Earlier quoted context omitted.
In other words, useless?
And expensive And with lots of innocent casualties And corrupt And supported by morons
And boosting economies outside of the US?
FBI seizes riseup.net server
51–60 of 111 posts
Re: FBI seizes riseup.net server
#52I do not understand the sledgehammer approach the FBI 'cybercrimes' division deals with things with. The FBI are not police, are not detectives, and are not competent in these matters. I'm sorry but covert monitoring of a server is going to be vastly more beneficial for an operation than taking the server and is going to net more targets and more evidence. I remember stories of the FBI sitting on a known front for or…
> I do not understand the sledgehammer approach the FBI 'cybercrimes' division deals with things with. ... I'm sorry but covert monitoring of a server is going to be vastly more beneficial for an operation than taking the server and is going to net more targets and more evidence. I wonder if they'll auction off the server? Fun fact. The federal government makes ~$3 billion a year off asset seizures. They don't have t…
Yeah, but they have to hold on to that stuff for a while. a 5 year old cash is still cash. a 5 year old computer is a doorstop.
Re: FBI seizes riseup.net server
#53America's online law enforcement shaping up to be pretty much like the war on drugs.
Let's see. In the war on drugs, a number of police forces have been caught delaying drug busts so that they can make more money from seizing cash (as opposed to seizing drugs). What's the cybercrime equivalent?
Re: FBI seizes riseup.net server
#54I can understand the need to stop the bomb threats, but the FBI also should have respected the other users of the seized server and not removed it. And besides, nothing is stoping the person from using other anonymous email hosts.
I agree and whom ever is doing this is motivated to keep doing it. Initially the bomb threats started in bathroom stalls and then to emails of just one bomb threat for a day. But the situation keeps escalating, today 13 bomb threats have been made.
Re: FBI seizes riseup.net server
#55So if riseup.net had been hosted on, say, EC2, what would the FBI have seized? The server hosting the VM and many other completely unrelated VMs? Scary thought. Also, if you haven't done so already I encourage you to read the FAQ at the end of the page. It has one of the best answers to "Doesn’t Mixmaster/anonymous remailers enable criminals to do bad things?" I've ever seen.
If previous seizures are any indication yes. They identify machines by IP and even if its a virtual machine they seize the server running it.
Can't comment on whether or not its effective, and of course if you have a disaster recovery plan and your site pops back up I don't know what they do, I guess they play whack-a-mole with search warrants.
Re: FBI seizes riseup.net server
#56America's online law enforcement shaping up to be pretty much like the war on drugs.
Let's see. In the war on drugs, a number of police forces have been caught delaying drug busts so that they can make more money from seizing cash (as opposed to seizing drugs). What's the cybercrime equivalent?
If you opt to not cherry pick the comparison, and look at the larger picture instead of trying to make it a 1:1 analogous comment, you'll probably find that what the OP of this chain was referring to is that both are shows of excessive waste where government entities are faced with something much larger than what they can lasso in, and are routinely going about very questionable methods to get what they want.
Re: FBI seizes riseup.net server
#57I do not understand the sledgehammer approach the FBI 'cybercrimes' division deals with things with. The FBI are not police, are not detectives, and are not competent in these matters. I'm sorry but covert monitoring of a server is going to be vastly more beneficial for an operation than taking the server and is going to net more targets and more evidence. I remember stories of the FBI sitting on a known front for or…
This isn't a "sledgehammer" approach. The operators made an explicit choice to stick a bunch of mailing lists and websites on the same machine as a remailer. A reasonable person would expect the remailer to eventually be used to commit a crime.
It's like keeping your kids school books and a kilo of cocaine both in your cars trunk, then complaining when the FBI takes the whole car into evidence.
Re: FBI seizes riseup.net server
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's see. In the war on drugs, a number of police forces have been caught delaying drug busts so that they can make more money from seizing cash (as opposed to seizing drugs). What's the cybercrime equivalent?
If you opt to not cherry pick the comparison, and look at the larger picture instead of trying to make it a 1:1 analogous comment, you'll probably find that what the OP of this chain was referring to is that both are shows of excessive waste where government entities are faced with something much larger than what they can lasso in, and are routinely going about very questionable methods to get what they want.
You may have read sarcasm into my comment where there was none. I am, in fact, looking for an analogous operation which provides the Feds with destructive incentives in the area of cybercrime enforcement.
Re: FBI seizes riseup.net server
#59This is a testament to why you would want to use AWS virtual instances and never have "a server" - point your domain at a new instance should one machine get ordered off by the FBI.
Flouting law enforcement does not strike me as a good design goal. If the law wants you to stop doing something, they will make sure you stop.
Law enforcement, failed hard drive, link outage, whatever...
They are all the same == Downtime.
My point is that if you have a "server" that can be seized, you have not designed a robust system.
Imagine the FBI trying to seize Google or Amazon or Facebook (well, a lot easier in the case of facebook only because they have so few datacenters by comparison.)
Re: FBI seizes riseup.net server
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you opt to not cherry pick the comparison, and look at the larger picture instead of trying to make it a 1:1 analogous comment, you'll probably find that what the OP of this chain was referring to is that both are shows of excessive waste where government entities are faced with something much larger than what they can lasso in, and are routinely going about very questionable methods to get what they want.
You may have read sarcasm into my comment where there was none. I am, in fact, looking for an analogous operation which provides the Feds with destructive incentives in the area of cybercrime enforcement.
I do not know of any, pulling from recent memory-however the point of my post was to highlight that you (in the general sense) can't reasonably deduce from alaskamiller's post there's going to be an exact parallel with cybercrime enforcement and drug enforcement; what I took from alaskamiller's post was that cybercrime enforcement shows a lot of the same characteristics as the war on drugs, as myself and other posters have already highlighted.