I would then relish writing long, hand-written letters, cutting pens, ink stains and ruffled shirt cuffs, once again.

If only those flaws could be as easily laid bare through the application of just a few moments of explication by you.

An apartment building does not become evidentiary in its entirety when a criminal enterprise is conducted from the unit of a single tenant.

But what if, say, every single apartment shared the same phone line? Or the same mailbox? Or what if several adjacent apartments, including the criminal’s, were connected via a hidden corridor?

Any properly conducted investigation would encompass the adjacent units, even if they did house innocent tenants.

This is a better analogy to what the FBI faced when they confiscated those servers. Again, it’s unfortunate, but the risk of losing evidence would be far more dire.

Warrants are the difference here. IANAL, and leaving aside the shared phone line that I’m not even going to take a stab at, I’ll try to address the mailbox and hidden corridors.

Mailbox would likely then have mail from every tenant there. They STILL can ONLY open/seize the mail with the persons name on the warrant in that case. If they want more mail, they need to get another, or update the original search warrant. Just finding all the mail together (you would expect it to be separate) would still be basically illegal.

Hidden corridors (going to other apartments) could likely be searched with no further warrant. But not the apartments connected. If ALL the apartments are owned by him/her, you ‘might’ need another warrant. If they are separately owned, then yes, you would need a warrant, unless there was another circumstance that allows for entry without warrant.

Though, I’m pretty certain this was an illustrative analogy, not a direct one…

What happens as more-and-more web hosting is done through cloud platforms? If this site were at Rackspace, say, would the whole server farm be seized? And don’t these people know about copying files == how easy it is for a site to send copies of itself out somewhere?

The scammers do. But innocent people don’t.

Absolutely trivial, probably 50 character or less command to back this up, and probably takes up very little space.

So, just restore from that very small, easily created backup. Right ?

the FBI had no way of telling the “innocent” hardware from the particular box specified in the warrant.

Yes they did. Contact the provider, ask them to identify which hardware is used by the parties in question, and instruct the serving agents on which hardware to seize, in a way that does not cause collateral damage.

Your arguments in this discussion thread have all been amazingly ill conceived, and over the course of the discussion they increasingly just come off as an attempt to prove that you’re the smartest person in the room.

If you don’t respect the people you’re talking to, do everyone involved a favor and don’t speak to them at all.

Yes, it is unfortunate that other servers were seized. However, the FBI had no way of telling the “innocent” hardware from the particular box specified in the warrant. They were all in the same rack, they were physically connected to one another, and likely shared some of the same peripheral hardware.

Had they not seized everything in the rack, a defense attorney could theoretically argue that the FBI were not sufficiently thorough in their evidence-gathering, and perhaps convince a judge to throw out the case before it even reached trial.

Again, it’s too bad that Instapaper was caught in the crossfire, but no data was lost, and if it means that the scammers see jail time, then it’s worth it.

1) Identification of the hardware to be seized
Anybody insisting that there was no good or accurate way to identify the specific hardware subject to seizure is very obviously clueless about Operations. There are numerous reasons why a provider MUST know who’s stuff is on what box, among them would be billing and support. You can’t bill people accurately if you don’t know what resources you’re providing them, nor can you provision their services. Imagine a car rental company not knowing what car they’d rented to a customer. Same idea here.

2) Seizing a blade chassis is “okay”
Yeah, no. Not at all. Blades are still individual machines. You can pull them without impacting the rest. That’s the whole POINT. If the FBI shows up with a warrant to seize DVDs of surveillance footage (what an anachronism, “footage”), they can’t go seizing a DVD player. Again, same idea here. It’s not the provider’s problem if the FBI doesn’t know what to do with the blade. Imagine if the server they seized was an old Sun box with the goofy 25-pin video adapter. Would the provider have to give up a monitor and keyboard out of their stock just so the FBI could interact with the thing? No, absolutely not.

3) Law enforcement incompetence is acceptable
Again, no. Street cops are (hopefully) thoroughly trained in the maintenance and proper handling of their firearms. They’re expected to have the expertise to use them properly. Likewise, forensic technicians are expected to be well-qualified to perform their work. In what way are agents on a tech raid exempt from this? Why do we suddenly say “Oh, that’s okay, they were confused by all the blinking lights.” If they don’t understand what they’re looking at, then they need to educate themselves.
Anybody remember Ghostbusters? Peck, the EPA guy, just keeps shouting “Shut it off!” without a goddamn clue about what’s going on there. Result: All hell (almost literally) breaks loose.

4) “The provider should’ve been policing their servers for criminal activity”
Uh….what? As was already mentioned above, this is just a stupid thing to even try to argue. Setting aside all the myriad legal reasons you couldn’t hope to do this (you’d need a team of lawyers monitoring every box every day, all day), the basic logistics of human-to-computer ratios make this a ludicrous idea. The amount of human time it’d take to audit a server for any sort of “illicit” activity (when you don’t even know what you’re looking for!) would be huge. Multiply by the many dozens to many thousands of servers per human, and this quite obviously is insane.

And, to make specific mention of one user:
@Ratio, you’re pretty straight-up wrong (see above) in your arguments and analogies. Your attitude just makes your wrongness more irritating. I doubt you’d be attempting to score points in such a flawed fashion if you had any experience with this kind of work. If I’m wrong and you do have direct experience, then I stand in awe of your willful ignorance of your own profession. Your employers have my sympathy in any event. I’ll be happy engage you in discussion, but your attitude is going to require some improvement first.

Would you agree with the following scenario?

“FBI raids and confiscates all objects in every unit of an apartment building while serving warrant on one unit.”

This is authority acting illegally and badly.

Then perhaps they should learn how to do so, no? This *IS* the FBI, they aren’t exactly penniless and they *DO* have some fairly bright people working for them (all appearances to the contrary).

What they did is akin to seizing an entire apartment building in order to serve a warrant on one apartment. Or arresting an entire store full of people to catch one shoplifter.