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Comment by kyledrake | Hacker News Reader

I'm a little confused why they're going with a search warrant here instead of a subpoena. The only reason they would want to do this usually is if the admin was refusing to comply with a subpoena, but the search warrant says nothing about this AFAICT. This is pretty unusual for FBI evidence gathering procedure.

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4chan has always been transparently cooperative with law enforcement whenever they ask. They don't demand subpoenas or are obstructive - I imagine 4chan has good relations with various agencies.

8chan is another beast and I'd imagine that site to be as toxic as what goes on. I would imagine no good relations nor prior willingless to play ball. They state they "comply with US law" and are "responding" to the police. Doesn't seem as friendly as 4chan's approach.

Of course in the US it's common to "never talk with the police" so I should affix by saying that I'm a European and have more trust in the law

I hesitate to demonize 8ch solely on the basis that they require legal protocol to be followed. I expect all organizations to require warrants before handing over data to the authorities.

Subpoenas aren't warrants and we are just as legally required to oblige them if they are valid and signed by a judge. One can get thrown in jail for not complying with both of them, so if one is pushing back, they better be really fucking prepared for the consequences of that action. For a subpoena/warrant for legitimate data collection of online extremists, that's not a battle one is likely to win. Like with all things in life, one really need to pick their battles sometimes.

I'm more inclined to believe that this FBI agent is not familiar with standard operating practices, seeing as his biography describes him as spending most of his career working on drug gangs, which is a somewhat different beast than online domestic terrorism work.

Relationships aren't really with the organization (RE the 4chan comment), they're more with the individual agents and pretty decentralized. I've never had the same FBI agent twice, for example.

Your assumptions are disputed by information in the linked search warrant we are discussing (see, e.g., paragraph 32).

Actually you do have a point, looking back over the operational history of 4chan interaction with law enforcement wasn't that unusual; during that canada van attack thing the entire site went down while police collected evidence and the response was basically: https://desuarchive.org/a/thread/171969632/#q171978582.

I don't know why they decided to escalate to a search warrant.

> during that canada van attack thing the entire site went down

This is not true. HTH HAND

Belt & braces. Nobody can argue that you've done it improperly if you've got a warrant even if the subject would willingly comply.

Only thing I could think of is if he was still facing state charges only at the time it was drafted and served? Then there would be no case to issue it under. I guess they could have done a grand jury subpeona, but that comes with certain secrecy requirements.

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