FBI Seizes Servers In Virginia

Axolotl_Rose writes "The FBI has seized servers belonging to several clients of a hosting company in Reston, VA, disrupting service for many other clients. 'In an e-mail to one of its clients on Tuesday afternoon, DigitalOne’s chief executive, Sergej Ostroumow, said: “This problem is caused by the FBI, not our company. In the night FBI has taken 3 enclosures with equipment plugged into them, possibly including your server — we cannot check it.” Mr. Ostroumow said that the FBI was only interested in one of the company’s clients but had taken servers used by “tens of clients.” He wrote: “After FBI’s unprofessional ‘work’ we can not restart our own servers, that’s why our Web site is offline and support doesn’t work.” The company’s staff had been working to solve the problem for the previous 15 hours, he said.'"

Comments

Re:Civil and criminal liability

[icebike]

You can try to file a suit, but you probably wouldn't get anywhere.

The Federal Tort Claims Act was enacted by Congress in 1946 to allow citizens to sue the federal government. Prior to that you had to get something
passed by congress in order to sue the government.

From http://www.finchmccranie.com/refresher.htm

While the passage of the FTCA constitutes a limited waiver of sovereign immunity, Congress specifically limited the government's amenability to suit in a variety of different circumstances. In 28 U.S.C. 2680, Congress specified that its limited waiver of immunity would not apply to the following claims:

(a) any claim based upon an act or omission of an employee of the government, exercising due care, in the execution of a statute or regulation, whether or not such statute or regulation be valid, or based upon the exercise of performance or the failure to exercise or perform a discretionary function or duty on the part of a federal agency or an employee of the government, whether or not the dis- cretion involved be abused; ...

So you see, you are effectively shut down before you get to the courthouse steps. All they need do is say "We had evidence that all servers we took were involved" and there is nothing more you can do. You will not be granted the ability to examine that evidence.