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Comment by jonknee | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty unfair how the cops can take all of the tools you need for work without ever charging you with a crime. Jason's lucky in that he can easily loan another computer/camera, but many hackers would be in a serious trouble if all their computers were seized.

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What would have happened if Chen did all his work in Google Docs? The Police have to execute a search warrant on Google as well as Chen's house?

What would have happend if he did all his work in an install of etherpad hosted on a european EC2 instance?

Can you think of a better way to investigate computer crime?

Copy the drives? There's no reason to sieze a digital camera and both of the guys phones. Realistically they are simply looking for emails, there's no reason to take every bit of equipment the guy feeds his family with.

If anyone has to be inconvenienced it should be the authorities. Someone who has not been found guilty or even charged with a crime should not lose their livelihood so the cops can look for a theoretical crime.

A guy I knew in college had a rootkit installed on one of his servers. FBI and GBI took his drives (I was his RA at the time, definitely was law enforcement, not a 18 year old's exaggeration). They brought them back around a month later after the crime lab made copies.

It shouldn't take a month to copy hard drives.

Have you seen CSI?

Okay, that isn't at all like how police actually work. For most cases, police don't bother sending most of the evidence to the lab, because they won't get anything back except the one or two pieces that are absolutely essential to convict.

In that environment, I'm not at all surprised it takes a month to copy hard drives.

The data on the drives and the cameras are evidence in an ongoing criminal investigation. Law enforcement needs to establish and maintain a chain of custody of that evidence, and ensure that it's not tampered with.

They will likely pull the physical drives from those computers, image them with special-purpose hardware, then keep the original drives in secure storage until the case is resolved.

It's not just a matter of copying over a few files. They may need to look at data remanence that aren't visible to the file system.

So take the drives or memory cards and return them as soon as full copies have been made, it just seems nuts to take a guy's entire camera when the photographic evidence they want was quite literally seen by millions of people. From what I've heard siezed evidence is often not returned for years (which in the case of technology you use daily means it's worthless when you get it back).

Depriving someone of their way to make a living is a very significant power and shouldn't be taken lightly.

I'm assuming they took the cameras to prove that it was one of those cameras that was used to take photos of the phone, thus proving it was in his possession.

Since he is employed it is up to Gawker to make sure he has equipment. Can they fire him for having his equipment seized? Wouldn't that be unlawful dismissal?

He's on fucking video holding the thing and personally returned it to Apple, there is no doubt he was in possession. The cops didn't care what they took, they just took any available piece of tech.

The cursing really helped make your point.

You're still thinking in terms of home PCs, but the law has to handle every case in the most secure manner. There are many solid state storage cards, which may not be easy to recognise by people executing the search. In case of organised crime, it's also easy to hide additional storage in electronic devices in ways that isn't obvious to a normal user -- for example to pass information between members, you could modify the camera to extend the internal memory and hide a separate partition there. It's not likely that any mobile team will have enough tools to check all cases like this and tell that some device is "clean" and can be easily mirrored by classic tools. And I didn't even get to custom-made hardware of unknown capabilities.

(playing devil's advocate)

It's annoying but you should at least have an offsite backup in case of fire, seizure, or other type of loss/theft if you depend on your data.

This is making think of pulling the trigger on using truecrypt or the like to encrypt my on-disk data as well.

The data's one thing, but they took all his hardware. Hard to back that up remotely.

I'm sure his employer can kick over $300 to buy a netbook to tide him over given the circumstances.

AFAIK, seized hardware is usually returned years later, if ever.

In many states, you can be held in contempt FOREVER. The issue with truecrypt type things is you can never prove it is gone, therefore you can get stuck in contempt with no way to stop it.

If you Google enough, you'll see a guy in jail for contempt for 10 years because the judge didn't believe there aren't hidden foreign assets in a divorce case...

I believe this is only true for civil cases, as indicated in your last sentence regarding the divorce. I found this definition on criminal contempt:

In a criminal contempt charge, which is aimed at punishing bad behavior, a defendant is afforded the due-process safeguards of the criminal system, including a possible jury trial.

I'm not a lawyer, but I would suspect that if Chen is under suspicion for a felony, the above definition might apply.

If they're going after Chen instead of after Chen's source. Then I doubt Chen has protection under contempt laws. I bet he does under the journalist shield laws though

Not if he committed a crime (like receiving stolen property) because if it did, all criminal hackers would get press cards, or stash their data on computers owned by journalists and be able to conceal evidence of their crimes that way.

edited for specificity.

crackers?

Maybe i misunderstood this site's title.

> crackers?

If you're going to be pedantic about it, sure.

This is one area where technological developments gave the police vastly more power. Before everyone used computers most they could do was seize all your documents. That’s bad enough, but at least they couldn’t seize your tools (typewriter, telephone, fax and so on). That’s pretty much what they are now allowed to do when they can seize and keep your computers for months.

I think the law needs to be changed. Allow the police to, say, seize your computers for one or two weeks in which they have time to copy the drives. Or time to pull all the drives out. Then they have to give your computers back.

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