A WHILE BACK, RACKSPACE TURNED OVER INDYMEDIA SERVERS to the FBI. Now Declan McCullagh reports that this was because RackSpace didn’t know what it was doing, not because the FBI asked for the servers:

In October 2004, a federal prosecutor sent a subpoena to Rackspace Managed Hosting of San Antonio, Texas, as part of an investigation underway in Italy into an attempted murder. Under a mutual legal assistance treaty, the U.S. government is required to help other nations secure evidence in certain criminal cases.

The newly disclosed subpoena, which has been partially redacted, asks only for specific “log files.”

But Rackspace turned over the entire hard drive at the time, taking the server offline and effectively pulling the plug on more than 20 Independent Media Center Web sites for about a week.

Rackspace claimed at the time that the subpoena required the company to turn over the customer’s “hardware.”

Now that the documents have been unsealed by a federal judge in Texas, though, Rackspace is backpedalling.

If I were a Rackspace customer, I’d want some sort of assurance that they wouldn’t make this kind of mistake again. (Via SlashDot, many of whose commenters seem to be oblivious to the fact that the subpoena originated with the Italian government, not John Ashkkkroft).