[hackerspaces] Metalab supports Forskningsavdelningen, you should too!

[Ron Bean]

quemener.yves at free.fr writes:

>I don't want to raise an overtly political flaming debate here, but I
>wonder if the issue is really education about hackerspaces instead of
>respect of the law by policemen.

That was my thought also-- from one of the reports, it sounds like they
might have been trying for the offices of Utkanten, and found the
hackerspace by mistake. Alternatively, they might have received a "hot
tip" from someone that turned out to be wrong (there have been a few
cases in the US where the cops raided an empty house, or even a vacant
lot, because someone gave them a bogus address and they didn't check it
out first). This sort of thing is embarrassing, and they're not likely
to admit what really happened-- at this point, their PR dept is just
trying to make them look good (one hopes that the IT guys would
recognize a wifi antenna when they see one).

But the issue of the cops not knowing what was there in the first place 
is the real problem-- particularly since it's a community center with 
lots of stuff going on. Utkanten's website has a lot of 
anti-establishment rhetoric on it, but I doubt if that's shared by all 
the other tenants. Cops are human-- some are nice guys, some are 
assholes, and some are misinformed. It might help if they had some idea 
of the variety of things going on in the building, and what the 
"hackers" (and others) are really doing there.

It reminds me of some of the things the US and USSR believed about each
other during the Cold War-- much of which is now known to be false.