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Does BD stand for Bound and Diverted?
Check out my topic some months ago: https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/127970/hetzner-server-hard-disks-confiscated-by-district-court
I received a recommendation from a very kind German guy here privately. Just ignore it because Germany has a lot of complicated law that they may not apply to your country. But if you are living in Germany, please take it seriously.
I'm into hosting industry since 2003, even managed Abuse for some datacenter for few years, hardware gets confiscated only if you have ignored or not answered LEO requests or ignored subpoena depending upon jurisdiction or if the officer/court thinks that the provider itself is responsible or involved in it. It can even happen if it's some very sensitive issue like Terrorism.
For issues like child porn or copyright they usually first contact abuse and if it's not taken care then and only then it comes to this.
Just move on and make sure you don't ignore any abuse complains and have proper contact information on your website.
We don’t allow any illegal contents or others and didn’t get any abuse email.
You said you offer shared hosting, so what if one of your clients ignored such a letter?
The police doesn't contact the reseller. Why should they? They got a court order to confiscate certain drives which are owned by Hetzner, not the OP.
this. and if they are looking for proof, they of course would not want to 'warn' upfront with any kind of abuse notification.
it's a risk you have to deal with, if you are offering services like hosting. you can't monitor all of the doings of your clients (and probably are not even allowed too). yet you have to expect the law to interfere if 1 out of 500 clients breaks the law.
think about hetzner who just lost their harddisks. they probably did not even ask you what's going on or how to compensate? they just live with the risk that it happens for any of their clients...
Hosting porn without secure access restriction (which does not mean button or creditcard) is illegal in Germany. Any porn, also drawn. German law specifically states pornographic CONTENT, not images/video, so includes also drawn and text. Certain books are illegal in Germany by this.
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__184d.html
They do, if you are in the same country (for fear of their own law) or large enough. Hetzner, on some services, does IP SWIP anyway - i get all abuse including court orders directly.
Bullshit. If there is illegal data on it the drive is wiped and still sent back. Police does not keep originals or even work at them; all block copies.
You can, there is no reason to have customer data by German laws - you merely need to fuck around your accounting for this to have the right VAT rates.
Not true in much of West EU (DE, AT, FR...). If the POLICE (LKA, BKA etc.) wants data they will sometimes ask but if the court wants it for an existing case... it will just take it.
In Austria very common as no judge has to sign for a search/confiscation warrant.
There is also no subpoena like system, or rather it has no way to force anyone to anything - Either you are victim/witness (which means you HAVE to comply with most things, but NOT by Police, ONLY court) or defendant (in this case you have the right to not say anything at all, aside of your personal data).
Not always the case as William has already mentioned.
I can speak for 5 EU countries, 2 West, 1 Central, 2 East - They just sent Europol for the HDDs to the DCs and Europol got the local cops for enforcement and in all aside 1 country a re-certified (and translated) court order as well.
Notably ISPs are also protected so unless they have solid proof the ISP is in it they will not break into the DC or similar, they might go there and keep an eye on every person until the job is done instead of having them remove the drives/install spy hardware but that depends on company and location.
I personally watched Police in one country install a server to tap into a server by port mirror - they had no idea how to configure the port mirror (ok, no issue, not rare).... or their shitty BSD server (...really?)... i'd not expect much idea of what they do generally.
Then there was Gefahr im Verzug.
Unlikely, in clear cases (aka to prevent further immediate damage or crimes) there is no need for any court order, it can be obtained later.
They had one, from a lower court, which is probably dated at least 2 days before they actually tasked Hetzner to take the HDDs (nobody went there to do that, Hetzner does this often by size anyway).
This being Amtsgericht and as nothing really IT relevant is in Stuttgart i'd say it probably is defamation or similar - CP orders are usually from higher courts (or belong to existing cases) and Nazi stuff should always be from Berlin (this SHOULD fall into federal, not state, by the nature of the crime/background).
I did not know this was possible, damn. Maybe I will move back to OVH/SYS afterall, I do not host copyright material neither pornography but some of my hostees could, I mean, you cannot control everything they host, imagine this happening because someone uploaded into their WP a copyrighted song without them even knowing about it..
France has laws too.
ofc, but seems not to be that hard for what I am reading, also thinking about going to SYS Canada or for instance OVH US.
You want to move your data to US for fear of local laws? Did I interpret that correctly?
Not local laws if I am not from Germany
So you think that US laws offer better data protection than German laws huh?
Disks get seized or cloned or tapped everywhere, it's not like Germany is any different (unless you're a revisionist or a pornographer); you're not getting a server seized for a simple copyright infringement (like: user posts rickrolling.mp3) either, civil != criminal prosecution
With everything I have read here and on the net, US law is more soft than Germany's, I mean even jail for TEXT porn? I mean we are talking about sexual texts or even dead's pictures? Imagine people posting a movie screenshots
What do you refer to with „Nazi stuff“? Smaller things should be handled on lower levels.
But if there is a federal / „defense of nation“ implication (which can either mean that a case spans multiple states or it is directed against federal institutions) or it is of terrorist nature, then it will be pulled by the „Generalbundesanwalt“, which is the federal prosecutor in Germany.
That would then be Karlsruhe, I beg to differ.
To be precise, he sits exactly 1 building away from the 1&1 headquarters there - with a cinema in between.
But back to topic, this case will hardly come from there, that is a really small agency.
Don’t believe everything you read. This is wildly out of context.
Porn is not „per se“ illegal, what that comment most likely referred to was making stuff available to minors.
Also other aspects here seem to wildly mix up: Yes, you’ll probably not find much better data protection laws anywhere else. But what has that to do with your case?
I agree with what has been said before: perhaps some case of defamation. But no way to know for certain.
But if so, that could have happened to you anywhere. No point in moving. You’re a provider, this should be standard business risk for you!
Frankly, you’re not making a very professional impression here.
Call the prosecutor as suggested above!
Wiederbetätigung - Usage of this symbols and their meanings is i assumed in DE always a case for Verfassungsschutz (presumable depending what exactly either federal or state), not the general or federal police as in Austria usually (but it can end up with BVT there also easily).
Not really, if you publish or host cp - which includes text/drawings in Germany, you probably know anyway, as it is *pornografische Schriften - you could end in jail, but it is not more likely than with actual porn, seems to vary wildly by court, that this cases are usually not open does not help analysis why either...
I guarantee you a lot of US ISPs will never give data based on a foreign court order (if even legal), now if they COULD have got one in US is not up for discussion without seeing the German one, but yes while US laws are worse overall* the constitutional protection and resistance to gov is generally higher than in DE.
Porn. The law specifically is designed for porn and specifically (see above) includes writings and drawings. But it needs to be porn which leaves some... interpretation area that might end you in court at the end though at the sole discretion of a judge.
Some movies are illegal to publicly show in Germany (aside of nazi movies/glorification etc. which are illegal by another law), are not allowed to be sold even privately but SHOULD be legal to own (eg. Lolita).
These among others are illegal and have been confiscated actively (the store can be forced to give up your data and the gov will get it from you or send a letter where to ship/bring it, usually no charges) - usually not for porn though, mostly violence etc.:
https://www.moviepilot.de/liste/beschlagnahmte-filme-nach-131-stgb-noir
it's probably something involved with child porn. terrorism related would probably be tapped.
I would certainly feel more comfortable hosting certain things in the US then Germany - that's just my personal preference.
Anything more than an nazi meme is an criminal offense.
The question was not if it is a criminal offense or not. If the case in question here wouldn’t have been a criminal offense, then the HDD wouldn’t have been seized.
My point was that only either terrorist activities or other general threats to the nation (irrespective if Nazi background or other) will earn you a direct flight to the Bundesgerichtshof in Karlsruhe where the Generalbundesanwalt will charge you.
(This is actually true: as the subjects stay in state custody - there is no federal prison - they will be flown in to BGH for questioning by helicopter. And as the BGH is in city center, this usually doesn’t get unnoticed.)
[That said, personal note: one of the things that make me really happy and proud about this nation is the way how the highest court, the Verfassungsgericht (constitutional court) is set up (also in Karlsruhe, but has no relationship to BGH): it’s the highest court in a 80mio people nation, but it sits in a smallish bungalow-type building right in the middle of a public park. There’s promenades around it and at least in the front there’s zero fencing or barriers and you could walk right up to it... ...to be told rather quickly that those decorative delimiters of the walkway are supposed to be taken seriously. Well, I suppose that’s just one of those lessons to learn when you move to a new place.
But the point is: it’s such a powerful statement:
the world might go crazy, other countries might have people with guns walking around and shootings every other day, there might be insane lunatics on the rise. But we live in a free society and here it’s the civil people via the code of law that rule, and we are not afraid.
The sheer power of this picture made me shiver ever so often when I walked by.
Self delusion is a hell of a drug.
I will have to check this information with my friend from Germany, he is German..
Yes, correct - But that was just my point: if it’s not on a national level = suspicious activity in more than 1 state or certain terrorist cases, then it will remain on state level (Verfassungsschutz of the state in question -> Generalstaatsanwaltschaft). But not be picked up by federal prosecutor.
The discussion emerged from the claim „Nazi -> Berlin“ which I just said is wrong.
Perhaps I overlooked something, but I did not at all refer to CP. I was talking about plain simple normal p without c.
The drive was seized by police, which implies a court order from a german court.
So the provider didn’t just „give data“ up to a foreign court order - why do you suggest this?
How would things have worked out any differently with a filing to a US court-> US court order -> US provider?
If you compare two legal systems, it’s hardly fair to look at a local court order in one case and compare it to one from abroad in the other, especially without knowing the origin of the OP, his customers and their users.
Of course OP could deliberately choose a location where neither he nor any of his clients nor their users sit, to put up as much complexity to make it as inconvenient as possible to prosecute him.
That really is a strange statement.
I‘m fairly certain that we don’t have hundreds of seizings directly from intelligence agencies under some strange laws that even prohibit the provider to tell anyone what happened.
Not talking about corporate and it’s influence.
And the statement is a contradiction in itself: Because I feel rather well protected by my constitution, I don’t feel the need to protect myself against my government (after all, I am 1/80mio of it myself) - if I look at the reality of today’s world protection against Supra-national corporations and billionaires and their influence seems rather more relevant.
Really? What a B.S.
You clearly have no idea what you are talking about.
Oh come on, this is again way simplified and mixing stuff up.
porn (not cp!!) is NOT per se illegal. It may be possessed and traded legally. You just have to observe certain rules for youth protection, e.g. no sale to minors.
yes, there are types of content that are generally not allowed and punishable if you sell them: nazi, certain violence etc.
Is this why you consider speech not to be free here? seriosly?
Anyway: those are two seperate things and we have 0 insight into what the case at hand really is about.
Here’s a picture of the constructional court: https://goo.gl/images/AJ9htz
All the green all around the buildings are public parks. In Summer you will find this area packed with people/students as there’s a university nearby.
Note the walkway right above the buildings, just seperated with a single line of trees and some small bollards from the driveway of the court: that’s a public promenade.