
FBI seizes riseup.net server - quadrahelix
https://help.riseup.net/en/seizure-2012-april
======
electromagnetic
I 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 organized crime and
waiting until they got someone worth catching before making a move.

It's a universal truth that any action has a reaction. If the FBI shut down a
money laundering front, then the Mob would get wise and get more sophisticated
and you won't hurt their operation. If you wait until you can link someone
important to the Mob infrastructure and _then_ make a move, then you've
seriously effected crime in a city.

The FBI does shit like this and Megaupload before they appear to have their
ducks in a row. They don't know what they're doing, and don't know what
they're looking for so they consistently appear to jump the gun.

My only thoughts with this are that someone with a lot of power and influence
is making this happen. What I wonder is what politician or presidential
candidate/whatever has a lot vested and a lot to lose from someone finding out
they/their kids/their family is pirating, or running anonymous operations,
etc. Seriously, it's the only reason I can think of other than incompetency as
to why the FBI is consistently jumping the gun.

~~~
dsl
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.

~~~
hoprocker
Whoah whoah whoah! Is a remailer really === a kilo of cocaine? Seems like it's
more like a car sans license plates, operating in a state where license plates
are optional. (But hey, if you use that car to transport a cool k...)

~~~
dsl
Sure. Because you have no idea if that remailer is going to be used to leak
information on civil rights abuses or to plan the assassination of an
official.

I run a number of Tor nodes. I follow the Tor mailing list. I understand that
what I am doing is not illegal, but is still very risky. What have I done in
response to that risk? All my important shit is hosted elsewhere.

------
joeyh
I have friends involved in Riseup, and I know they do good work. Software
projects like monkeysphere and backupninja. Didn't realize they hosted so many
mailing lists, apparently 14,000.

This is a good time to <https://help.riseup.net/en/donate> .. lots of options,
including bitcoin and flattr.

------
_delirium
With this rash of seize-servers-first-ask-questions-later, sounds like we're
heading for a reprise of the glorious Steve Jackson Games era of blunt-weapon
policing tactics when it comes to technology.

~~~
younata
I'm sorry, but what are you referring to?

~~~
LeafStorm
The FBI raided the offices of Steve Jackson Games because Loyd Blankenship,
the author of _GURPS Cyberpunk_ , was the subject of a crackdown for
disseminating a (largely non-technical) document about the E911 system on his
BBS.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_Games,_Inc._v._U...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_Games,_Inc._v._United_States_Secret_Service)

~~~
waterlesscloud
Check the external links here for free versions of The Hacker Crackdown, a
non-fiction account of the whole situation by Bruce Sterling.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Crackdown>

------
agwa
So 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.

~~~
ChuckMcM
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.

~~~
durin42
Can you cite any examples of this ever happening? I am curious now.

~~~
ChuckMcM
<http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/1883984>

------
alaskamiller
America's online law enforcement shaping up to be pretty much like the war on
drugs.

~~~
suneilp
In other words, useless?

~~~
rorrr
And expensive

And with lots of innocent casualties

And corrupt

And supported by morons

~~~
skore
And boosting economies outside of the US?

~~~
psyconn
Don't worry about economies in EU, we've done a really good job in
hamstringing with "social" policies. Compared with other countries law
enforcement in US is pretty decent.

------
mayoff
This seems like a no-brainer to me. The FBI has the duty to find the Pitt bomb
threatener. Perhaps Mixmaster truly does make the email untraceable, but it's
the FBI's duty to try tracing it - not to take the Mixmaster claims as fact.
If the FBI has evidence that criminal emails passed through that server, I
absolutely want the FBI to be able to obtain and execute a warrant to seize it
and search it for evidence.

Analogy: the cops need to look at a gun store's records to track down a
criminal shooter. The cops have reason to believe people with access to the
gun store might go in and destroy those records. Should they be able to shut
down the gun store (temporarily) and block access to it while they execute a
legal search warrant on it?

~~~
siculars
Criminals (and worse) use all sorts of things, including technology, that
everyone else uses. By your logic, the FBI should execute seizure warnings
against GMail, Yahoo mail and Facebook... every time they have "evidence that
criminal emails passed through that server."

Frankly, your logic makes no practical sense.

~~~
mayoff
The FBI should absolutely execute a seizure warrant against those companies,
if doing so is effective, but:

\- Those companies probably have too many servers and too much data to make
seizing all of it productive.

\- Those companies would be less likely to be effected, as they have backups
and redundant servers for handling outages.

\- Those companies keep records that they provide to law enforcement when
presented with a warrant or subpoena.

It's 100% ok to run an anonymizing remailer, with no backup strategy in place.
It's retarded to act surprised and indignant when the server gets seized
because it was probably used to commit a crime.

~~~
gee_totes
_It's retarded to act surprised and indignant when the server gets seized
because it was probably used to commit a crime._

Did you read the press release? Riseup was not running the anonymizing
remailer, it just happened to be on the same physical machine as some of
Riseup's infrastructure/e-mail accounts/listservs/etc.

From the press release:

 _The seized server was operated by the European Counter Network (“ECN”), the
oldest independent internet service provider in Europe, who, among many other
things, provided an anonymous remailer service, Mixmaster, that was the target
of an FBI investigation into the bomb threats against the University of
Pittsburgh._

~~~
mayoff
Good point. Then it's ok to be surprised. This is a non-obvious risk of shared
hosting.

------
ingrid
The building I work in and practically live in as student was evacuated two
hours ago due to a bomb threat, and as of today 11 bomb threats have been made
across campus. The total of bomb threats made is now 126. It is ridiculous.

I do not agree with the FBI confiscating servers to figure out where the
anonymous bomb threats have been coming from, but I'm kind of glad they are
and feel bad for that.

~~~
mikeash
When was the last time a bomb threat was followed up with an actual bomb in
the US? Maybe it's time to stop blindly evacuating buildings in response to
anonymous messages.

~~~
samstave
1993 World trade center

And today is the anniversary of the 1995 Oklahoma city bombing.

However I am uncertain if a "threat" was ever called in for either.

This is evidence that a called in thread will likely never be real - real
attacks aren't called in with warnings.

~~~
ssmall
Just because those didn't come with threats doesn't mean all attacks come
without threats. Also it doesn't prove that all threats won't be followed by
an attack.

The unibomber is one example. He would send mail bombs if newspapers didn't
heed his threats and publish his ramblings.

------
sciurus
I met Jamie and some others associated with May First/People Link while
volunteering to support the first US Social Forum. I was really impressed with
their ideals and how they applied them to their work as technologists. I hope
everything works out well for them and that this seizure brings more attention
to what they are doing.

------
gee_totes
_In total, over 300 email accounts, between 50-80 email lists, and several
other websites have been taken off the Internet by this action._

I hope Riseup posts a list of those 300 e-mail accounts that were taken
offline, so the owners know that they are now on an FBI watch list.

~~~
alanh
You’re recommending a breach of trust/privacy by making this public —
obviously the right thing to do is contact them directly & privately.

------
dendory
Learn from the pirate bay. It's no longer a matter of protecting your business
from hackers, but also from corrupt governments. When you start a business you
better have contingencies in place to switch domain, server, country, etc
seamlessly.

------
rdl
FBI actually has some good agents, but the only ones I've met were on
counterterrorism, either in the us or overseas trying to find foreign links to
us terrorism. I know most of the other law enforcement funding got
repriorirized after 9-11, and I could imagine it is still attracting the
better agents. Most of the really stupid FBI stuff originates from their bush
league regional offices or is pushed by idiot US Attorneys in those places
(e-gold, mmj raids, etc). The Secret Service, at least on computer crime, is
far more uniformly competent.

------
nextparadigms
The American version of SOPA already passed in 2008. It's called the Pro IP
Act. That's how they are able to seize "local" domains like .com and .net, and
I think .org, too.

------
ihuman
I 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.

~~~
gee_totes
This seizure is especially chilling because Riseup is used primarily by
activists.

------
ssmall
Again? Didn't they get all their servers seized back in the late 90s early
00's too?

~~~
gee_totes
I want to say that they had servers seized running up to the 2004 Republican
convention in Minnesota. However, I'm having a hard time finding news links
about this.

I also went to check their wikipedia page to see if there was a history
section, and Riseup doesn't seem to have one.

Now I'm going to go soothe my paranoia.....

~~~
ssmall
If I remember correctly... it was because they were offering free hosting to
political groups and someone was using it to host bomb plans without them
knowing.

I'm sure the time I'm thinking of had to have been before 2004 because I
remember not even having a drivers license at the time.

------
tobyjsullivan
There are a lot of comments here, but I don't see anybody asking one
particularly important question (and please forgive my ignorance of
Riseup.net). Why did removing one server cause so much disruption? Do they not
have back-ups? Redundant servers?

If this stuff is so gosh-darn important, I feel these users have put their
faith in the wrong hosting organization...

~~~
bruo
it is an important question, but it's far away from the issue. that's why
nobody is asking that, because it's not important in this specific issue.

riseup is a collective driven isp that is focused in social change activists,
so they do have values and principles different than making money. the issue
here is not the disrupt, it's the attack on those values.

i hope you now understand why nobody ask about that, it is important, but not
the issue about this. also it's because this values people put faith in them
and not in google, amazon or another money focused company, me included :)

------
echo-unity
What recourse do the people have when voter fraud occurs? How much monitoring
is done through those channels?

*I know it is not a react quickly because human lives could be at stake - but considering anything tied to a presidential election could lead to a person voted to office that could jeopordize a nation.

------
viraptor
> "In total, over 300 email accounts, between 50-80 email lists, and several
> other websites have been taken off the Internet by this action."

Dramatic description aside, I really hope that what they mean is - lost one
copy of it, waiting for DNS change to propagate... Am I hoping for too much?

------
philipithomas
"[. . .] search warrant issued by the FBI,”

Doesn't a judge have to issue a warrant?

------
rhizome
Pretty cheap R&D by the FBI for anonymized communications techniques.

~~~
rosser
It's not like Mixmaster (and presumably everything else running on that host)
isn't FOSS. This isn't R&D; it's swatting a fly with a thermobaric device.

------
loverobots
From a forensic evidence perspective, can an image or a drive clone suffice?

And does anyone know what was this about, e-mail threat to do ... ?

~~~
mayoff
The warrant was (according to riseup) related to the recent rash of bomb
threats against the University of Pittsburgh.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=university+pittsburgh+bomb+t...](https://www.google.com/search?q=university+pittsburgh+bomb+threats&tbm=nws)

------
samstave
This 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.

~~~
carguy1983
Wow, you place an awful lot of faith in amazon.

~~~
samstave
Not really actually, I just mean having a discrete server that can be "seized"
is not a particularly robust solution.

~~~
carguy1983
... and what do you think an Amazon slice is? It sits on a physical machine
that can be identified, located, and handed over by Amazon given a lawful
request, all without the site operators knowing.

You think they give a fuck about the other 4 slices on your server? No. They
don't. In fact it says so right in their SLA.

~~~
samstave
I used the word ROBUST

If you are trying to defy the FBI, and 100% of your site architecture resides
within Amazon's infrastructure you are not robust.

