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Hey look a thread about law enforcement doing something, of course @Maounique is here to rant about how horrible they are. Anarchy for all amirite?
Oh, so the datacenter tech will log into someone's servers, enter the root password, do a vzdump, load it on a USB drive and send the police on their way!
Just because there are other people's data doesn't mean anything. Those drives had (something) illegal on them, and they received a court order that allowed them to take those drives. Why are the police supposed to know it's running a VM? They know that X IP has illegal content on it, it's owned by XY company at XYZ datacenter.
Even if the police know it's a VM, what are they supposed to do? Wait for the host to get around to making a copy, and deleting it? Then they lose some evidence. What if there was a VPS on that node that was being used as a way for terrorists to communicate through? Can't seize it because someone's running a minecraft server on the node too?
What I meant is enable providers to more easily take backups instead of getting another dedi, etc...
@mnpeep I like that picture
@ontopic
Long time customer of RAM Host here, just like @joepie91, sad to hear this. I have no vpss on the german nodes, but still. I wonder why the HDD got seized. Maybe somebody ran a tor exit on them.. I hope ramhost will be open about the case, just as they always are.
I will ignore the personal attack as always and move to facts:
If someone can offer an argument on why a few hard drives presented in court will do more to convince the jury and judges than the collection of files from the VM associated with the "infringing" IP, then I am ready to hear it.
This kind of "bulk" seizing has the purpose to:
1. Frighten the DC/provider into doing the police work (screen users, keep personal data, force them to do more verifications than needed) by implicitly terrorizing everyone by example (you are next ! kind of thing). In the end they will spend more for extra hours of work, and the raids will still happen because it is kind of random and nobody can review the all the content passing through their wires and storage, no matter the effort.
2. Shoot in the dark hoping to find more data on the neighbouring VMs which they hope will lead to more raids, naturally, if there is a criminal on a server, they are hanging together. Who cares about the data of innocent ppl ? Who cares about privacy, only the criminals have something to hide...
3. Offer some bullets to the ppl pretending they fight against CP and terrorism and show how many raids they did to "get tough on crime". Elections coming close and the right wing government might lose power and we cannot let that happen, god forbid ! We must show the citizens we protect them from cybercrime even if we have no clue...
4. Demand more unconstitutional anti-privacy laws showing the low rate of conviction in these cases as a problem with privacy instead of the real problem with incompetence.
They probably can't actually. IDK how it works in Germany, but in the US modifying the data in any way, INCLUDING making a copy, is the fastest way to have a judge throw out your entire court case since it is considered tampering
edit: the only acceptable form of copying is usually throwing the disk in another machine, mounting it read-only and making an image of the disk
@Maounique unfortunately i think a copy of the data can't be used as a proof in court. The court wants the original physical evidence to be presented - i.e. the HDDs.
And they probably want to look at the HDDs and search for already deleted data, etc.
I wouldn't say "unfortunately", it's a good thing that courts won't accept just any old digital evidence the police can produce
Sadly they are that dumb. Just look at what happened/is still happening to @william because of how moronic they are. And this too in the EU.
In the US, they may simply walk out with an entire rack/racks of servers and your business is dead.
@Maounique you're not realistic. Police is not there to "trust" company but to take and secure potential evidence.
The way you described how thing should be don't work in my world and so it don't work in your. Infact you're very limited here without taking into consideration what implication would have your way of dealing with matters. There's not magic wand which would immediatelly summon IT experts around your boxes and before that politely ask you if you have some clients on server and then ask you also if you're sure that it's not you the one who do nasty things and of course then they should take your word for it because it's well known that people don't lie...
Yes of course all this what you're saying would be possible in society where police would have enough budget, enough autority, enough equipment, enough manpower, enoug of control, enough of experts... to know and see everything. Police state! But luckily it's not that way and they are actually clueless and forced to take disks for investigations because all other alternatives require something much much worse and luckily we're not there yet.
Yeah, the fact that they have to take whole disks actually is actually a great benefit to defendants.
For such cybercrime, I believe they need to seize the physical drive. Make a copy, and investigate the copy so as not to damage the original
Well better than live in a world where repressive institutions would have enough authority to know everything about everyone already and wouldn't need to take out whole disk. (that's still related to @Maounique ideas of freedom)
I send them all to Amazon S3, and good luck seizing those hard drives.
Just to note:
That's in Austria, not Germany (Yes there is one in Germany, but that village is very small) - So this was not German police, but Europol.
No, if you are registered company in Austria they do not confiscate HDDs usually, there are other ways.
Well, i doubt Europol can just walk in a DC. The local police must come with them.
Can someone edit the thread to stress the "RAMHost" part or something? Getting scared comments from clients...
Clients have an IQ above the baboon level and are able to read and understand English? It's the first word of the post tilte...
I like part of the prevailing logic that police must seize actual drives. As if exact imaged copies are not sufficient.
How about the pirate culture uses the same bogus logic to defend against copyright owners? It's just a copy. It might be imperfect. That's not the file I had.
Don't they like to accompany the police on these raid things? You know to help the law keep track of what drives to remove and what not?
Copyright folks have been documented accompanying police, yes. Never should be allowed to.
I am anti piracy, pro free speech.
I can't think of many good and valid reasons for police to be touching a damn thing.
If they have evidence to justify a warrant, that information that the warrant is based on should be adequate as evidence. This is digital and thus, nearly imaginary intangible data. It's not that they suspect you smuggled an elephant and need a warrant to seize the physical evidence. There is nothing "physical" about data.
The crime is the transaction, the sharing of the data, etc. It is like arresting a person who you saw commit a crime via CCTV camera. Absent the CCTV footage, there is no basis for pursuing the perp.
Laws do not fit the data world. Because of it crime has gone rampant electronically.
Police respond in the worst fashion. Shuttering viable companies. Tying up expensive servers and corporate information.
It's time for a new solution to avoid all of these issues and it isn't the cloud.
This post xBillion, but can't change the world unfortunately.
So @pubcrawler you are literally saying that all warrants and house searches should be abolished because they don't extract any evidence ever?
I think he's saying it doesn't apply to digital media.
Warrants for physical issues, are to seize often the physical items that were taken in the commission of the crime (stolen art, money from a bank, cocaine stored in the house proven to exist by monitoring outgoing trash collection), or used to commit the crime (think, gun, hammer, knife).
Now white collar crimes are inherently different. Police might pursue a warrant to seize computers used by a hacker. But that is when and where they have evidence of the misuse of said computer. They already have the evidence, the act proven, logs, ip information, telephone records, etc. The only thing they might need to do is identify the person at the location they've traced back to. Who in the household is the do'er.
The arresting or seizure of the perps computer (hacker) really just serves as a free for all expedition by police looking to magnify an often minor infraction of the law that would surely be challenging to prove much in front of a jury. So they use open ended warrants to mass collect and freely rummage. This gives them all sorts of data to distort and harass the perp and confuse a jury with. It shouldn't be legal anywhere, unless you like living in a totalitarian no rights society.
Digital media is a totally different beast, very akin to the hacker scenario. But worse, it is a multi tenant environment in the case of hosting. In doing these seizures, they rush to "do the right thing" through traditional means. I doubt they are inept, but rather employ the free-for-all rummaging to bolster useless non-prosecutable cases.
Companies impacted should sue and demand immediate release of their equipment.
What's to stop the same do-good mentality from seizing an entire neighborhood or apartment building or any other semi-common environment because of the accusation of crime?
And... I was thinking, Amazon must host quite a bit of problematic content for customers.
Has anyone heard of Amazon getting raided and drives removed?
Moral of the story is, do everything illegal in RAM.
I think the moral of the story is:
That applies to any real site.
@jarland how ironic then it was RAMhost that got raided