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FBI Seizure of Mastodon Server is a Wakeup Call to Fediverse Users and Hosts to Protect their Users (www.eff.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How is a law enforcement agent staring at some workstations and computers to know what equipment was involved in the alleged crime they are raiding the facility for?

That would be a valid argument if they timely returned whatever they don't need, but they don't, so it isn't.

If the FBI was raiding a home for child abuse and pornography, there’s no way they have the access or expertise at the time of a raid to know the server in the corner is only for Mastodon, the box over there is just a Linux firewall, and that box over there is a porn server.

Maybe not, but if they're not completely incompetent, they'll have images of all of those devices within a day or two. They don't have any legitimate need to keep the seized equipment after that.

The cruelty is the point.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

We're talking about law enforcement agencies, not an IT department. Of course it's technically possible to image a machine quickly. However, there are all kinds of steps and rules for chain of custody, transporting evidence, cataloging it, storing, examining it, etc. and a finite number of personnel to perform the work. Revisiting the child pornography example I used, fingerprints and DNA evidence on equipment could be quite relevant to a case. There may even be a need to examine hard drive platters (old school spinning disk, not SSD obviously) to determine if there was data deleted in the past. It's rather simplistic to say it's a matter of just imaging and returning as quickly as possible. I agree the equipment being gone often presents a hardship for a defendant, but arguing that it's intentionally set up this way to inflict cruelty ignores the reality of investigations.