Apparently the FBI took three racks. If those are whole racks, it seems excessive. https://twitter.com/#!/Pinboard/status/83256217174147072
But another issue is that Digital One told Pinboard this was due to bad router firmware -- how do you confuse a software issue and an FBI raid? https://twitter.com/#!/Pinboard/status/83257679023325186
1. suspect that someone had walked away with 3 racks, or
2. guess that some network hardware had gone bad?
In the United States we might start considering computer equipment as private spaces, not unlike our residents and vehicles. With so much of our lives increasingly digital in nature, it's not that screwy of an idea that law enforcement should require a search warrant for computer equipment and storage media.
> In the United States we might start considering computer
> equipment as private spaces, not unlike our residents and
> vehicles. With so much of our lives increasingly digital
> in nature, it's not that screwy of an idea that law
> enforcement should require a search warrant for computer
> equipment and storage media.
http://www.cybercrime.gov/ssmanual/index.html
I'd be willing to bet my house that the law enforcement had a search warrant to take the data in question.
The problem is that the government's strategy -- grab the hardware -- doesn't work well when the hard drive is a virtual disk that sits on a server with a ton of other virtual disks.
Ultimately though, I think this isn't a question that can be solved by technical means. The solution is going to come when law enforcement can come up with a way of "confiscating" the virtual disks that doesn't open the door for claims of tampering & evidence planting.
> The problem is that the government's strategy -- grab the hardware -- doesn't work well when the hard drive is a virtual disk that sits on a server with a ton of other virtual disks.
A fine point. I assert that the government should, then, have to receive a search warrant for each individual's data on the specific piece of hardware. Consider the search of an apartment complex: getting a warrant for one residence of the building does not grant search rights for every other residence. My contention is that physical disks with many virtual disks should be treated as multiple tenant property, as indeed it is.
Thank you for the comment and the citation.
I would, however, imagine that the police would need a warrant to search any other virtual disk.
But the seizure of those disks raises an interesting legal question. Any lawyers know the answer?
Going back to your hypothetical, if the resident of 3A were stuffing materials of interest into the crawlspace between their ceiling the the floor of 4B and said crawlspace could only be accessed through the floor of 4B, the interested authorities would need either the express permission of the residents of 4B for entry into their residence or a warrant for search. _That_, I assert, is a similar situation akin to the topic under discussion.
But the government is going to claim that its "right" to get at the evidence is stronger than the property rights of the other co-resident users.
Consider: the 4th Amendment isn't in effect when you're within 100 miles (?) of the border; the chance of smuggling, etc., is greater there, so the need to detain and search people in that zone outweighs our rights. Or, consider a case in which my buddy borrows my car, and is seen driving through an unsavory neighborhood, is stopped, and found with a big sum of cash. This gives them the "right" to confiscate my car because it was involved in drug trafficking, even though no crime has been committed, and I wasn't involved in any case.
However, that particular issue is not germane to the case in point, which appears to involve the FBI rather than immigration/border patrol.
Your post is high on hyperbole and fear but low on content.
Just because the government has the legitimate right to conduct warrantless searches under conditions {x,y,z} doesn't mean they have rights to conduct warrantless searches under any other condition, or under all conditions.
The feds could do plenty, but won't. The legal system is slow to react, and the feds likely fear that just taking virtual disks would lead to evidentiary issues at trial.
Hosting providers might be able to provision in a way that the servers hosting evil.site could be taken by the feds but backups existed of the other sites, but it would be an extremely hard -- if not impossible -- task.
In the end, cloud computing doesn't change the rules of safely deploying your site to the world -- if you care about uptime & your data, your site must be running on at least two different hosts.
Honest question: why are physical hard disks more valid as evidence than virtual ones? Aren't they equally easy to tamper with?
But the police have a well designed chain of custody system to at least reduce the possibility of tampering. Not everybody in the office can tamper with evidence behind lock and key with seals -- of course it still happens, but the goal is to reduce the possibility.
This falls apart when the evidence in question is data that can be copied, altered, etc.
And of course we can likely come up with clever cryptographic answers to this problem, but in the end, it's far easier and a more understood procedure for the police just to grab hardware and seal it up.
Do you want to explain to 12 randomly selected people how virtual disks work, and the cryptographic algorithms you used to ensure that the data you're showing them is identical to the data the defendant had on their system? Could you explain it so well that a reasonably skilled defense attorney couldn't confuse them enough to produce reasonable doubt?
...or is the answer that the law has no adequate treatment of abstract evidence?
Everything.
Moving rack after rack into waiting trucks makes for excellent TV.
Somewhere in the FBI, right now, is a man or woman powerful enough and ignorant enough to order such a seizure. It's pretty much inevitable.
[1] The original link is broken, but I discussed it at the time here: http://clubtroppo.com.au/2009/04/05/on-a-risk-i-had-not-cons...