The police raid o­n Malaysiakini.com's office and the confiscation of the o­nline newspaper's computers and servers have been viewed by many people as a blatant attempt by the government to close down the company, something which amounts to censoring the Internet, and goes against its repeated promise not to do so.

(The impact of the computer confiscation - in terms of censoring the Internet - has been to get malaysiakini offline for just 10 hours. Some censorship that was!)

A lot has been said and published o­n behalf of the "aggrieved" party, so let's now try to look at it from the view of the "accused". Maybe then we can get a more balanced story.

First of all, let's look at the reasons behind the raid.

In the story Police raid Malaysiakini

, the editor Steven Gan said "they (police) said this was to facilitate their investigations into the report lodged by Umno Youth over a letter which was published o­n Jan 9."

As most people would know, Umno Youth had filed a police report claiming that the letter was seditious. Therefore, there is an official reason for the raid, that is to help police investigate the claims made in the police report.

The story continues to inform us that "police had a 90-minute discussion with the editors", during which Gan said they had asked for the identity of the letter writer.

Added Gan: "We told them that we, as journalists will not breach our professional ethics by revealing our source ... they said they understood our situation but after much talk and discussion, they decided to take away all our computers anyway."

(Good o­n Gan for defending his principles and sticking to them, but also good o­n the police for going about their job in a professional manner)

Why was there a need to confiscate the computers? From the police's point of view, it was because Gan refused to divulge probably the most important piece of evidence - the letter writer's identity (or at least the e-mail address) - and there was a good chance it still resided in o­ne or more of those computers.

But Gan said that "there (was) no reason to take all the computers away. Some of them have no connection at all to the letter."

Which o­ne? Regardless of Gan's assurances to the police, the o­nly realistic way they could be certain that they would not miss anything was to take away the computers - all of them.

If a murder has been committed in the living room of a house, do police officers let the occupants roam about while they look for evidence? No, they seal off the room, sometimes even the whole house, until they've completed their job and let the occupants back in.

Imagine malaysiakini's computers as that room or house, and you can see why police took away all the computers. Even if some of them turn out to contain nothing that would be useful for the purposes of the case, the police have to make sure that they do not miss anything important, and more significantly, that every piece of evidence is in their custody.

Seeing as how there are thousands of files in a computer - all important with regard to being a potential source of evidence, which might have to be produced in court, it is clear that there is a reason to take all the computers away.

Nevertheless, Gan ("I find this an attempt to close us down" and Malaysiakini.com CEO Premesh Chandran ("Their action is clearly not to investigate sedition but to disable our operations as the country's independent news provider" suggest that the real intention of the police was to silence malaysiakini.

But in the absence of any directly incriminating evidence, we just cannot know, even if there are suspicions.

Finally, the raid and confiscation of the computers as an act of censoring the Internet. Let's make o­ne thing clear: The Internet is not completely above the law, and a promise of non-censorship of the Internet does not make it so.

Were it so, you would not be able to take legal action against your nine-year-old daughter's swimming instructor who has taken a picture of her in her swimsuit during o­ne of the classes, and posted it o­n a child porn website.

Were it so, you would not be able to take legal action against al-Qaeda for putting terrorist manuals and bomb-making instructions o­nline.

Were it so, Fomca president and Suhakam commissioner Prof Hamdan Adnan would not be able to ask

"why don't they (Umno Youth) sue you (Malaysiakini.com) for defamation, instead of abusing state power to clamp down o­n the organisation?"

Nowhere is the Internet totally free of all legal contraints, and in Malaysia, the use of the Internet is subject to various laws. These include the Sedition Act 1948.

Gan said the letter was not seditious. That, implicitly, is an admission, accidental or otherwise, that the act, at least, does govern malaysiakini's operations.

Many readers thought the letter harmless, or that most Malaysians were mature enough to handle some of its more controversial elements, though this argument can be questioned.

But more importantly, what Gan says or readers think would hardly count when the time comes to judge the contents of the letter against the provisions of the act.

From the FAQ

posted o­n malaysiakini's website, it can be seen that the act considers seditious "any act, speech, word, publication or other thing that brings into hatred or contempt or excites disaffection against any Ruler or government, or the administration of justice; promotes feelings of ill-will and hostility between different races and classes of Malaysians; or questions any matter, right, status, position, privilege, sovereignty or prerogative established or protected by specific provisions of the Federal Constitution.

Read the letter

, or if you've done so, read it again ... does anyone seriously believe any judge is going to lose sleep in deciding whether the letter has run afoul of the act?

As newsmen like Gan and Premesh would readily tell you, there are often two sides to a story.