Satangoss Seizure: 1 year

At August 6th 2008, Civil Police from Campinas (78km from Sao Paulo, Brazil) seized the Sarava Research Group server that hosted at the Philosophy and Social Sciences Institute from Campinas University (IFCH-UNICAMP) due to a complain filled by the University Attorney.

Back in May 2008, sarava.org's server was shut down by the colocation's central administration because of a request from dutch autorities. The server hosted a website against dutch anti-imigration policies and attracted a lot of media attention in the Netherlands.

The server shut was completely irregular as it doesn't respected the colocation internal rules (why shut down a whole server just because of a single site?). Because of that, we were able to turn the server on again.

But things got worse: on August 6th the civil police seized the box without a warrant (they just had a request for the server, which could be denied without any legal consequences). The sysadmins at the place where the server is colocated were instructed by the university's attorney to cooperate with the
police! Late, we discovered that who called for the police wasn't the dutch or portuguese authorities but the University itself!

We found out that after receiving a complaint from dutch and portuguese authorities, the univesity attorneys wrote a letter to the Federal Police asking them to investigate, including in this letter citations to sections of the criminal law they think is in charge here. By that time, the Federal Police
thought it was Civil Police matters and forwarded the complaint and since then started a civil police investigation.

The University attitudes in all these events seemed as though they are scared of being incriminated, or to be involved in a dipolomatic issue, that they didn't hesitate to stomp on the university's autonomy and the freedom of research. By doing so, they proved to be unable to protect the university against police intervention, something that was really costly to get in a country that had about 20 years of military dictatorship.

That seizure happened in a context where university autonomy is just respected in what concerns it's freedom to spend government expenditures. After Sarava's seizure, there were at least two other cases of autonomy violation: Radio Muda crack by feds and the police invasion on Sao Paulo Univesity.

In our case, what took four years to be built was taken away from us in just one day.

After one year since the seizure, we don't have much hope to get the server back. Instead, we focused to recover data from our old backups and we are still recovering from the damage.

We would like to thank all support we received and we hope that such thing doesn't happen anymore.

The Sarava Group