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this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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The person referenced in the article was raided for completely unrelated charges. It just happened they took the server and backups as part of the raid. Had they hosted off-site or kept the backups off-site, the damage would have been minimal. This article brings up a good point, but it's not the nefariousness that the title implies.
Cops took what wasn't needed and haven't returned it (that we know of).
I'd say that's about as nefarious as it gets.
How do we know it wasn't needed? What were the charges?
Any time they take all electronics, there's bound to be something there that wasn't needed. It's overly broad.
And that's often because what is needed isn't in plain site, so it makes sense to just grab everything and take it back to their lab and have experienced techs go over it rather than having the site team sit on the computers going through files to find what they need.
Yeah, because humans can't just pick up a drive and instantly read every single thing on it. The cops have no idea how many pieces of storage you have or how you organize your files.
How do you know that it was? Were you involved in this case enough to know something the rest of us dont? Or are you just a bystander playing devil's advocate?
EDIT: since I apparently cant reply to your comment below, you cant just claim that the hardware was involved in a crime by "just asking questions" then accuse me of "stirring up shit" after calling you out on making unsubstantiated claims. If you make a claim it is YOUR job to defend that claim. Not everyone elses' job to disprove your assertion.
Were you involved enough to know that it wasn't? There's devil's advocate, and then there's devil's PR. Why are you trying so hard to stir up shit where none exists? It's not wrong to want more information before going on a paranoia bender.
I could say the same to you. Trying to research it literally only surfaces what the admins of the instance have said. As far as I could tell, they didn't publish anything concerning what was in the warrant, or any specifics of what crime was being investigated. The most they've said is that it's related to a protest.
Beyond that, it's basically just standard procedure to seize all or most computers and drives on a warrant since they can't possibly know exactly which ones do and don't contain evidence in advance.
So yeah, I'd would say it's entirely reasonable to question the person calling it "as nefarious as it gets" for more information
I'm not the person you can't reply to below.
I was literally just asking. If the warrant was in relation to a charge that they were hosting CSAM, then yes the seizure of the server would be appropriate.
Executing a warrant is as nefarious as it gets?
From what I read, it looks like they were hosting off-site, but had an unencrypted backup of the database locally at the time of the raid.
So the reaction we should be having is to be careful whose instance you sign up for?
No autocracy is when rule of law. Wake up sheeple.
But this is the strength of federation. One tiny bit of the fediverse was taken down. This did not affect the rest of it. There will always be bad actors, whether the cops, the administrators of a particular instance or the owners of a mega-forum like twitter or reddit. With a decentralized system the damage is localized and minimized.
It wasn't even taken down. The dude was raided probably because of some electronic crime, they took his electronics to get evidence. Completely reasonable.
On their backup hard drive happened to be a backup a mastodon instance, so by extension they got that too. The backed up data, not the server.
It's not some nefarious collusion, it's completely reasonable actions.
Now whether the backup should have been stored unencrypted on a hard drive at their house? Well that's a server admin problem not an FBI issue, but the comments here come across like the FBI shouldn't have done what they did.
But I'd argue that you should not store anything on Mastodon where it would be an issue if it became public. It's basic 90s internet safety. We know that the data isn't encrypted (the same for Lemmy), don't go sharing passwords on a site designed for public sharing.
One of the first things new fediverse users should be told is that the fediverse is not the darknet.