Slashdot Mirror
FBI Conducts Raids Over Half-Life 2 Source Theft
TheXerox writes "According to a recent weblog post, a San Francisco native had his house raided by the FBI last week, and 'lost upwards of 9 machines, and lots of misc equipment besides' in a seizure related to the theft of the Half-Life 2 source code from Valve Software." The scanned-in search warrant posted on the site indicates the FBI were looking for "...any IP addresses related to any of the Valve internal or external networks... Valve passwords and/or usernames... any and all items... related to Valve Software, Half-Life, Half-Life 2", and the Hungry Programmers page mentions that "...several Hungries were raided on January 14th by the FBI and Secret Service, and their computers seized."
full mirror inc. warrent here
Why is the secret service involved? Arent they only concerned with protecvting the president and fake currency?
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
It would really piss me off to lose my machines if I never did anything, I wonder how long it would be before you got them back and what kind of condition they would be in.
January 15, 2004
The whole surreal story
So at 6:30am on January 14th, I woke up to the doorbell buzzing. Not a short lived buzz. Someone had their thumb pressing the button and holding it there. "Fucking drunkard" I thought, and rolled over, intent on ignoring it. It then started a rythmic *buzz* *buzz* *buzz* *buzz*, over and over again. After about 5 minutes battling to get back to sleep, I gave up and got up. Put my pants on, grabbed my sweatshirt, and stumbled off toward the door.
As I walked down the steps I heard them talking to the nextdoor neighbor, asking him where the landlord lived. I reach the door just as the neighbor's door closes. I compose myself to deal with whatever is behind the door, and open it.
Immediately there's a flashlight in my eyes. "Are you Chris Toshok?" "Uh, yes" "Mr. Toshok, we're with the FBI. We have a warrant to search the premises." I looked down out of the glare of the flashlight and saw the FBI badge of the long haired blonde woman standing in front of me. I also saw two people behind her, bodies turned sideways so as to present less of a target. Guns drawn? It was too hard to tell really with the glare of the flashlight, but I'm assuming yes.
I mumbled something about turning on the light so I could see the warrant (pages 1 2 3 4 5)they'd thrust into my hands and turned and groped on the wall for the switch. They all tensed. The light came on, and I looked over the warrant for a second.
"Please come out here Mr. Toshok," and a hand on my arm pulling me onto the porch. Once I was out on the porch several agents started up the stairs. I said that my roommate was still asleep in bed. They asked his name, I said "Peter". They continued up the steps, yelling his name. "Peter, this is the FBI." "PETER" "PETER, are you awake? this is the FBI"
I didn't watch it happen but apparently Peter awoke, naked, to a doorway full of FBI agents with guns out, yelling at him to get up. He asked if he could get some clothes on. They said yes. He asked if they could turn on the light so he could see. So Peter got to get dressed under the watchful gaze of government employees. Must have been fun.
They took Peter to the back of the house, and took me back upstairs to the front of the house, and proceeded to start going through everything in my room and the office.
I was questioned by the FBI agent in charge and a Secret Service agent at length about the Hungry Programmers, people I used to live with, whether particular people had the capacity/knowledge to do what they were investigating, etc. During the questioning she says "Now we're going to take all your computers." She sees the look on my face and says "Yeah, this is going to be hard for you." I said "uh, when will I get them back?" She said it depends, that they'd try to have them all back as soon as possible, but it depends on if they find anything suspicious on them. If they found contraband (kiddie porn, talk of drugs, or stuff they were actually looking for), that particular computer would never be coming home.
After the questioning I basically sat in the front room on a folded futon mattress, with at least one agent with me at all times. Sometimes two. At one point I said I really needed to brush my teeth and the SS agent assigned to me at the time walked with me back to the bathroom and stood behind me watching me in the mirror as I brushed my teeth. On my way back down the hall I looked into my room and saw 3 FBI agents rifling through my belongings. One looking at the condoms and stickers in my nightstand, one going through my underwear/sock drawer, and one looking through my books.
After a lot more sitting in silence in that room, interspersed with tidbits of conversation (an fbi agent asking me about the guitars, talking about the piano lessons in his youth, and how he was kicked in the chest by a horse.) I must say, the SS agents were a lot nicer than the FBI agents. One in particular was pretty cool - we joked a lot about just how absurd the whole thing was
Just when I thought they would let it die down, due to it being a bit more personal and involved, it seems like they went in to full gear.
But I'm still a bit doubtful that ANY network admin wouldn't notice 11GB of traffic to an outside location on the network.
how else are they supposed to train their agents with the latest technology if it continues to be held past the release date!
This is like saying, "The murder victim's last name was Smith, and this guy has a reference to a Mr. Smith in his Rolodex. He must be guilty."
Sure, what the fuck ever. This is trivially defensible in court.
lost upwards of 9 machines
Um - how many machines did he lose? 1? 5? 8.5?
Like sex? Read and write about it! Indecent Blogging
Is Available of his Weblog entry
FYI, Chris Toshok (toshok), the person who wrote up this experience is also one of the head programmers on Ximian's Evolution mail client.
...the raid on the Hungry Programmers was the result of a miscommunication between Valve and the FBI -- Valve had actually traced the breakin back to an ip address in Hungary.
(collective groan)
Thanks, thank you, I'll be here all week.
Boy.... I better delete that 207.173.176.142 off my caching DNS server quick.
*ding dong*
Oh no!!! TOOO LATE!!!!!
Seriously, that's about the dumbest warrent condition ever IMHO.
Rather than "FBI agents, acting under a warrant issued due to probable cause having been ascertained, ..."
welcome to slashdot.
It had something to do with the fact that Steve Jackson was producing a Cyberpunk game.
c hno/jackson/
More info:
http://www.boogieonline.com/revolution/express/te
http://www.sjgames.com/SS/
http://www.eff.org/Legal/Cases/SJG/
If Valve tries to make the claim in court that HL2 was postponed until April because of the source code theft, that will become fraud on their part. Until now it was just harmless marketing lies. The delay had little if anything to do with the code theft -- that was only a convenient excuse.
Someday I would like to see a game company create a game in an open way. They should have all their engine code out in the open so anybody could follow the progress and even contribute if they felt like it. They would not need to make up stuff about release dates because the public could easily find out the status of completion themselves. And if their source code gets stolen by other companies, they can just go all SCO on their asses. On the other hand, they can also make clear that if a hobbiest uses the engine code that they own the copyright. Smart game companies do that last part already.
All it will take is one brave company to revolutionize the industry. Happens all the time.
The FBI came with a blonde woman agent carrying the warrent and trying to be as nice as they can to a suspect. Let's face it, that's what this guy, and his entire group, appears to be right now.
You don't need to be proven guilty by any standard to become a suspect. To get a warrant, they do need to present something to a judge, but what that something is usually remains sealed. That's how the system works, there was a due process for taking his property.
So, the good news for him is so far that the FBI's just fishing on his machines right now. If they find what they're looking for, or anything else very illegal to have, then they'll be back with the cuffs.
Maybe its just Sierra in FBI jackets.
The evil has spread.
=)
Did he say he doesnt know anyone involved, or they didnt use his computers?
I read the mirror and I didnt see anything about it. If hes guilty, or did have anything to do with this then they should be able to take his computers and serve a search warrant. Try looking at this from law enforcements perspective. Im not some Nazi who supports gestapo like law enforcement either, I just didnt read anything that seemed wrong to me.
But the Secret Service should be raiding whoever came up with this color scheme!
Poor bastard got Steve Jacksoned.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I can just imagine some clueless FBI agent rifling through the poor guy's Rolodex and demanding that he tell them where his IP addresses are. "Sir, where do you keep your IP addresses sir?! This isn't a joke, son! You think this is funny?! Keep it up punk! You can laugh at the judge when we tell him that you wouldn't tell us where your IP addresses were!"
Will Half-Life have a special "FBI Raid" level when it is released? =)
And it still doesn't equate to not knowing what's going on in the world -- it just means somebody doesn't know how to spell. Duh.
How many times has Slashdot been approached by law enforcement agencies to obtain access to records or postings?
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
In the future, if he's ever unemployed, that warrant will be a big ugly red mark that will deter employers from hiring him.
I knew someone whose ex-wife accused him of abuse because she hated him. He never came close to being convicted, but he hasn't been able to get a job since.
You don't have to be convicted to be branded a criminal.
~To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. -Yann Martel
If you are found innocent...
a) What countermeasures/damages can you persue
b) If your computers are for business use, can you sue for lost revenue?
c) If they find something illegal (who doesn't have a "hack for program x" or keygen etc), but it is found that they came after you mistakenly, are your computers still lost?
d) You got no card, how can you call to find out about your stuff?
e) 9 computers, decent chance one is a server. How about if the server was hacked (cmon, if they hack valve wouldn't they redirect through dummy servers)
When did a weblog become fact? I understand they had scanned documents, but I just get very nervous about allowing blogs to become sources of fact.
With multiple companies hoping IPv6 enabled home appliances will be in the "home of the future", will search warrents looking for Internet devices mean the feds will be seizing everything from your fridge, toaster, and can opener?
The debate over that ought to be interesting.
Wow, I have to say, that would be the absolute worst morning of my life if it was me, the kind of stress that could give a guy an ulcer. He seems to be handling things pretty well though which is good. Nobody wants the FBI and Secret Service Raiding their home, no matter what.
/. kind) is biting him in the ass. I don't really care if Valve was using Outlook, If i hang a bed sheet over my door, and you walk in and take my stuff, you're still breaking and entering, even if the bedsheet wasn't the most secure door I could have used.
However that said, and my condolences to his lost PCs, if he is resposible for stealing the HL2 code, he kinda did deserve it, because I for one am a little pissed about the delay, and if he's guilty I guess karma(and not the
"I am the Flail of God!" -Genghis Kahn
Oh, you meant done for them, not done to them; my mistake!
If Toshok is so concerned about what's being taken from his apartment, and he hasn't done anything wrong, then why does he leave during the search and go to a friends place to "spread the word"? Something doesn't add up there.
If I hadn't done anything wrong, I'd stick around to see what's being confiscated. It seems like this guy's first priority was to sound an alarm...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
root@loot:~# cd stolen_stuff/u ff# scp half_life2.tar.gz dood@hackr.kr:
root@loot:~/stolen_stuff# ls
windowssrc.tar.gz half_life2.tar.gz eletronic_votinghck.tar.gz
root@loot:~/stolen_st
dood@hackr.kr's password:
half_life2.tar.gz 100% 00:00
root@loot:~/stolen_stuff# rm -f half_life2.tar.gz
root@loot:~/stolen_stuff# ^D
logout
- no sig.
So 6:30 must be their favorite time for these types of raids. I woke up in 1994 to FBI, SS, Sheriff's Dept, US Attorney's office standing over my bed.
They gave me a SS baby sitter too, and we sat in the kitchen watching Weird Science. I went up to my room at one time to gather my backpack for my 2nd day of Univ and saw the same thing, as they disassembled my machines, flipped through all of my books, etc. They actually went out to my car and took my cell phone.
Never expect to see your machines again, or if you do, they'll be 10 years out-dated. My friend got his C64's and 128's back about the time the 486/66 came out.
I Belive that now copying something is considered theft by law. I do not agree with this, but if they have now defined it as theft, they are legaly correct in that statement, even if theoricly they are not right.
I want to know why they seized his xbox controllers? How the fuck is that evidense?
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
As Khan would say, "Let them meet static!".
This is my sig.
In other threads, people have suggested that the Feds didn't understand how IP addresses work, and raided the wrong network. I suppose that's possible, but I think it unlikely, especially since they must know about the crack being traced to a user in Europe. It's more likely that they know or suspect that the HP guys have copies of the stolen source, and the raid is just a way to "send a message" to others who might consider downloading it.
Technically, computers get seized so the cops can gather evidence, which is supposed to lead to some kind of punishment if all the due process requirements are met. But as often as not, the seizure itself is the only punishment metted out, and is obviously meant as such. Which is pretty scary, when you consider your total lack of recourse when you are punished in this manner.
"Hi, Valve? Yeah, this is Chris Toshok. Yeah, I got no computers to play your next game on, you know? Not your problem you say? Just a sec... I'm adding a couple new obfuscated filters to Evolution..."
Anyone notice they took down his XP CD-KEY for his Dell laptop? That key is toast now!
Aren't you supposed to be innocent until proven guilty in San Francisco?
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
Such a beast already exists...
http://dban.sourceforge.net/
YMMV, enjoy
You're guilty until confirmed guilty in a court of law.
There are no innocents.
You almost never get the shit back. Half the reason for only having $300 used eBay computers at your house/apt/dorm. You don't want them stealing your $3500 Alienware rig or the setup you just built with $1000 of parts from Pricewatch, or your shiny new Apple G5 or G4 TiBook.
I've been popped before. All because I had a fake CNN web page made, a few months before the 'CNN fake news generator' got popular. It wasn't even hosted on my home systems!
The FBI was waiting for me one day when I walked outside my apartment to go to work. They marched me right back upstairs. They asked me a few questions and took the following:
White box AMD 800mhz that I built from spare parts. Old Powermac 8600. Old Pentium II-233MHz.
They did not, however, take my mice/keyboard/monitors, they did take the Mac stuff though.
They also did not take every floppy disk and CDROM I had in the house. You always used to hear news stories with headlines like "OVer 5,000 disks siezed in piracy raid" in the early years of home computers.
As the agent was leaving, my roomates newer Compaq laptop caught his eye, but I told him that machine wasn't mine and he didn't question me.
They have you sign a bunch of crap, and they write down serial numbers, give you copies of everything...This was about 3 years ago too.
I called the FBI offices, sometimes once a month. They would never return my calls, and always were telling me things were transfered to another office, etc. Originally I was told that they would be done with my stuff in 6-8 weeks.
After a while, I figured no news was good news, and didn't want to even deal with them any more over $500 worth of computers.
Ironically, I had to help the FBI/Customs on a case they were working on, someone in our office was looking at kiddie porn from a work computer. Figure they'd be looking out for me but that's the government for you.
Now, on the other hand, your police departments are a little better. My friend had his computer missing for nearly 6 months, and when he got it back it was covered in identifcation stickers but it was pretty much the way it was when they took it.
Posting as AC, of course.
You're sure as hell not going to see something like this get presented by news outlets. Not sensational and it's just some geeks getting busted for hacking, afterall... Never mind that while due process might have been done, it may still be an unreasonable search and siezure of his property by virtue of the fact that they had little real worth to go on and used PATRIOT or something similar to rush a warrant through the courts. Since I don't know the whole story, I'm not going to venture a guess either way- but to ask me to think of it as fiction just because it's a blog is a bit much as well.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
We just added another reason (you needed another?) to keep your important code and data resources backed up and stored in a secure off-site facility.
The FBI/SS/Interpol can take anyone's machine anytime they want to and hold it forever, even just looking for emails that might be from someone you might know who might have committed a crime. You get email, right? And bits of interesting code? From a lot of people some of whom are developers, right? You know what all of them are up to all the time? Well you are in their email addressbook so maybe you should know.
The dark side social networking...
As things go, and as companies become even more litigious than they already are, I suspect that such loss of equipment and code to search and seizure might become as likely as catastrophic earthquake, fire or flood. Anyone in the code business better wisen up and assume that everything in your dev suite could be named in the next search warrant.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
To me the most interesting part of the story is this line:
...
I was questioned by the FBI agent in charge and a Secret Service agent at length about the Hungry Programmers, people I used to live with
So he lived with people of the same racial background of those commonly believed to have been involved with the break in. I know that being of the same racial background dose not make them guilty, but it does raise some red flags as to were the probable cause came from. Come to think of it he never really bothered to say he was innocent or anything in the article. And the bit about the wolves circling or what ever makes him sound even more suspicious.
man
No manual entry for
Anyone know what the halflife of a search warrant is?
Been modded interesting, insightful and funny. Why does real life have to be so different?
If you're in shock, you might not be thinking. Also worth mentioning is that you might not want to be around anyway- the agents are going to take things from your property and since they're armed, are you going to try to stop them from taking something NOT covered by the Warrant? I, personally, wouldn't want to be about unless I had to be- the stress of seeing them take my stuff and me being absolutely POWERLESS to prevent any of it would drive me physically ill.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Sounds like someone needs to use a cryptographic filesystem.
Psh... that's amateur stuff. What you need is some thermite. ;)
The comments are the amazing part to me. You'd think people savvy enough to have read this story would be bright enough to understand why they absolutely HAVE to take the computers, not sit there dicking around trying to pull hard drives out.
Here
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Another mirror
Dephine URL
Okay, points for keeping his composure I guess, but no points whatsoever for intelligence. He seriously just wandered off to take a walk while they were going through his apartment?!
Folks? If this ever happens to you? CALL YOUR LAWYER. Not the next day, not the day after, but the instant you can convince them to let you get your hands on a phone. If you don't have a lawyer, call a friend that you trust to find you a lawyer.
It's all well and good that the raiders in this case were relatively polite and friendly, but once the legal system takes notice of you in this way, Mister Policeman is no longer your friend. They have a job to do, and that job is to put your ass in jail. If being nice to you helps them to do this, they'll be nice. If scaring you senseless helps them to do this, they'll do that too. But the fact remains: they are not paid to catch someone who they know for a fact is guilty; they are being paid to catch someone they can convince a District Attorney is guilty, and those are two very, very different things.
If you are ever in this situation, the only words that come out of your mouth when speaking to the feds should be "I'd like to call my attorney." His job is to keep you out of jail.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
That was the main bit, yeah. But as it turns out, an employee there at the time was associated with the Legion of Doom hacker group - some of which were the folks who got a copy of Bellsouth's E911 document, which Bellsouth tried to claim was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars (basically by adding up all of the man-hours logged, AND the cost of every computer used to type the thing up). Operation Sun Devil (which the SJG raid was a part of) was primarily focused on this issue, IIRC.
The funny bits I remember about that whole episode was SJG telling the SS guy "This is a game" and the guy insisting "No, this is real."
"People" using "unnecessary" quotes should be "shot".
reading these posts, there are two questions that have REALLY obvious answers. I'll give them anyway, since they seem to be stumping so many people.
cds: its just policy. One can make a burned cd look pressed if they really want to. Instead of wasting time inspecting each cd, just take them all. Fairly simple.
why he told friends: Some may be students, who have their school work on their systems, but won't see those systems for years if they get taken. Some may be have files of business importance - perhaps they were writing a program for a company, perhaps they have an extensive cvs repository sitting on a server. Perhaps its just business contacts, or hell - email archives.
There are a LOT of things that will screw up your life for months, if not years, if you suddenly lose it. Keep in mind that while you may make backups, those backups will be taken as well. Offsite backups even will be, if they know about them (which more and more lately, they will know).
Think about what would happen if all of your computers, backups, media, and etc all disappeared in an instant. If you're 100% innocent, it will still take a couple of years to get things back. In our tech-dependent world, that's a long time to be in hell for no reason.
Why not just use an encrypted file system?
BZZZT! Wrong answer, thank you for playing.
If you haven't been paying attention, Congress has been essentially eliminating most of those checks and balances for some time now. And we've been letting them do it to us. If you don't believe me, look CLOSELY at the PATRIOT Act. Don't need probable cause for warrant or even the warrant for a search and siezure if they label you as a terrorist. The law allows the FBI that privilege, in violation of the Fourth Ammendment- and they've been using it. The law also gives the FBI the right to arrest you and treat you as a foriegn national if you're labeled a terrorist- no due process or anything inconvienient like that. And they've used those features too.
Anyone that thinks that the checks and balances are currently being acknoleged as being anything much more than toilet paper is sadly deluded.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Clearly this person was only in it for the programming -- if they were a real gamer, they could've TOTALLY strifed out of the way of the feds.
"Ain't I a stinka..." - Bugs
Because you'd be ordered by a judge to turn over the key, and "I forgot what the key is" or "I lost it" would get you thrown in jail for contempt and obstruction.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
According to this article Half Life 2 has been translated into Russian, compiled, and is for sale on the shelves of a Russian trader in Novosibirsk.
Sack the sigs
You know, I was wondering if that guy that he drove over too, while the fuzz was doing their thing, is going to get a knock in his door in the next few days....
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
a law must be enacted where computers can not be held for a certain period of time (5 business days) unless charges are brought up against the owner. the 5 days would give the confiscator enough time to copy the hard drives on the machines. if not, why should the citizen be responsible for the time it takes the secret service / fbi to analyze the contents of a hard drive. this kind of reminds me of the ibm sco case.
Why did I lurk so long before registering for a Slashdot account? I could have had a Slashdot ID of less than 100000.
Since when is game code that important? WTF is in the game that got the feds involved. How does Valve rate this kind of assistance? Shit gets stolen everyday and nothing like this ever happens. Anyways if this guy has half a brain he has backed up the important shit offsite like all good coders should do. As an offtopic thought, I wonder how they would do against Apple's filevault? Would they be able to crack it?
The nation's computer hacking laws are really messed up. You get ACCUSED of hacking, they take all your electronics (all of them, tv's, vcr's, etc). If you get convicted, you never seem them again. Even if it was your wife's computer, she'd be sans that computer (and all the data on the hd). If don't get convicted, all bets are off as to what happens to your data.
Let's say you get convicted. You get, let's say, 10 years in the slammer. You get out, and are not allowed to touch a computer for a while, and when you are, it's even longer before you can use internet, email, etc. You aren't allowed to make any profit (write a book, work in computer security) from computers. Your life (computers) has been taken away from you.
Now, let's say you murdered someone. It wasn't a bad murder, you got off with 20 years. You get out, you can't legally buy guns (but you can still have access to them). Other than a black mark on you record (which you have with computer crimes anyways), your life is relatively back to normal.
Computer crimes should be more civil (fines) rather than criminal. The problem is a lack of education in lawmakers about computers (in general too). They're scared to death of hackers, and want to stop hackers, but probably don't realize how little effect their laws have.
...is why they are called the "Secret Service" when they aren't, well, secret...
=]
bork bork bork!
"The blonde FBI agent was nice (and annoying) enough to tell me repeatedly that the judge would go easier on me (and they could all go home earlier) if I would just tell them where the stuff was. If I had it, of course. But if I denied having it, they'd really throw the book at me *when* they found it."
The prosecution and defense attourneys are the only ones that can do sentance negotiation / mediation. This line is *often* used by cops on evedince fishing trips. It's legal because he *isn't* in custody and not under formal interrogation.
I agree though - Call the lawyer.
Get FileVault for OS X. Never get caught, assuming you use a big password.
The exact address is blacked out in these scans, but if you have your monitor calibrated properly, you can see the censored parts of page 3 shining through in page 2. Of course on uncalibrated monitors, which they presumably used to scan these documents, you only see white.
:-)
Another reason to calibrate your monitors before creating stuff that you publish
I was amused to see numerous "move to Canada" suggestions, as well as "America is a police state" warnings provided to this person in comments relating to this person's allegations as printed on the person's web site. Evidently I was misinformed when told that Canada, and, indeed, every civilized nation on earth, has prisons full of convicts who got there as a result of being arrested by the police, including some who were convicted in trials by the weight of evidence seized with search warrants.
I'm in debt to those authentically brainy people who've set me straight about Canada, reminding me that Canada has no laws, no prisons, no convicts, no courts or trials, no police, and of course...no such thing as search warrants. And I guess the same is true of other European nations whose citizens reacted with shock and horror at this person's account, because like Canada, those nations, too, have no laws to break, no courts to convict, and of course no police forces to serve search warrants, not to mention no judges to sign such a warrant even if such a thing was possible in those countries. Yes, thanks to all of the "big brains" out there who have enlightened me in my ignorance. Naturally, if you hail from a country with no laws and no police and no search warrants, such a tale would have to inspire nothing short of dread and terror and a certain specter of a "police state."
And, too, I have to bow to the indisputable logic of those who insist that Valve has no moral right whatever to be incensed that its servers were broken into and its source code stolen--rather, as these people most brilliantly postulate for my poor benefit, Valve would be better served by throwing a party for the hackers, congratulating them an a job well done, and even, possibly, mailing them a big fat check for the service these unselfish, altruistic hackers have done them. How foolish of me to think it natural to want to involve the police when one's personal property is stolen--how foolish, indeed. Double foolish, really, but what can one expect from a poor underling such as I who has been raised in a country with laws, prisons, crimes, and search warrants? Since other countries, like Canada, have no need for such primitive mechanisms, it's no wonder I thought of this issue as I originally did. Woe is me.
But, to tell you the absolute truth, until I see some independent corroboration of the events alleged to have taken place, I must wonder if...
(a) Such alleged events ever occurred
(b) Such events occurred for the purpose this person has alleged
Even though I am not all that bright, really, as you can tell from my misapprehensions as to other countries having laws and prisons and search warrants, it nevertheless seems to me that...
(1) It is a simple thing to manufacture, or change, such "search warrants," using commonly available programs such as Photoshop
(2) It would be a simple thing to simply add "Valve" to a search warrant issued for another purpose, such as some kind of credit card fraud involving the use of computers
It occurs to me that this person might have had data belonging to other people on his machines prior to seizure, and that the "Valve" story is simply that--a story contrived, with the aid of Photoshop or something like it, to explain to his friends why their data, if not some of their computers, have been seized by the authorities.
Gosh, sometimes it's just so hard to think, and my head hurts...:) But it also occurs to me that possibly, just possibly, it might not always be a good idea to believe everything one sees printed on the Internet. Yea, right--what could I possibly know?...:)
they've developed a mobile data forensics lab where technicians download your harddrives, copy your CDs and everything else to their own systems and then return the equipment to you. The process takes time, obviously, but the van is loaded with equipment.
news story about it
-
Well... all I've got to say is that they shouldn't have left Half-Life 2 Source lying around on the Gibson. I mean, that was just asking for trouble, wasn't it?
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
I have some experience in this. The answer is that the 'talk of drugs' has to be evidence of drug posession or trafficking. The general rule, if they find something on your machine that could be used as material (key word) evidence in court they can keep the machine for as long as there is a case in which it could be used (otherwise they have 180 days I beleive).
Contrary to what most of the ill-informed Slashdotters are posting here, there are a variety of property rights that you have in cases like these. While I've never had machines siezed, I have two very good friends that are District Attorneys. I've worked with them as technical consult on a few computer crime cases. In 3 of the 5 cases (2 of which involved the feds) the machines where back in their owners hands in less than 4 weeks. These where all pretty clear cut cases that involved those machines being hacked and used for illegal purposes.
One thing to note, the warrants generally apply to searches involving very specific goals. They actually can't wantonly search every file on your computer (in theory anyways) looking to turn up evidence of some other crime. This is actually a pretty entertaining legal fight...
For those keeping score, the other 2 cases where clear (and I mean CRYSTAL clear) violations of law. 1 resulted in a plea bargain, and the other is awaiting trial. So from MY experience (take it for what it's worth), the experience is not nearly as draconian as your seeing here. While it does suck to have your equipment taken (i'm assuming), these people really don't want to sit on it for years. They want to do there job, gather evidence, and move on with life.
***beginning rant****
As with most things, the government is neither as onerous or interested in you as popular culture wants us to beleive. it's really a far to disparate collection of little agencies to effectively do that. It CAN really screw people, but for the most part people really do get treated fairly. My perception of government has really changed as I've become more and more involved with various portions of it. But I guess fear mongering is really more entertaining at the end of the day. *sighs*
****/end rant*****
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