He mentions the power usage, people do get reported over that. However the police also check for unusual heat signatures coming out of buildings at night, that could also have been what happened.
Interestingly, in some jurisdictions (notably canada) looking through someone's roof with an IR camera constitues an invasion of privacy, and requires a warrant.
Looking forward to the future when Bitcoin gets banned, and we see documentaries with police officers breaking down makeshift barricades to gain entry to innocuous looking barns way out in the countryside, pulling back layers of plastic sheeting to find a state of the art datacenter inside, with racks of clustered GPUs, and one very dishevelled looking vietnamese nerd sleeping on a bare mattress.
However the police also check for unusual heat signatures coming out of buildings at night, that could also have been what happened.
Uh, wtf, since when? They're allowed to do this without a warrant? They just randomly drive along the streets and check heat signatures?
Looking forward to the future when Bitcoin gets banned, and we see documentaries with police officers breaking down makeshift barricades to gain entry to innocuous looking barns way out in the countryside, pulling back layers of plastic sheeting to find a state of the art datacenter inside, with racks of clustered GPUs, and one very dishevelled looking vietnamese nerd sleeping on a bare mattress.
That'll happen soon and it won't be just for BitCoin, it'll be for any p2p network or any encrypted network since the governments of the world are all going censorship crazy at the moment.
> Uh, wtf, since when? They're allowed to do this without a warrant? They just randomly drive along the streets and check heat signatures?
"Emissions" are part of a Constitutional gray area because of the murky definition of privacy, but generally cops are allowed to utilize them. Heat signatures are not placed in the same category as wiretaps, but rather in the same category as walking down the street and happening to see something through someone's open window. The reasoning is that the heat information is "broadcasted" and therefore publicly available.
And the cops don't cruise around examining heat signatures. They do fly-overs. That, and stake-outs.
> Uh, wtf, since when? They're allowed to do this without a warrant? They just randomly drive along the streets and check heat signatures?
There were pictures in an article I saw talking about one such raid that was taken from the air, so they are probably doing it from police helicopters. It makes sense - if you have the thing in the air anyway (perhaps returning to base having helped out with some chase) make better use of the fuel it is consuming by sweeping the IR cameras around on the offchance of spotting something odd.
Any yes, in many (but not all) jurisdictions this is something they can do without a warrant.
