Montreal data centre dumps U.S. anti-government group's website
The online portal of an American anti-government group that promoted armed protest has been booted off its Montreal-based servers.
Cloud computing company OVH, which operates a Montreal data centre, said on Wednesday that it had terminated its contract with the website Tree of Liberty, which acted as an online gathering place for a loose network of farright groups collectively known as the Boogaloo movement.
Archived posts from the site indicate that members of the movement, who paint themselves as libertarians against a tyrannical government, intended to carry weapons in demonstrations outside state legislatures later this month.
“It's about coming together peacefully, armed, and standing together as Americans,” the organizer of the event wrote in a recent post.
Members of the movement are identifiable by the Hawaiian shirts they often wear at protests and demonstrations. The New York Times reported that proponents of the Boogaloo movement were among those who stormed the American Capitol building in Washington last week. They believe in fighting a coming revolution that they refer to as the “Boogaloo” against the United States government.
Tree of Liberty's presence on Montreal-based servers was first reported by the CBC early Wednesday morning. Within hours of the initial reporting, the site was down.
“The website has been taken down earlier today and the client's contract terminated, following an investigation conducted by our experts,” said Guillaume Gilbert, OVH marketing communications manager for the Americas. “As a responsible cloud provider, Ovhcloud does not tolerate the hosting of abusive content that does not comply with our terms of use and current legislation.”
The “Boogaloo boys,” as proponents of the Boogaloo movement call themselves, appear as a group of men steeped in a culture of internet memes, Marc-andré Argentino, a Montreal-based academic who studies the intersection of extremism and technology, wrote earlier this year in a post for the Global Network on Extremism and Technology.
But beyond their appearance, members of the movement are capable of violence; several have been charged with terrorism-related offences and one member of the movement allegedly livestreamed his attempt to murder a police officer.
OVH'S decision to cease its business dealings with websites associated with the group follows those of major technology giants who are increasingly unwilling to provide services to right-wing groups following the violence on Jan. 6 in Washington. U.S. President Donald Trump has been banned from Twitter; Facebook and Amazon's cloud computing service AWS has refused to do business with Parler, a Twitter alternative that has attracted a varied coalition of conservatives, conspiracy theorists and extremists who feel spurned by what they see as big-tech censorship.
Canadian servers are attractive to extremist groups who want to avoid detection. Law enforcement officials in the United States can access server information stored domestically, so several service providers, some of whom brand themselves as defenders of free speech, have begun offering offshore server locations.
One such company, Patriot Node, which had been providing services to Tree of Liberty until it too was removed by OVH, offered its clients privacy guarantees, assuring them that its servers were safe havens for free speech.
“Our network and servers are hosted offshore, meaning that your data and privacy are in the hands of true Patriots. Post confidently with Patriotnode and never fear that someone is watching,” said a message written on the company's website, which was adorned with military imagery and American flags.