

FBI seizes entire data center, won't say why - vaksel
http://sites.google.com/site/mnsclec/index

======
rudyfink
I wonder if this is true. The 15 police cars and a SWAT team thing and the
lines attributed to the FBI commander seem a bit over the top.

If this is true, this strikes me as wrong on many levels. The overall expense
and damage to unconnected organizations when a simple phone call would
probably have achieved the same result is saddening.

Edit: This hosting company seems to not have a website. Most of the Google
references are to this incident. There was one link which suggests there
actually is a business by that name though.

~~~
nostrademons
It completely reminds me of Cryptonomicon. Anyone have an EMP-gun?

~~~
sho
Sure I do, but it's a bit old and I'm not sure it's still working .. hang on,
let me just te

------
greatfog
Report Shows Alleged Fraud Against AT&T, Verizon
[<http://cbs11tv.com/technology/Core.IP.Networks.2.975776.html>]

~~~
sangaya
The gist of the article is this: "Documents say AT&T and Verizon told
investigators they believe they were being defrauded out of $6 million in a
three to four month period by a group of investors working together, including
Faulkner, Simpson, and three others.

The documents say those individuals profited more than $1 million."

$6 million in fraud .... now that's a reason for raiding a data center that
makes sense. As much as people may despise the RIAA and MPAA, the leak of the
X-Men movie is not a reason to take down a data center.

~~~
dhimes
I wonder where the other $5M went?

------
patrickg-zill
I wonder if the ECPA, Electronic Communications and Privacy Act, is still in
force. If so the FBI may well be in violation of it.

Also reminds me of the Steve Jackson Games case:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_Games,_Inc._v._Un...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_Games,_Inc._v._United_States_Secret_Service)

------
Mazy
I may have missed it, but why do you think this has to do with the Xmen movie?

~~~
azanar
[http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Is-Wolverine-Leak-
Investi...](http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Is-Wolverine-Leak-
Investigation-Causing-Collateral-Damage-101709)

This was linked off of the Dallas Observer blog here:
[http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2009/04/so_what_l...](http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2009/04/so_what_led_fbi_agents_to_raid.php)

How legit this is, or how credible Dallas Observer is, I have no idea.

~~~
stoic
The Dallas Observer is part of Village Voice Media
(<http://www.villagevoicemedia.com>), which includes similar local weekly
newspapers in other cities. They aren't exactly incompetent rabble-rousers,
but they tend to do more investigative journalism and "what-if" scenarios than
your average major daily newspaper. I doubt they have any real direct
experience with this particular corner of the IT industry, though, because
it's incredibly unlikely that pirated movies prompted the takedown.

I've worked at various hosting companies around Dallas for 5 years, and have
worked or observed quite a few abuse cases involving the federal government.
This sort of heavy-handed action (killing an entire company's operations for a
single client) has NEVER happened in my experience, and definitely not for
something as innocuous as copyright infringement. That's what the DMCA is for.
The feds don't get involved unless it's some seriously nasty stuff going on,
like child porn, suspected terrorist communication, fraud, malware
distribution, etc.

In the event that the government gets involved, they will have a field agent
demand access to individual systems under a subpoena, but only to the systems
actually involved (maybe some switches/routers as well). Unless Core IP has
been proven to be complicit in some kind of ultra-illegal activity, e.g. the
CTO is the kingpin of some hardcore piracy network, I have a hard time
believing that this has anything to do with a leaked movie. I'd think that the
Secret Service (US Treasury) would be involved in such a case, rather than the
FBI.

This really is completely ridiculous, though. Makes you want to go read the
common carrier laws cover-to-cover :)

edit: I guess this piracy thing has been confirmed as a rumor for some time...
but hopefully this sheds some light about how the process works :)

------
stoic
Well, here's an interesting tidbit: Mike Faulkner's side of the story.

<http://www.uwwwb.com/>

And some BBB-style fraud reports, fairly recent (July 08):

[http://voip.yuku.com/reply/421/t/Re-premiervoice-net-aka-
pvo...](http://voip.yuku.com/reply/421/t/Re-premiervoice-net-aka-pvoip-net-
FRAUD.html)

I don't mean to cast aspersions or commit libel, but it looks like Mr.
Faulkner might have a bit of a spotty history, and according to these reports,
has used multiple names in the past. This might get interesting :)

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Drama is an understatement. There is a lot of yelling and hand-waving in that
post. He even goes so far as to start impeaching the FBI informant by showing
his picture and labeling he and his wife "drug addict" and "mrs. drug addict"

I'm thinking he's looking for slander charges on top of what he already has?
Not sure though -- and quite frankly its not worth my time to investigate.

If -- and its a big if -- the FBI is screwing him over accidentally, then this
will make a great case study for law enforcement on how not to do this. The
truth will out. If, on the other hand, somebody has been playing in the cookie
jar, no amount of yelling "gestapo" and "police state" is going to help him.
The best it will do is play to the mindset of folks who are already paranoid
to begin with.

This is a brave man. He should sit down and shut up. That's always the best
criminal defense publicity strategy at first. The only thing you're going to
do, innocent or not, is provide facts which can be discredited later on.
You're also providing testimony in your future court case. Trying to make it a
political case by personally appealing to the net? That's whacked. That's
really whacked.

------
froo
New to-do list for setting up data centers:

    
    
      - Raised Floors
      - Sufficient Power
      - Sufficient Cooling
      - Defensive Perimeters
      - Tripwires and Claymores
      - Attack Dogs

~~~
donw
Do you actually think your datacenter employees are going to (illegally, mind
you) risk life, limb, and imprisonment to fight the FBI in enforcing a
warrant, granted in a court of law by a judge?

There are datacenters that have bullet-resistant riot glass, guards armed with
submachine guns, guard dogs, and so on, but they would hand your servers over
to law enforcement in an instant, as long as they had the appropriate
paperwork.

If you're truly concerned about the data, encrypt it. You can still be
compelled to reveal the key by a court ruling, but that's more work than a
warrant, and something your personal lawyer can fight, or at least stall, much
more easily.

For downtime, have multiple datacenters, and spread them across national
boundaries. It's not that hard to get a few boxes in Canada or Ireland, or
Sweden, and it's a much bigger pain in the ass for the police to coordinate
internationally to shut you down. Taiwan is probably a better bet, as they
have no treaties regarding this sort of thing with the US (to my knowledge).

~~~
froo
I see that sarcasm is lost on some people...

I was also going to suggest a moat, drawbridge and surface to air missiles,
but that was perhaps being too obvious.

------
austengary
From Simpson's information, it is fair to assume the raid was indeed not in
relation to the X-Men leak. A search and seizure as illustrated would at the
very least require a standard search warrant, of which, would specify the
nature of the search. Now according to Simpson, the FBI refused presentment of
such, a prerequisite to the search, unless there was reasonable evidence data
would have been destroyed. Either way, at some point, some one would have been
served, unless, of which is a reasonable assumption, is in regard to suspect
terrorist involvement or another of the various other scrupulous 9/11
subsequent clauses.

------
3ds
that google sites link is down... see google's cached version (do you also
think that that doesn't make a whole lot of sense?)

[http://209.85.129.132/search?q=cache:vxqYQFKjExEJ:sites.goog...](http://209.85.129.132/search?q=cache:vxqYQFKjExEJ:sites.google.com/site/mnsclec/index+http://sites.google.com/site/mnsclec/index&cd=1&hl=de&ct=clnk&gl=de&client=firefox-a)

~~~
CalmQuiet
FWIW: The Google Sites link says that it's down because it "exceeded its
Pageview limit" If he's cleared of any involvement, this suggests Simpson may
revive his business through the publicity. ( The "just spell my name right"
approach to marketing. )

------
DanielBMarkham
If there's a warrant, the warrant has to explain what the search was for.
Somehow in this post the author fails to mention the details of the warrant,
instead going off on a tirade about the loss of freedom.

In general, nobody is coming into your data center and seizing anything unless
its part of a criminal investigation. As such, a judge has to sign the warrant
and the petitioner has to explicitly describe what is being searched for.

I can understand the writer being upset about his datacenter, but either he is
not fully aware of the situation or is being purposefully misleading. My
opinion is that he wrote this before he became fully aware of all of the
facts.

~~~
kubrick
Very good points, although it's worth pointing out that the system can be
rigged. Meaning -- just speculating -- a guy like Rupert Murdoch can use his
influence with a judge to get a warrant. It's also worth mentioning that the
author claims to have been in Phoenix while the raid was in Dallas, so he had
no direct access to the warrant. And no one is forcing the FBI to obey the law
these days -- read the news.

~~~
stcredzero
There are a lot of businesses that could be brought down through the seizure
of their datacenter, if even only for a few days. It could be something like
an IP address in some log, connected with a kiddie porn. The authorities could
easily concoct such a thing _after_ they seize the center, then backtrack,
later saying that the log entry turned out to be faked by the real criminals
hiding their tracks. In the meantime, the business has been completely
inoperative, it's websites utterly gone.

I could envision a corrupt branch of the FBI doing this on the behalf of an
organized crime group.

There should be guidelines for the seizure of a datacenter, as this
constitutes the ability to destroy a business, especially in cases where high
availability is critical. (Often the entire center doesn't have to be seized,
only access granted to forensic specialists while access by employees is
severely restricted.)

------
rdl
The only way they can do this (legally) without presenting a warrant involves
a "National Security Letter", but even those need to go up before a secret
court.

Another win for redundancy in your hosting! Especially across jurisdictional
boundaries. Hopefully the affected customers and service provider will be able
to recover damages from business continuity insurance.

(Shooting it out with federal agents who have arrived to perform and illegal
search/seizure is a bad idea...)

~~~
villageidiot
Correct. "It is a demand letter issued to a particular entity or organization
to turn over various record and data pertaining to individuals. They require
no probable cause or judicial oversight."
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter>

Anyone who wants to watch a documentary largely about these letters should
watch _Spying On The Homefront_ by PBS Frontline (you can watch it online):

<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/>

------
vizard
Please, can a moderator change the headline?

~~~
jibiki
(Previously, the headline implied that the raid was part of an investigation
into the leaking of the X-men movie.)

------
paul7986
Yeah there is no way to tell if this is due to the leaked movie that 20th
Century Fox leaked themselves. A month to go and it's the movie that everyone
talking about from their target audience to grandmas(they may not be talking
about but now they know about the movie).

Ok the above maybe inaccurate but the leak if not a pr stunt is a pro for this
movie.

------
Raplh
Whatever else you can say about the original post, WHEN will people putting
things up on the web realize that "Today at 6:00am," becomes ambiguous real
fast on the web, when nowhere else on the page is there a date? I see this
constantly, even on news sites. Gag.

------
jderick
So AT&T and Verizon can call up the Feds and get them to collect their debts
for them? Nice.

------
siculars
what happens when the FBI or some other agency decides to shut down an aws or
gae data center? How many of the toys we play with everyday just stop working.
Our apps migrate to a backup datacenter, right? Maybe. And if they do, that
means data is replicating in realtime all over the world. So in that regard
it's better to work with the datacenter owners and shut stuff down
systematically. Unless the datacenter operator isn't cooperating or is the
subject of the investigation. Brave new world of cloud computing we will all
be living in to greater degrees in the not so distant future.

~~~
njharman
Not 100% sure about gae but aws has multiple datacenters and is designed to
distribute your S3 data across them so if one goes down your data is still
available at others.

And you can always store a copy of your data/server images in
US/Euro/Japan(some continent your regular data/servers are not) S3 as hot
standby to launch when your local government raids datacenters.

AWS and probably GAE are in fact good defenses against this type of outage.

The real problem is not keeping your servers connected its avoiding being shot
by the SWAT team assaulting your house.

------
sho
_"The only data that I have received thus far is that the FBI is investigating
a company that has purchased services from Core IP in the past. This company
does not even colocate with us anywhere, much less 2323 Bryan Street
Datacenter."_

For that extra little touch of incompetence, I'm sure this mysterious
company's CTO is right now sitting in his back yard, scrubbing down the hard
disk platters from all his servers with sulphuric acid and steel wool.

------
nessence
fodder

------
ctingom
Wow, just wow.

