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FBI Seizes All Servers In Dallas Data Center
1sockchuck writes "FBI agents have raided a Dallas data center, seizing servers at a company called Core IP Networks. The company's CEO has posted a message saying the FBI confiscated all its customer servers, including gear belonging to companies that are almost certainly not under suspicion. The FBI isn't saying what it's after, but there are reports that it's related to video piracy, sparking unconfirmed speculation that the probe is tied to the leaking of Wolverine."
On the train on the way home there was a guy walking through the car selling the latest X-men on DVD. I think this is the proverbial "horse already left the barn" situation. However, what happened serves as a good example of what the future holds once the Federal government gets enhanced "cyber security" powers. Imagine what happens when say, for example, a Chinese botnet operator decides to launch an attack against (insert agency here) using zombies exclusively on Verizon's network. Oops... millions of Verizon customers are suddenly SOL. If you've ever had to deal with law enforcement when it comes to recovering what they took from you, you know what a nightmare this could turn into.
This is nuts, every server in a data center? do they realize the cost that might incur to all these non infringing companies? The wolverine leak nothing, no one was deprived of anything so there is no monetary loss but this? This is plain incredible. Good job FBI, you just caused many people a lot of trouble for a stupid movie.
Do the Americans now live in a police state that is controlled by the RIAA. This may sound alarmist but when innocent companies are hurt by the use of FBI force - how far away is it?
Stay tuned for new sig...
... and the memory fades with age. But I seem to remember a time when this was a free country, with due process of law and such.
Hasn't the FBI heard of data center control panel software to find the specific server(s) in question? My colocation facility's web panel tells me the switch #, power plug #and location and a whole ton of other shit. WTF is up with this?
It's not speculation that the data center was raided and shut down, including businesses that aren't doing anything wrong...
When a police officer seizes computer hardware from a business in the course of an investigation, they can be held civilly liable for any loss or damage caused to the business by their actions.
At least thats how it is for Pennsylvania State Police.
-jX
Don't you just love politics? It's like a comedy of errors.
They're just after the original leaker. SOP... "Shoot first", ask questions later
What?
I'm assuming Wolverine is a movie not a music album, so that would be our overlords at the MPAA, not the RIAA.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
This is not the question to ask.
The question to ask is what good are the public getting in return for giving up such freedoms, AND paying for the giving up of such freedoms (dont forget who pay for the FBI, Police, etc), and paying for the protection of the revinue to copyright owning entities.
Now, this is supposed to be the entering in to the public domain (as in becoming free..) of creative content at the end of the copyright period - a fair and equitable arrangement one could say - we protect their profits for a period, and at the end of that, we gain the advantage of their creativity openly.
However, that was in the days of limited copyright periods, these days thanks both to DRM (an unbroken DRM means an item cannot become free after its legal protection stops) and changes to copyright periods (a lot of things we have already paid to protect should be public now, and are not..) we, the people, have lost our end of the 'bargain'.
Perhaps it is time for the copyright owners to be carrying the full costs of enforcing their copyrights, since they don't feel the public should be allowed future advantage of their content?
I wonder what the yearly government costs of copyright enforcement is, it seems more and more public resource is bring piled in to protecting it..
Or perhaps the people (that is, government) should simply cease on their end of the bargain in return, and in light of technological DRM, revoke copyright laws, as they were enacted to protect otherwise unprotectable items (such as books) - does DRM mean we shouldn't have to suffer copyright laws?
Once upon a time there was balance, an equitable deal between the state and copyright holders - the copyright holders have long since stopped holding up their end of the bargain....
Wrong. When I take planes, they just fly straight through the clouds. Think how hard it would be to suck up and confiscate all of them.
Eldred v Ashcroft holding was that a copyright law (in that example the one that extended Mickey's copyright protection) is presumed constitutional if it doesn't explicitly say it's for "infinite length" and if it maintains the distinction between idea and expression.
Although your reading -- that a copyright law is unconstitutional if it does not promote Science and the Useful Arts -- makes a lot of common sense, it just isn't the case.
In America, I mean. As presently Constituted.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
from the owners statements.. "unwarranted early morning raid" Fist they must have a warrant and it must specifies each piece of equipment that they are taking and why, This is why you have an attorney on call, and it also sounds like the agent threated this person, which is a crime.. Under the Fourth Amendment, searches must be reasonable and specific. This means that a search warrant must be specific as to the specified object to be searched for and the place to be searched. Other items, rooms, outbuildings, persons, vehicles, etc. may require additional search warrants. (from Wikipedia) Just like when the police came by (and had the wrong house) and wanted to see my car, I asked to see the warrant.. When they got done talking lots of crap about how much trouble I was in for not letting them search my car, they then figured out that they were at the wrong house.. just because they ask does not mean you have to let them in.. also if you are an effected business, I would contact your lawyer and have them contact the FBI about loss of productivity, and if your servers were not on the warrant, then start a suite on unlawful seizure..
reason.
There is also speculation on illegal drug communication.
Also not confirmed.
Things to remember.
A) They had a warrant
B) We are only here one side
C) There is a lot of speculation as to why.
Lets watch closely, but avoid jumping to any conclusion.
No I'm not new hear, just overly optimistic.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Bottom line is people need to hold Obama accountable for these things (he sets the tone for things in the Fed gov just as Bush did before him) and stop putting him on some kind of plinth.
I normally don't care about privacy issues. The government can tap my phone if they feel like it, they can look into my purchasing records, they can stake out my house. They can look into my past work history. I really don't care.
They don't care about you. It isn't about you. They care about rising politicians and others who challenge the status quo.
I care deeply about personal privacy for the same reason I care deeply about gun rights - chances are that I will never carry a weapon in my life, but our society as a whole is made safer and more resilient by the fact that law-abiding citizens can own and use them in self defense. Similarly our society is made stronger and more egalitarian when everybody has privacy, the people who can make a difference and the common peons like the rest of us.
I love the end of the story "CBS 11 News emailed Simpson about the raid, but as of Thursday evening he had yet to respond"..... I wonder why? May be the FBI took their mail server too?
Romania or Belarus, where nobody gives a shit!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
A police agency disconnects 911 service and the media tries to email a guy whose email servers are all fubar from the raid.
... CBS 11 News emailed Simpson about the raid, but as of Thursday evening he had yet to respond."
I wonder who carries the liability here, the FBI for disconnecting customers 911 service, or the data center for harboring evil doers?
FTFA:
"According to Simpson, some residents' access to 911 is also being affected because some of Core IPs primary customers include telephone companies."
"Simpson claims nearly 50 businesses are without access to their email and data.
The second paragraph is one reason why your feelings stated in the first paragraph are harmful to you and everyone else.
Privacy is its own reason.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
We, The People, already revoked copyright laws. As Robert Heinlein once wisely wrote:
"I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; If I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am responsible for everything I do."
("The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress", 1966)
Nothing like easily broken laws and internet anonymity to set a man free...
Well, I had no interest at all in this movie to begin with. But you got me thinking, if it's so important to "them" to suppress it, it's in everyone's interest to make "them" fail. So I joined the revolution, I'm downloading it now, from the 100000+ seeds.
As someone once said, if you're not part of the solution then you are part of the problem. Right now the problem is getting rid of those copyright nazis. If downloading Wolverine eats into their profits, let's all download Wolverine!
So, this justifies pulling the 911 service servers in what way?
You see, search warrants are supposed to be narrowly tailored to those areas where it is more likely than not that they will find the evidence they are looking for. Pulling 50+ servers without even checking to see who is using those servers (we don't know how many servers, we know that 50 companies were affected) seems to be blatantly in violation of the 4th Amendment.
It is worth noting that the 4th Amendment was included partly in response to the common law larger-area search warrants which would allow police to search a string of houses because they were pretty sure that the evidence they were looking for was SOMEWHERE in that range. We require a tighter level of control than that.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Unbelievable.
I've worked in three different datacenters in my professional life, and I think I can safely say that this company is done for. Five+ days of all servers being offline... not just offline, but seized and inspected thoroughly... clients are going to cancel in droves once things come back online, if they haven't already called the company and made their intentions clear.
Whether or not this had anything to do with the whole Wolverine leak is unknown to me, but if it is, how is it OK to seize the assets of an entire datacenter? I sincerely doubt that the majority of those customers were engaging in the distribution of pirated material. What justification could you possibly have for affecting not only the longevity of the service provider, but the customers *at* the service provider, just so you can find some sleezy pirate with your movie on his servers. Is it worth hundreds of thousands (perhaps even millions) of dollars in *others' money*? Yeah, I don't think so.
The only time this would be even remotely OK is if the datacenter housed some gigantic criminal operation where the vast majority of its customers were committing crimes, and the DC was in on it.
I really wonder what this says for other datacenters that unknowingly house customers who engage in criminal behavior. Because, statistically, every datacenter that serves the public at large is bound to have at least one. As a provider, how am I to know what's going on in every corner of my DC? Am I to surveil all the traffic, all the servers, everything? And if that's my duty now, isn't that a bit disturbing?
I can hardly wait until we elect a Democrat and all of this will stop
I never expected it to stop. The most I was hoping for was lefties having to admit that their guy wasn't any better.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
IANAL, and I'm not familiar with what it takes to get a warrant such as this. This being /., that shouldn't slow me down a wit here. :) Didn't a Judge have to sign this?
If yes, then it is the Judge who really needs to have a hard long look cast in their direction. Law enforcement agencies are *always* going to apply a warrant as broadly as possible. They want to turn the case from red to black - it's the same thing as account managers making their number, whereby a lot of them will sell *any* service, regardless of whether you can actually support what they're proposing, as long as they can argue they hit their number.
The Judge should be the check/balance in the process, and force for a narrowing of the warrant's scope to a reasonable point, which allows the FBI to gather the evidence required (I mean, most of us want the bad guys to get caught, right?), while ensuring that other companies are not unreasonably hosed by the warrant. Being hosed means losing all your gear and service delivery facilities when the evidence used to get the warrant in the first place in *no* way implicates your company.
It doesn't take much grey matter or thought for a Judge to figure out that a finer granularity of shutdown than the main power supply switch for the building or data centre floors does indeed exist.
The Judge is a jerk-off, based on current facts and my wildly speculative opinions and lack of experience.
[17] Leary, T., White, C., Wood, P. R., Bhabha, W. D., and Wirth, N. Lambda calculus considered harmful. In Proceedings
Don't hold your breath on that. Obama is a puppet in the hands of big corporations as GW was and as every other politician who wants to make a career is. Come on, do you really think there is one politician in the entire world who will protect normal citizens against the will of any giant corporation?
Before we let run wild our confirmation biases...
We might wait on news of what the raid is actually about? Man, trotting out the partisanship at this point is pretty ugly.
Speaking of jerky behavior, the agent in charge of the raid was reported by the CEO to have said:
Geez, the CEO must be a real criminal to merit that treatment. Better pre-emptively pull out his toenails.
Politicians love power, and what President would want to limit his own? Look for Obama to amend such laws late in his first term, when it looks better, if that even comes.
But don't you think it's a bit early in his term, one encumbered from the start with heavy baggage, to begin dealing with the myriad problem laws that have been passed during the last half century?
FWIW, RICO was passed in 1970, and the Feds love its vagueness to death. Easy prediction: Obama will receive no recommendations from his cabinet or federal appointments to crimp or change it. Between RICO and Patriot, we're not going to see the end of fracked-up warrantless situations like Core IP, not until a President alters the makeup of the Supremes, and subsequent legal challenges bring down the over-broad aspects of those laws.
O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.
Well, my memory goes back to this: SJ Games vs. the Secret Service, which happened in 1990. So your memory must be longer than mine to recall a time when such things didn't happen.
Btw, what was the outcome of that? Oh yeah:
The judge gave the Secret Service a tongue-lashing and ruled for SJ Games on two out of the three counts, and awarded over $50,000 in damages, plus over $250,000 in attorney's fees.
and
the creation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
And that all occurred after a raid on a pretty small company. Imagine what will happen this time. Provided that the colo provider can survive the loss of it's tenants.
--
$tar -xvf
Politicians love power, and what President would want to limit his own?
Exactly. That's why it's so tedious to hear people claim that everything will be just fine and dandy if you just give the vast accumulation of power in violation of our constitution to their team instead of the other team.
Power is like Uranium. Get too much of it in any one place, and Bad Things Happen.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Mr. Lynd would not tell me why he raided our datacenter or what he was looking for.
Let's see... Where was that? Oh yes;
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Agent Lynd needs a remedial reading lesson. It's not merely illegal, it's unconstitutional to search without a warrant, and the warrant has to say what they're looking for.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I agree with you generally. But I also find somewhat odd and even disturbing that they can raid you and not tell you why? How long do they keep the computers? Do you have any recourse or compensation? Something like this could make a company go bust, so I would think the raid would have to be justified properly.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
But I also find somewhat odd and even disturbing that they can raid you and not tell you why?
Think that's bad? We had a president back in the 1940s who locked up thousands of innocent people without charges just for having Japanese ancestors.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Well when Dubya was elected I was hoping he would be better than Clinton, and he was at first, but after 9/11 he turned into a War Hawk. Very disappointing. The proper response to 9/11 should have been the same as if it was a major traffic accident that killed 1500 people - mourn, rebuild, move on. NOT go out and commit mass murder against Iraqi and Afghan citizens, which makes us no better than the terrorists. (I'm glad I voted libertarian.)
As for Obama, I never expected much from him. An outstanding speaker is not necessarily a good executive. Plus he's doing exactly what I expected - spending our children and grandchildren's income. Nice job.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Obama's only been in office since Jan. 20th ... in this time his primary focus has had to be the economic crisis and the wars in the Mid-East.
Bush had a full 8 years to put all of his policies into effect. Do you think it's reasonable that Obama could reverse all of that in such a short time in office? Our new President has been very efficient since taking office and has put many wheels in motion trying to reverse much of the damage that Bush Co. has done to our country. But he can't do it all with a simple stroke of the pen, and he doesn't have the Constitutional authority to just "make it so" with a stroke of his pen for many of the things he'd like to do. His policies must follow the process of law, or he's no better than Bush.
Any objective observer would give Obama very high marks for his first 74 days (as of this writing). Granted he's got many people on the right who will cry foul at many of his moves, and people from the left who are whining that he hasn't given attention to their pet issues, but you have to admit the man has been very busy and very efficient even if you can't agree with what he's done.
It will take time for the 'cultural change' within the government to take hold. Many Bush appointees still hold office, many gov't agencies still have the mindset of the last 8 years and it takes time to enact cultural change within an organization as complex as the US Government.
It's not the time to judge Obama yet, give him time to get his agenda in place. Stay vigilant, yes. Complain that everything hasn't changed yet? C'mon ... be realistic.
It's not my fault! It was this way when I got here.