

FBI May Not Have Had Access To Instapaper Hard Drive Data After All - jakewalker
http://blog.instapaper.com/post/6990340491

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canistr
I think he should make an open apology to the FBI.

People really have to understand that "the government" isn't after you and
that Western society has generally had a really good track record of not
abusing their power as compared to most places around the world. The FBI
simply doesn't walk into data centers or your homes and try to disrupt things.
There are real American people who work in the government and police agencies
who do good work. You have to realize that when they do something they
shouldn't be doing, they have to answer to the court of law just like you and
I with presented evidence.

I'm sorry if you disagree with me. But I don't think it's fair to assume
corruption on part of the police.

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kijinbear
The FBI still took Instapaper's blade servers, and that was wrong. I don't
think it was intentional at all, but it was certainly careless, and therefore
I don't think there's any need for Marco Arment to apologize to the FBI. If
anything, the FBI should apologize for their careless seizure of hardware not
covered by the warrant.

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ktsmith
You are making an assumption that his blade server wasn't covered by the
warrant. It's much more likely that the warrant was quite broad and allowed
for the FBI to take exactly what they did. This has proven to be the case
throughout the years under similar circumstances. I'm more surprised they only
took one enclosure.

~~~
ericd
It's still careless to take something that wasn't relevant to the
investigation and thereby cause harm to citizens who aren't involved.

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bkudria
So... is this just a case of massive incompetence on the FBI's part? Why would
they take the server and not the HDDs?

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brown9-2
We don't know that they didn't seize other hard drives, just not ones used by
Instapaper.

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alex_h
But it would be odd if the FBI was clueless enough to take an entire rack of
servers when they were after just 1, yet smart enough to pick exactly the
right drives out of a disk array. (assuming thats even possible)

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ktsmith
A single C7000 is 10U in height and can house 16 half height blades. If they
are using full height blades it houses eight. A typical enclosure is 36U, 42U,
or 45U so it's certainly plausible the enclosure that was seized housed
multiple blade chassis and or storage chassis. In which case it's also
completely plausible that the storage array for Instapaper was in a different
enclosure but the storage array the FBI cared about was in the same enclosure
as the blade chassis.

What would be odd is if the FBI pulled out only the blades they were
interested in at the data center and left everything else intact. What's much
more likely is they took the entire chassis as it is in working condition so
they could do their analysis. If they missed something or their warrant didn't
include additional enclosures or equipment then they'll probably be back with
a second warrant to collect the enclosure with all the storage arrays.

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milkshakes
so they took the blades but not the drives? what would the point be?

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atlbeer
Never assume malice or intent when incompetence is a possible explanation

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tomjen3
Actually, do assume malice. Too many cooks go free otherwise.

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ca98am79
too many crooks in the kitchen

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mrkurt
A rarely promoted benefit of a SAN!

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mrpollo
FBI Raid ready?

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skeletonjelly
Raid 0!

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eli
Well, yeah. Did anyone honestly think the FBI intentionally (and perhaps even
illegally) took data belonging to Instapaper to.. what? Build profiles on
upper middle class Americans' reading habits?

I'm definitely not an apologist for the post-9/11 police state, but that's a
pretty silly conspiracy theory.

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wmf
No, people thought the FBI _accidentally_ took data belonging to Instapaper.
You're right that the FBI wouldn't have looked at it anyway since their
investigation is not about Instapaper. They can't even afford to investigate
crimes that are reported, so they definitely don't have the resources for
random Web 2.0 fishing expeditions.

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gojomo
My concern would be that if the wrong disks get imaged (either by real
bumbling, or erring on the side of over-collecting, or calculated-hoovering-
that-could-be-portrayed-as-an-honest-mistake-later), the disk data could then
wind up in some broader forensic analysis pipeline, or long-term evidence
archive, and then be eventually misused.

For example, if they think they may have imaged too much, do they promptly and
irreversibly wipe the extra? Or keep it, just in case their assessment of its
relation to the current investigation changes again? Could current or future
automated criminal-activity-analysis engines be run against every old disk
image in their possession, ignoring the details of how/why they were
collected?

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wmf
_Could current or future automated criminal-activity-analysis engines be run
against every old disk image in their possession..._

As problematic as that is, it's a drop in the bucket compared to things like
Echelon. I think people should be realistic about their paranoia.

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nknight
Echelon can be guarded against with in-transit crypto.

Physical access to systems is far more problematic. Even if the data is
nominally encrypted on-disk, the key must be in RAM to make use of the data,
rendering it vulnerable at the time of seizure. (You can partially mitigate
the risk, but you can't make it 100%, and it's very likely you'll have issues
with cost, performance, and user-friendliness along the way.)

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tlrobinson
...unless they had one of these:
<http://www.wiebetech.com/products/HotPlug.php>

