an example of an increasingly frequent situation that has arisen within the UK Network over the past few years: a lack of consensus that has resulted in inaction. In order to give people with different positions the autonomy to continue with their own projects, a decision was made at a UK Network meeting at the end of last year, to the separate the UK Network into two distinct projects. We think this was the right decision and we hope to see good things emerging from both projects.