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Comment by BLKNSLVR | Hacker News Reader

Short version:

Possibly the worst thing to be raided for: distribution of CSAM.

Apparently based purely on the 'evidence' of my IP address being on some list - that's the only explanation I ever got.

Funny thing is, they did so little background research they didn't even know to expect kids in the house when they raided at 6:30am.

It still triggers me. This was in August 2022. I wrote pages and pages of my memories and thoughts about it, and it still makes me angry for about ten different reasons.

The long version I haven't written yet and probably never will. I don't want to dwell on it, I want to get on with my life and have an even worse drama to deal with at the moment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44533637

I know I'm alive, that's for sure. I'm trying to make lemonade by the goddamn bucket load.

P.S. I have written prior HN comments referring to the raid if you care enough to go back that far.

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> It still triggers me. This was in August 2022. I wrote pages and pages of my memories and thoughts about it, and it still makes me angry for about ten different reasons.

As someone who was arrested in his PJs at 4am due to a false accusation that the police did not investigate and for which they did not have probable cause, I feel this in my bones.

$15k in legal fees, a day in jail, and three months later, the charges were dropped because, as per the DA, “we cannot in good conscience pursue this case”.

No consequences for the person who made the false accusation, or the officer that enacted an arrest without probable cause.

My heart still skips a beat whenever I think I hear a knock at the door or noises in the middle of the night. I’ll wake up from a dead sleep in a panic. In theory I could pursue a lawsuit against both the accuser and officer, but that feels overwhelming — I’ve just tried to move on.

It completely changed the way I see the police and the criminal justice system. The process is, in of itself, punishment.

I was fortunate enough to be able to afford good legal representation, and I now have a great deal of empathy for those who are railroaded by the system because they cannot.

I'm only postulating here, but I have a strong suspicion that my ability to get past it as well I have (not perfectly, but I don't have nightmares or break into a sweat when I hear police sirens - although it does remind me almost every time) is because I had to give the impression to my kids that there was nothing to worry about; this is not a big deal; this is not traumatic and will not change the course of your life.

> It completely changed the way I see the police and the criminal justice system. The process is, in of itself, punishment.

One million times this. Even if it's not completely true at it's base, it's true for those unfortunate enough to have experienced this.

One of the funny (?) things about it, is that most of the individual officers were nice enough people, personable (other than one inflammatory officer who should not be employed in a role that comes into contact with people), one even gave the cat a pat. It's the system / systems, and likely the perverse incentives for their monthly stats.

I'm glad I didn't end up needing legal representation.

The way I deal with it is to actively let it go, forgive the situation in my mind, treat it as one of those anomalous circumstances that happen every second on a global scale. Treat it as a reminder of the unpredictability of life and an opportunity to be thankful that it's not my 'normal'.

>It completely changed the way I see the police and the criminal justice system.

Well,hopefully it has also changeed the way you see society in general, it's terrifying how common people willingly ( even when they have options) defer to the govt./authorities. The system didn't get be this this way overnight. Covid was one example of the tyranny of the majority.

That's absolutely horrifying! Glad to hear you've managed to move past it, as it would have absolutely broken me.

My home was searched by the police for something much less serious (buying lab equipment, completely legally), and the experience left me having panic attacks every time there was a knock at the door.

It makes me crazy that police in the U.S. nowadays can get a search warrant permitting seizure of large amounts of valuable computer and networking gear along with digital devices certain to massively disrupt anyone's life - only from buying things which are completely legal to buy and possess. Apparently all it takes is "a suspicious pattern of behaviors" to get a judge to issue an expansive warrant. The "suspicious pattern" is often defined ad hoc by police under no objective standard and never detailed in the warrant request. Judges are really failing in their duties because there are too many cases like this happening.

Depriving people of their valuable property for 8 months or more is also abusively punitive. In warrants that grant seizures of all or most digital devices, judges should require police to return the items within 30 days if they don't either file charges or go back to the judge with good cause for an extension. If police can't get around to actually looking at the evidence they claimed was so crucial in 30 days maybe it's not a high-priority crime. And if having a reasonable time limit makes it too hard to look through so much stuff, they're free to more narrowly tailor their seizure requests so they don't have so much to troll through.

And my experience was in Australia, so the "decline of policing" has well and truly reached out shores as well.

To possibly make this even more frustrating, when I was told I could pick up my gear, the detective in charge said that a few things they found flagged as suspicious:

1. I had / used virtual machines

2. I had "Tor" on my computer(s)

3. I had downloaded stuff from Megaupload

Now I'm not entirely sure whether these comments were based on what they found on my seized gear, or whether these were actually sufficient 'red flags' to make them think the warrant was justified initially, but, my god, how completely out of their depth, and therefore totally unqualified, they are to make life-changing adjudications about these things - and that their access to metadata only makes it more likely that they'll make false positive mistakes (which is just terrible for society overall).

I'm literally not sure what they meant by saying "you have tor on your computer", whether there's evidence of my having visited the dark web, or just having a (way outdated) copy of the tor browser saved somewhere.

And I think the only things I'd ever downloaded from Megaupload were Android ROMs.

Regarding Virtual Machines: I can't even... they're obviously non-technical so couldn't possibly understand, and yet... gah, I can't even...

This is extremely concerning. I was reading this thread thinking thank god this could only happen in the US.

My concern is around the sequence of events that needed to take place for this to happen to you. Also as a former network operator I want to know how laws like the data retention act, identify and disrupt, etc play a role in these situations - ie who triggered what. I think I’ll review your comment history.

Sounds like you have handled it in about as healthy manner as one could hope. I saw that as a compliment.

Where you actually charged and prosecuted for anything or did they just steal your gear without due process?

The latter wouldn't be unheard of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...

They had a warrant for the raid. Or at least they showed me a piece of paper, but my mind was so thrown that I literally couldn't read it (I've never experienced such a thing before or since - I literally couldn't make out letters on the page, such was my state of shock at the time).

I wasn't arrested or charged, they found nothing of what they were looking for on the multi terabytes of disks they seized. No further action other than the raid.

Did they eventually return your gear?

> (After 8 months they told me to pick up all my gear, they found nothing, but thanks for traumatising my kids)

Don't forget yourself, the breadwinner of the household!

In the USA? Where you can be sued if someone slips on your sidewalk? Can't you sue the gvmt?

Why would you be able to sue the government for conducting a search authorized by a judge? It's expected that result of some searches is "Oopsie doopsie nothing found".

It’s even worse than that, in the US police have broad latitude to destroy property, kill pets, seize any cash or assets (theoretically related to the crime, but very easy to abuse) and etc. while executing a search, with little to no recourse.

Not just kill pets, but kill people. Even if they raided the wrong home.

Yeah, it’s true.

You could sue if they made some major mistakes or were fabricating evidence or some other significant malpractice. It's a pretty high bar.

You can but chances are you'll still lose.

I think it's fair to expect that the authorities must have a very good probable cause to perform a search of your home, and that any search that turned out to be unwarranted results in a big compensation and a public announcement stating that the specific police department and judge violated the right to privacy.

I'm guessing search should still happen in a way to limit damage (physical, psychological) to other parties (in this case, the kids present).

You can sue the government, but the grounds for winning are much narrower.

Meerly suffering harm from government action is not sufficient. Having property impounded as part of an investigation, pursuant to a warrant, is likely not actionable, unless there was malice involved. Using slim evidence isn't really actionable.

> In the USA? Where you can be sued if someone slips on your sidewalk? Can't you sue the gvmt?

Sure you can sue anybody for anything. Whether your case actually gets heard or not is another consideration. And even if it gets heard, the judge can simply dismiss it for a variety of reasons before proceeding to trial.

Also, state and the federal governments have sovereign immunity and qualified immunity. Basically the government has to allow itself to be sued.

True this doesn't apply to counties or cities, however there is still a much higher bar for tort even for local police. Generally if they are operatikng within the law, like executing a valid search warrant, the standard is much higher than it would be for an average citizen.

The government has endless resources; you would go bankrupt unless a law firm saw a huge payout in taking your case. The system is rigged in favor of the government. They could have burned down his house and the neighbor's house, and not been responsible. Land of the free, God Bless America......

Also, there is almost no deterrent effect. The people who authorized or perpetrated the abuse are not punished if you sue and win a settlement. They don't even have to hire and pay the lawyers. The payment comes out everyone's taxes, perhaps with interest if the government has to pay by issuing debt.

When the police abuse their power, it's the community that pays their salaries that feels the pain.

This was in Australia but your point stands.

Australia.

We looked into anything that could be done to minimise the chances of such a thing happening to innocent parties, but the only option was to make a complaint about an individual officer. There's no (easy, obvious) way to question the system they use to determine "validity" of raids or due diligence prior to requesting a warrant, or evidence required to justify a warrant.

The whole thing just felt to me like it was blindly rubber stamped all the way through because "protect the children". Pity my daughter was a child and absorbs such experiences... My son was also a child, but he's less affected by such things.

It's good for children in the US to learn early that they can't trust the police.

Same goes for almost any other country I've been to. But the US does seem to be one of the worst places from what I see online.

In which country can the children trust the police?

China?

Japan, England

Can they? I've heard of police in Japan pinning murder cases on people they don't like. I believe there has been some reporting on this related to why thy have such high clearance rates. Don't the police in the UK still have a lot of sexual misconduct scandals?

In England the police arrests you for a tweet under hate speech laws and they threw the post office workers under the bus to protect the politicians and buggy SW of Fujitsu. Not the place where I'd trust the law enforcement at all.

And Japan, while being clean, safe and Kawai, its legal system has like a 90%+ conviction rate, so make of this what you will.

In general, the most civilized part of the world, western & north europe.

So, Norway, Dennmark, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, France, Spain, Austria, Switzerland

You can, and people have, get arrested and sentenced to prison in most of those countries for posts on social media.

Do you have some specific examples? You present it as if it's a bad thing but I can imagine scenarios where it makes perfect sense. As an obvious example the person could be sharing CP on social media.

So what exactly are you referring to?

https://brusselssignal.eu/2025/06/german-police-mass-raids-h...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/german-woman-given-harsher-senten...

https://www.foxnews.com/media/germany-started-criminal-inves...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/08/10/autistic-teenage...

https://www.dw.com/en/germany-greens-habeck-presses-charges-...

Germany and the UK seem to be the worst offenders in regards to this, but that may just be selection bias on what gets into English language media. I can pull more articles if you're actually interested.

The Telegraph article does seem a bit ridiculous but the others seem fairly fine to me. One of them wasn't even an arrest, it was just a politician pressing charges which is his right.

I think it's fair to demand that people follow laws on the internet as in person. Germany has laws against supporting nazism and for good reason. I don't give a crap about those people's right to free speech. The laws against insulting politicians seem a bit less reasonable but honestly just don't call people names online. Can't say I'm bothered by these articles.

Are you by any chance a European?

He said not to call people names, dummy.

Most Germans wouldn't be able to recognize Nazism if it was doing the harlem shake on their dining table.

Mention to them that the only way Communism and Nazism differ is Nazism following Engel's nationalist approach to overthrowing capitalism rather than Marx's international one and Nazis having been obsessed with spiritual and Iranian occultism and you're met with blank stares.

Yet those are the fundamentals of Nazism everything else derives from. Including the Holocaust.

Same goes for the understanding of the Nazis "Nationalism". Most Germans just won't believe you when you tell them that it was an absurd use of that term and much more similar to the modern "pro-EU" mindset than the modern understanding of nationalism.

The Germans are propagandized into thinking the definition of Nazis is being called "rightwing" by the media and wanting decentralization of power and cultural homogenity (modern nationalism). Yet the left:

- has already its SA precursors back on the streets (Hammerbande, Antifa, "NGOs")

- is getting rid of free speech to the maximum extent they somehow can pull off within the limits of the law and beyond that through mandatory voluntary industry initiatives (e.g. "Trusted Flaggers")

- are manufacturing external enemies at fault for all wrong (the Russians)

- is spinning up the war machine (massive military spending at 5% of GDP, near limitless commitment to finance the Ukraine war instead of trying to push for peace)

- Are centralizing more and more power in the hands of highly intransparent or even unelected institutions (e.g. EU or international contracts)

And various other stuff. E.g. some of the stuff you can hear on e.g. party congresses of the German "Die Linke".

I know I'm going to get a lot of flak for looking like I'm shilling, but the UAE, ironically. They do not mess around with kids, and make sure they're not exposed to whatever issue the parents might be facing. In many cases, the police allow for lenient visitations for the mother and children. These instances are often not portrayed online because 1.) family guys tend to be less involved in open crime whatsoever, 2.) the UAE has a large singles population so whatever instances happen are very rare, and 3.) the surveillance state ensures that the police already know who's at fault and who isn't.

But God forbid if you're ever caught for any crime whatsoever. Or if you're detained for domestic violence. Especially if not in Dubai (which is miles more lenient than other emirates).

If your downspout is draining onto the sidewalk and turning it into an invisible ice rink...

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