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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Gestapo American style What does the FBI do if it has a search warrant to track down one miscreant on a network? Why they seize the whole data centre of course!
I’ll attempt to make the seriousness of this more apparent in a non-cyber world example. Imagine the local police are looking for a document that is evidence of a possible crime. The Judge gives them a warrant based on probable cause. When they search the file cabinet at that address, they can’t find what they are looking for. So they corden off the entire apartment building and seize all the file cabinets containing all of the personal and business records of everyone living there. They cart those off with total disregard to the impact on lives and businesses. Then they tell everyone their file cabinets will be returned as soon as they’ve made a permanent State copy of their entire contents.
What sort of society would you say you were living in if that happened?
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Wow. Not only did you post this article without digging deeper than slashdot to see what this was about, you immediately violated Godwin’s law.
This case isn’t as simple as you make it appear. foonet was a shell host for nothing but spammers, carders, ddosers and their ilk.
Dig deeper before going into a cockrobin routine ok?
I don’t care. You do not seize the private data of large numbers of different persons. Period. Not.
You have not given me any reason that would make the action taken by the FBI as anything other than repugnant to a free society.
This sort of BS is why I encourage people to take their data off-shore and keep it encrypted against these mf’s.
And in addition, a very simple google on ‘foonet’ will get you lots of information that shows there is a lot more to foonet than some abusers.
Additinally: a Search Warrant was for one particular criminal act. We cannot have jackbooted morons trampling all over our privacy in hopes that if they seize and database enough data they might, someday, with some technology, catch a wrong doer.
More likely they’ll trump up something about something they find to CYA themselves against civil liberties replies.
Anyone want to bet they start making noises that ‘we found kiddie porn’? That’s the usual lie used over here in the UK. Can’t imagine the US variant of the breed would be any more truthful.
If there were illegal activities, they should deal specifically and surgically with those individuals. If they cannot do so, then…. tough. I’d rather criminals go free than have my liberties taken away.
Or, to take it to the extreme… I’d rather die as a free man in a nuclear fireball than as a slave in a ‘safe’ state.
It’s rather simple. Most of the users of foonet were shelling in and doing their activities. If left online, what they were doing would have been erased quickly. By removing the equipment, the shell accounts couldn’t work. Unless they were willing to suffer lawsuits, I’m sure they had their little packet of warrants signed, dotted and crossed.
I still think you went over the top with very little information. The “cry wolf” syndrome. As this was computer crimes, I strongly suspect that instead of “jackbooted morons” they used sneaker clad geeks.
Sorry Joe but that dawg don’t hunt… if the FBI were to move in to Hosting Matters (where not just this blog is hosted but also where my business is hosted) to grab a server containing some possible evidence against a client of Hosting Matters, but also decide to grab the server my stuff is on, that is a very big deal indeed. If I am not involved in the criminal matter and am not even on the same damn server, I am going to start screaming blue murder is some Federal goons shut me down as a matter of their convenience!
‘Wholesale’ should never be a term describing a function of a civil government in a free society. Perhaps one can attach that to a government which is in a ‘martial’ mode and war is being prosecuted. But in a free society, the innocent do not go down with the guilty just because it is expedient for the government to do so. It may make for distasteful results to as the guilty can cloak themselves in the ‘flag and freedom’ but that’s the toll we have to pay to assure maximum freedom for the individual.
It chills me everytime I see something like this. It furthers my own neuroses over the results of technology (e.g. computing) in our lives and in society. I nurture concepts (unibomber-esque?) of what technology does to our society. Doing operations faster and more efficiently is great as it maximizes output and wealth. But the downside to the immediacy and scale leads to greater damage an individual can do if they decide to harm someone else’s property. It also is the measure of the response we want from government, and possibly the more ‘proactive’ it needs to be.
In other words, the greater the scale and the greater the efficiency with which a ‘criminal’ can inflict harm necessitates a more intrusive government to guard against it. In essence does technology breed Statism? And is the process further fostered when the State focuses resources (by force) and invest in more technology? Or, given this connection, is it even more necessary to remove the State from our lives and leave the creative efforts that make technology to individuals and market forces and assume, that without artificial supports (regulation), the breadth and depth of technology will be limited?
I still think you went over the top with very little information. The “cry wolf” syndrome. As this was computer crimes, I strongly suspect that instead of “jackbooted morons” they used sneaker clad geeks.
Cutting through all the euphemisms, isn’t it the same thing? This dovetails with some discussion here last week over what makes a ‘police state’. Eclipsing freedom is eclipsing freedom regardless. If I have to live in fear of living my life unencumbered, and fear reprisals if I ‘step out of line’ in endeavoring to live free as long as I am not harming, or threatening to harm, someone else’s property, I can safely say I live in a form of a police state. Not being whisked away to a camp or a gulag for posting my opinions over the internet may be good fortune compared to Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, but it’s then only a matter of degree. I still live in fear of the State should I resist them and their continued invasion into my life. If I make too much noise, and blip onto the radar, I am sure that my activities will be monitored. That is living in a police state in my book.
Frankly those analogies were pretty terrible.
Do I agree with the FBI? No, not necessarily. Do I agree that they went over the top? Possibly. Do I think that they might have cause to do what they did? Yes.
Fact is the most basic aspect of criminal justice is to preserve the crime scene. This isn’t just basic common sense, it’s *required* by law. If the crime scene is a computer, or a data center, then that crime scene has to be preserved. There’s simply no choice about the matter. If the FBI didn’t do exactly that, then any decent defense lawyer could argue that the FBI were negligent by not preserving that crime scene.
*shrug* If you’re sharing a webserver then you’ll have to accept the potential liability. Otherwise you can make arrangements for cohosting your own dedicated server or making sure that the host strictly enforces it’s own rules.
Frankly I don’t see this as being any different from any other situation where a third party’s property might be incidentally involved in a crime. Until the authorities can be absolutely certain that property isn’t instrumental in either the crime or it’s prosecution, then they must hang on to it.
And the whole “jackboot” thing is way over the top btw.
I’m sorry but I do not think it is over the top. They seized not one but all the servers. I simply do not care if the guilty party gets away if they don’t take them all. My liberty is more important than that.
Repeat. I DO NOT CARE IF THE CRIMINAL GETS AWAY.
The price of catching him is too high to pay.
Yeah I believe you. Yup.
I definitely think that, if you were the victim of a crime and you were looking at the ruin of your life, uppermost in your mind would be the thought “Thank GOD my website is still up!”.
I know that there must be millions of crime victims out there who are more concerned the integrity of a data center and people’s websites that in solving the crimes and catching the criminals.
News at Six!
There are very apparently two alien mindsets at work here. Some of you think “We must catch the lawbreaker. Every wrongdoer *must* be caught and punished.” Your logic (and eventual slavery) follows from that.
Some of us think “We must defend our liberty and our privacy. If we can catch a wrongdoer without violating those, fine. If not… then it just isn’t that important.” And *OUR* freedom follows from that…
So Ed, are you saying “better nannied & safe than free but possibly at greater risk”?
If so, I think you’re diverging from the majority of Samizdata readers.
You might very well be right. In the heat of victimhood I might well bemoan the inability to dig out the wrong doer. That would not make me right. It would be to the betterment of all that others reminded me that my revenge is my problem and does not give me a right, via the State, to inflict harm on them just to make me feel better.
The question nobody seems to be asking is, is it possible that the people the FBI sent were simply so clueless about computer networks that they thought it was perfectly justified to take the whole datacenter, where they would know very well that it would not be justified to take an entire apartment building’s worth of file cabinets?
Knowing the legendary cluelessness of the Bureau, it’s quite possible that the culprit here is not jackbooted police-state groping for power but simply utter ignorance of how computer networks should be treated by police.
Also, from reading the article, it appears that FooNet/CIT hosted IRC “networks”, and that IRC users were the cause of the complaint; it’s quite possible, if that is the case, that multiple machines were hosting IRC servers on that same network (or linked networks; no details, so impossible to say at that level), which would itself make multiple siezures plausibly appropriate.
(Another difference is that to sieze an apartment building’s worth of file cabinets, each individual apartment must be entered, and each of them is legally without doubt a separate premises. A datacenter is generally just a fenced-in area with a pile of machines; the machines are not, to a layman, obviously analagous to apartments or houses. Again, ignorance vs. malice.)
We should not jump to too many conclusions too rapidly.
Hmmm.
1. “There are very apparently two alien mindsets at work here.”
I have always had an alien mindset and I relish it. Fact is that I believe in personal freedom. Whether or not I believe in it as much as some, I couldn’t care less to debate. However it strikes me as plainly ridiculous to preemptorily handcuff law enforcement on the basis that someone might be discomfited. Perhaps the price of freedom is to not allow law enforcement such powers. I’d suggest that anyone who says that is clearly not evisioning themself as a crime victim.
The plain facts are simply these. In democratic judicial system, such as we have in the West, there is a requirement that the law enforcement agencies involved must act in a positive manner to uphold the law. Additionally the requirements of the court mandate that these same law enforcement agencies must provide evidence uncontaminated by chain-of-evidence mistakes.
So here it is.
If you want a fair judicial system whereby a prosecution case is presented for an active defense to debate, then you must allow law enforcement to do it’s job as it is required by the law.
If you don’t, well then let’s bring out the red-hot pokers, iron maiden (not the band!) and the thumbscrews. If law enforcement doesn’t need to handle evidence then they won’t bother confiscating equipment. Instead they can just go grab people and throw them into prison. Eventually they’ll get the right person. eh?
2. “So Ed, are you saying “better nannied & safe than free but possibly at greater risk”?”
No not really. What I am saying is that you CANNOT have reasonable and responsible law enforcement without the ability to secure a crime scene and investigate criminal activity.
I can’t make it plainer than that.
3. “It would be to the betterment of all that others reminded me that my revenge is my problem and does not give me a right, via the State, to inflict harm on them just to make me feel better. ”
Ok then. Let’s do an experiment. Send me the details of your bank account, along with a signed note permitting me to do this, and every now and then I’ll withdraw a random sum from your checking account.
You won’t have any recourse but you’ll be happy to note that your freedom hasn’t been impinged and the website is still definitely up. You could fly out here to my home and, if I still have any of your money left, you can have what remains. That won’t stop me from continuing to drain your bank account, but then again your freedoms are still pristine.
The unanswered question here is how much of an obligation to the innocent does the FBI have to not interrupt their daily activities. I think that this duty is quite large and there were technical measures that the FBI could have taken to lessen the disruption to innocent parties.
In a seizure of this nature, I certainly could see taking a server off-line for a couple of hours, copying its drives, and putting it back up. I think that the police should have an estimate of the order of magnitude of data that needs to be copied and that they have a requirement to bring sufficient rapid copy data storage on site when they execute such warrants so that such copies can be made.
I further believe that the FBI should not have access to the data thus copied. I believe a judge should be appointed (not the original search warrant judge) and should grant access based on user permissions with each account being a separate warrant. XYZ account did this? sure, you get access to all data he had read/write/execute permissions on. ABC account isn’t on the original warrant, you have to make a new probable cause presentation before you see the first byte. Once the crime is adjudicated, dropped, or a certain time limit passes the data in state custody has to be wiped.
Thus, the search fails in two ways. It was unnecessarily crude in inconveniencing the innocent and thus, unreasonable. It is also broad beyond imagining, a classic updating of the old colonial area searches that created the 4th amendment in the first place.
No doubt there is a crying need for legislative intervention to manage this properly.
Do I agree with the FBI? No, not necessarily. Do I agree that they went over the top? Possibly. Do I think that they might have cause to do what they did? Yes.
Fact is the most basic aspect of criminal justice is to preserve the crime scene.
But you are assuming a crime scene in the traditional sense. This leads back to my earlier comment about the progression of technology (and no I’m not anti-technology if my earlier comment made it seem that way, I just have questions). The impact a criminal has to cause damage is greater. The (supposed) requirements of the State to perform its function will also be greater and automatically more invasive and ‘wholesale’ due to the nature of technology. And meanwhile individuals diminish proportionately. There are limits to how invasive the State can be when investigating crimes, limits to hot pursuit, high speed chases, and entering private property. While not completely parallel to this example, the idea is to preserve individual rights. If I’m reading this right, then, we have to give up individual rights as technology grows?
The idea that not preserving crime scenes will lead to dark of night abductions is opposite to the idea of freedom. If clumsy, inaccurate methods are not allowed in catching criminals, why would trial-less imprisoning be the answer? The result is likely to be a guilty person go free instead. And of course that is the essence of civil society, how to remove threats to life and property effectively while leaving the population free from coercion while executing this function. Libertarians strive to preserve individual freedom first and bear the risks of malfeasant people amongst us moreso than safety and eclipsed freedoms. A blanket shut down of an entire operation to discover the activities of a few clients is outside the bounds. The response needs to be proportionate to the crime at the very least, especially when third party (and likely disinterested parties) are involved.
Yep. Let me for the moment get a bit technical and then put forth exactly how much damage the FBidiots could have done in a slightly different circumstance.
Let’s assume a hosting company has a rack of nice big blade servers sharing a SAN (storage area network) of perhaps 10 Terrabytes (trillion or 10^12 bytes). A setup like this could easily handle a thousand ‘virtual machines’ representing a thousand websites, mail servers, etc.
Now let’s assume our FBidjit comes along with a warrant to get the data on a front corporation. Except that he doesn’t know anything more than the IP address, and hundreds of virtual machines share the same IP. So he does the same as the hobnailed bootjockeys who invaded foonet. He seizes the whole rack of disks. After all, the SAN unit is just one bit of kit isn’t it?
WRONG.
With 1000 sites storing their data on that system we have 1000 small to medium companies. Many of them (in the future perhaps the majority) are dependant on the network for their business.
So the crazycops have shut down 1000 corporations for an indeterminate period. Even a short period will destroy some companies; a period of a week or so will cause fatal damage to many.
So to find one front company we might cause the loss of hundreds or thousands of jobs and the loss of tens of millions of revenue. Economic damage could even be higher depending on the type of company.
The 1000 companies could hold financial records, tax records, buying preference data for hundreds of thousands of individuals.
All of which now ends up copied to some storage media in a State facility. Even if they claim they will delete it or not look at it, no one will believe them.
That is why I say these people are just plain stupid. And whether they intend it or not, their actions are severe attacks on liberty and privacy.
We just can’t allow this sort of thing to happen.
A judge issued the warrant, and a judge will decide whether the evidence (if any is obtained) is admissible. There is probably little precedent for cases like this, so it’s hard to say what a judge might likely decide. Does anyone off-hand know of landmark cases that are similar?
Perhaps you should look here for a different perspective:
http://www.ahbl.org/index.php
The headline you are looking for is Breaking News! Ding Dong, Foonet’s Gone!.
“Perhaps the blackest of the black hat networks is finally gone, raided by the FBI. Foonet was home of spammers, packet kiddies, script kiddies, carders, and other illegal activities, as documented in the links below.”
“Naturally, there are many different sides to this story as to what the real reason behind the raid was, so draw your own conclusions based on the information we provided and what you can find on the Internet easily using Google.”
“Carders” is people engaging in credit card fraud and identity theft.
Maybe you shouldn’t just accept Foonet’s version of events at face value…
Since the foonet bust: “we’ve seen maybe 25% of the DDoS attacks that we regularly receive.” Quote from an IRC netop.
Dale: If you have that SAN kit then you can mirror off a copy for the Feds, that option wasn’t used here because CIT/foonet wouldn’t cooperate on a narrower search. And if you’ve got that much infrastucture you should have DR plans that make it simple to let the FBI have the primary servers for a while. You’re bitching about criminals being taken care of without providing any thought what so ever on an alternative.
BTW, check here for some links to private actions taken against foonet: http://www.ahbl.org/, and notice how ineffective they were
Hmmm.
Ok then. Another thought experiment.
1. You’re an investigator.
2. Your job is to secure any materials related to criminal activity.
3. You’re looking at the core of a data center where there’s 150+ computers of varying types and sizes all chugging away.
4. You have to ensure that all evidence is secured and located and maintain the chain-of-evidence required by the courts.
5. You know that computers can be setup to erase everything of any use within minutes.
6. You also know that neither programs nor data must be located on a specific computer and that distributed systems can and do exist.
7. You also know that there is a multitude of data storage technologies available that spread data across so many different machines and platforms that it might not be possible to locate a specific machine as the source of the data.
So what do you do?
a. shut the place down.
b. secure all the computers.
c. dump everything into secure storage.
d. go through each piece of equipment one by one and determine if it’s something you need to keep or if you can release it.
Well? Is there any other option?
Regardless of whether we think the FBI is justified in any of its particular actions, Dale’s point remains.
The consequences of this kind of policing is the death of liberty.
We can justify anything we like.
“Dale’s point remains”
Dale doesn’t even know what the facts of the case are. There are numerous reports from the past year linking Foonet to spammers, DDoS attacks, credit card fraud, and other illicit activities. There are numerous reports that Foonet has shielded spammers and hackers.
If the FBI is investigating Foonet and its owners for criminal activities, then seizing all of the servers may well have been justified. For all we know, such a seizure may even have been specified in the warrant.
If the FBI was as over the line in this case as they were in the infamous Steve Jackson case, then they will probably get their hat handed to them in court. When (and if) the facts come out, if it turns out that they had no probable cause sufficient to justify such a broad seizure then they will deserve your condemnations.
But it is impossible to judge the appropriateness of their actions without knowing who is being invesitgated and for what suspected crimes.
“this kind of policing is the death of liberty”
Oh, please. At least make sure you know the facts of the case before you make such dire claims.
Complete anarchy with no meaningful criminal enforcement is also the death of liberty.
Yeah, lets let the courts figure this out. We all know how much it’ll hurt the FBI to “get their hat handed to them in court.”
Lets count the ways it’ll hurt:
1) They will take some of my money to defend themselves
2) They will take some of my money to pay their salaries during their trial (and anybody involved might get time off with pay. Wheee, a vacation!)
3) When they loose they will promote the lead investigator and give him a raise, using more of my money
4) If they really get hammered they will owe some people at Foonet compensation for damages… which they will pay by taking some of my money.
5) They will use a bit more of my money to launch a bit of a PR campaign or pay off some politicos to keep their image up and their powers in place.
6) ???
7) Profit!
Man, I feel sorry for those poor blokes at the FBI.
Yes, there is an option. The investigator could recognize that carrying out such actions was a gross violation of potentially thousands of peoples Civil Liberties.
I would suggest that an investigator who carries out such an act should be prosecuted and jailed for their lack of respect of peoples privacy.
Since this is not going to happen, it is up to us on the net to take appropriate actions. Spread the data out, keep it encrypted at all times, make life impossible for these people.
And perhaps foonet did have a lot of blackhats on it. That does not relieve police (and judges) of their duty in a free society to narrowly target only specific individuals. If they cannot do this by seizing a smaller chunk of data, then they should look for other investigative measures for doing so.
I will *not* give up my liberty for this kind of ‘security’.
When police take actions like this, I no longer consider them to be on the same side that I am. They become the enemy, not the defender of civil society.
And to the other suggestion: yes, the proper way to do that is to use multiple sans in multiple places with encrypted shares such that only the data’s owner can possibly recover it.
I have no sympathy for the FBI. I might even say that Ashcroft in the Justice Department is perhaps the single biggest reason for voting against Bush in 2004. I think a lot of us are on a balance between the stellar job he has enabled Condi, Rumsfeld and Powell to do on the international scene against the total civil liberties disaster of Ashcroft and Ridge.
I like Rumsfeld; I *loathe* Ashcroft. It’s a hard balance to decide whether I want to keep one more than I want to be rid of the other.
Complete anarchy with no meaningful criminal enforcement is also the death of liberty.
Unfortunately you don’t even get that choice. In the arbitrary police state, the police have better things to do than the efficient suppression of real crime, which is hard work and possibly dangerous. Once the police get the idea that, rather than to protect and serve the public, their role is to protect themselves and serve the state, we need not be heading for the gulag to lose both freedom and safety.
Once property seizure and administrative penalties are the leading weapons of investigation and prosecution, the charming indolence and self-funding traditions of Russian and African policemen are echoed in the oh so modern and democratic institutions.
Hmm.
Frankly the tortured chest-beating is truly awful. Let’s face facts here. Anyone with any kind of experience or knowledge can setup a situation where criminal activity is not located on a specific computer. That’s the point of a data center isn’t it? To create a concentrated network of interconnected computers allowing for distributed processing and shared resources?
So you really expect law enforcement to sit down and analyse the HD of every single computer *and* do so in a manner that doesn’t discomfit you?
You’re being utterly illogical and ridiculous.
It takes all of minute, or less, to erase valuable evidence from computer systems. The very least that law enforcement would be required to do is prevent any access to those computers so as to avoid a situation where a criminal user acts to elminate evidence. That *alone* would guarantee a severe outage.
If you want to continue discussion in a reasonable way instead of this nonsense then lets, otherwise this is a waste of time for me as I haven’t seen any worthwhile argument here.
That is your perogative. You believe catching wrongdoers is the most important thing there is; I do not. Liberty and privacy are far more important values to me than the capture of every lawbreaker.
It’s actually better for the system if full enforcement is impossible anyway. That means the legislature can pass what ever laws it wishes but they will not be enforced because no level or resources will make them enforceable.
It is up to us libertarians to raise the costs of enforcement to the point at which it is only feasible for law enforcement resources to be expended on the most serious of crimes (or, unfortuneately the most trivial, like traffic tickets here in the UK). Legislatures will continue to spew forth law and regulation in order to ‘do something’ and the only brake on them will be disobedience and quiet resistance and obstruction.
I am reminded of a Russian proverb: “The severity of local laws is made milder by lack of necessity to follow them thoroughly.”
And of Ayn Rand: “”Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.” in “The Fountainhead” (1943).
Oh dear God in Heaven! Not Ayn Rand! Not The Fountainhead!
Frankly, as an aside only, I thought that book was the most boring overblown piece of tripe I had ever read. Apart from Moby Dick of course. When it was first published the reading public thought Moby Dick was total garbage. I happen to agree with them and I think the same way about The Fountainhead.
I can still remember reading it. I can still remember myself standing tall, after having read it, with my fist upraised to the stars and screaming “I want the last 2 hours of my damn life back!”.
🙂
Oh and I see that you didn’t want to take me up on the offer of that bank account test. I guess when all’s said and done, we all prefer to not be victims eh?
Well, it in fact does take ‘more than a minute’ to erase a hard drive. What takes just a minute or so is removing the directory entries; the files are still recoverable. It takes quite a lot of time to actually overwrite any significant amount of data, and you need to do it more than once to put it beyond the pale of the large data recovery houses, who can bust out specialized gear (the equivalent of electron microscopes) to read eased or overwritten files. Once through with zeros or random data is no longer enough, you have to do both multiple times to really scrub a disk against a ‘well funded attacker’, which the FBI most certainly is.
And Steve Jackson Games isn’t the only time they’ve gone haywire, typically with any computer crime search warrant they WILL take all the machines on the presmises. Technical education of the courts will be required to get more narrow warrants issues, as even when they have the technical expertise on a case, the FBI would much rather get a judge to issue a warrant for all gear in the place, as this makes SURE their chain of evidence handling is kosher. And screw anyone hit in collateral damage.
That’s the picture I’ve gotten not just from the press over the years, but from talking to law enforcement in my capacity as a vp of operations of a large regional ISP here in AZ during the dot-boom. Their attitudes don’t seem to have improved one whit since then.
foonet does sound like the kind of place that might actually deserve such rough treatment, but I guarantee you that most parties involved in such cases do not.
And mere encryption and mirroring don’t get you all the way either, as many jurisdictions will compel you under severe penalty to provide passwords. Which is why there is at least one filesystem under development which allows different file systems to live intermingled with different passwords, so they can never know if you gave them the right one. You just have an alternate passwd that revels the same structure, but clean.
Ed:
This sort of police action has the potential to cause huge economic losses to 3rd parties for the reasons Dale gives. But that doesn’t bother the Feds because they don’t have to bear any of those costs (for the reasons Goonfood gives and for other reasons).
Result: the Feds take every server on the site and sod the harm to third parties.
Don’t you see that as a problem?
Cydonia
Hmm.
1. See previous posts on why it’s important to secure data to prevent alteration and contamination.
2. See previous posts on why that would guarantee a severe outage.
3. “This sort of police action has the potential to cause huge economic losses to 3rd parties …”
That potential has *never* stopped any law enforcement agency from acting. Whether that is the local county prosecutors office or the state AG or the FBI. The primary consideration for these entities is enforcement of the law, investigation of criminal activity and prosecution of crimes.
You don’t like it? Fine. Then suggest an alternative that would be acceptable to defense attorneys and the courts. Good luck.
Excuse me, but the world does not run for the convenience of police, courts and prosecutors. We, tThe People, decide what is acceptable and they live with it.
Whether they like it or not is not a matter on which I give a squat.
And I’d suggest that the world doesn’t give a squat whether or not you like it. Instead they’re rather more interested in seeing crime punished.
*shrug* go figure.
I can only hope you are wrong about America. You are certainly correct if speaking about the UK. In the name of catching criminals we are on a very rapid trip into a police state here. Hardly a month goes by that some other basic legal protection is not called old fashioned and that it must be changed to stop crime.
Thing is, none of it works. As another commenter pointed out, in the end you just get the police state but no extra safety or security. Reality proves Ben Franklin prescient: “They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
But I do think in this case the people will speak. If the FBI ever did anything as stupid as the example I suggested, they might catch 1 wrongdoer… but they would have 999 companies and their employees in a class action suit for damages. And given the non-local nature of the internet, they might well have half of Congress contacted by damaged local companies.
Not even the FBI of J. Edgar ‘The CrossDresser’ Hoover would have stood up to that.
One would hope they are smart enough to learn the lesson before they are taught it with a budget cut and a congressional investigation.
Just as an aside, Hoover wasn’t a cross dresser. That was a rumor started by some media pundit decades ago. Apart from that rumor there has never been any evidence whatsoever to support that whole cross dressing thing. In reality the whole thing is little more than an attempt to defame the reputation of a man who, being dead, cannot defend himself.
Personally defaming someone dead is rather boorish.
I’ve got to say that I haven’t seen so many strawmen since I attended a convention of scarecrows.
1) Irish giving reasons for voting “against Bush.” Last I checked, you don’t actually get to vote on this.
2) Some forsaken strawman built on a network that IBM couldn’t afford. This “datacenter” was in a dude’s basement.
3) Liberty at any price. I hate to break it to you but the liberty of these clowns is less than the liberty of the people to keep their money from being stolen by this group. You do NOT have the liberty to spend my money after stealing my credit card numbers.
4) If anyone else was stupid enough to have their stuff hosted by these clowns, they deserve what they got. They have the liberty to pick someone that is not primarily hosting criminals.
5) FBI costs. That post ended using the word “blokes.” Should we assume that you are not actually an American? Thus you do not actually pay taxes here? Therefore it isn’t YOUR money that funds the FBI? See point #1 for reference.
I started this comment thread mentioning that the article was “over the top” and premature. Nothing in the comments has changed that impression. The “jackbooted thugs” comment was simply over the top. The “J. Edgar ‘The CrossDresser’ Hoover” comment is emotional masturbation. Hoover was certainly an ass. He was not a cross dresser. It doesn’t take much research to check that.
There is an unbridgeable difference in mindset. I care mostly about individual liberty and privacy; my view of much of law enforcement is as someone to call to carry away the body of the dead burgler caught in the livingroom. Police deserve no more rights and protection in the carrying out of their duties than any individual; in fact that is where things originally stood in common law.
Second, I am an american who lives overseas and votes whenever the Democratic controlled city I was registered in deigns to send me an absentee ballot in time.
Third, the datacentre I used in my example is not even a big one. No more than $200K for the hardware I suggested. I know it can handle it because I easily supported several hundred business web sites and 5000 email users on 200MHz class machines back when I ran an ISP. I’ve built and moved datacentre’s; I spec out, install and configure racks of gear and have done so on two continents. I think I have just the least bit of cred when I talk in this area.
Fourth, the original thing on foonet was for a DDOS attack purportedly coming from there. Although this is an annoyance, it is not deadly and it is primarily a technical problem that will at some point be solved technically rather than by legal means. Legal techniques are really rather useless against it anyway. Likewise SPAM is not solvable by law; it requires a technical and procedural solution. I will get around to an article on this eventually as there is a draft RFC out there which could do just this. As to credit card fraud; it’s been with us for ages and I’d just as soon it be cracked by gumshoes doing the old hard slog than by indiscriminate seizures. That might be the easy route for a police state, but it is not compatible with a free society. Get out on the street and get into the networks of the bad guys and track them down the hard, boring and sometimes dangerous old fashioned way.
I don’t quite understand an altogether more basic problem of this little ideological argument:
If the government doesn’t know who it’s looking for but knows the answer is in the database, how else are they going to find the answer unless they get the whole thing to look through?
Just curious! I know that europeans have the patent on Subtlety (made obvious by calling Feds the Gestapo! Ahhh, the understatement of the Emerald Isle), and you would do it terribly differently, but I’m curious what technique you’d bring to the fore to carry on the investigation.
> I’m curious what technique you’d bring to the fore to carry on the investigation.
Exactly the same way you would approach the problem
if you knew the evidence was somewhere in the Empire
State Building or on the Island of Manhattan. You’d
use other investigative techniques to narrow things
down a bit, and once you knew what you were looking
for, a judge would issue you a search warrant precisely
limited to information about the particular individuals
involved.
State fishing trips and copies of data on hundreds
or thousands (and in the future millions) of people
would just simply be refused on grounds of being
overly broad.
It will come to be seen as no different than asking
a judge for a search warrant for Manhattan. He or
she will suggest you come back with a precise residence
of a particular person or persons suspected of a
particular crime for which you have probable cause
to believe is there.
It’s only going to get worse. Computer systems are
becoming entire worlds. The trends are already well
along and within the decade you will find it will be
true for most people that the most private of information
will be in that virtual world, and single disk clusters
will contain private spacies with the most intimate
details of the lives of millions of people.
Do you really want the FBI pawing through every detail
of your personal life as a side effect of looking for a mugger
in Manhattan?