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Comment on FBI Seizure of Mastodon Server is a Wakeup Call to Fediverse Users and Hosts to Protect their Users

This says that the server was grabbed during an unrelated raid?

How is that even legal. You can just get seized because your neighbor in the server rack is doing something? I feel like that should be a lawsuit for taking down someone’s business essentially. I’ll be real with you it doesn’t matter if the shits encrypted or not - in 15-20 years if Feds hold onto your messages trivial or not, with their budget and resources they can probably crack hashed data, if Quantum computing comes online especially, where quantum was stuck in a state of laughable doubt just like ML or AI was eight years back.

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x4740N@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Take this with a grain of salt but what if the unrelated server raid was an excuse

There’s plenty of right wing bigots in the US government that would take the chance to take down anything they don’t agree with

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uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Law enforcement in the US, including the FBI has long since abandoned the doctrine of staying within the threshold of legality, and the court system, right up to SCOTUS has defended them. Since the 9/11 attacks, the PATRIOT act and the creation of Homeland Security, the US Supreme Court has been chipping away at the protections established in the Fourth and Fifth amendments to the Constitution of the United States.

So, the question is not whether a given action (illegal seizure of property and the illegal search thereof) is legal rather if it’ll be upheld.

SCOTUS has already established if a crime is severe enough, that the evidence from an illegal search can be admitted anyway. And they’re talking about drug possession, not finding the leg of a child in the back of a van.

When police seize your computer arbitrarily, there is a risk that a judge will not accept it as a legal search, such as if a warrant wasn’t sufficiently specific, or if probable cause wasn’t sufficiently established. But in the majority of cases, judges side with law enforcement regardless in the US. (YMMV depending on what county you’re in. Portland, OR is better about constitutional rights than Oakland, CA).

That said, the FBI is no longer law enforcement but its mission was changed to National Security by James Comey when he was director (it improved his budget to do so, and gave the FBI more latitude regarding operations). I’m tempted to say the FBI acts less as law enforcement and more like the secret police of the US (that is, hunts and investigates enemies of the current administration and those who might bring embarrassment to officials or the US state). So it’ll seize what it wants, and aim to extract intel from what it gets while you fight in the courts to get your stuff back.

That said, if you’re doing anything of interest to the FBI it’s best to encrypt the snot out of it, including having alternate accounts filled with images of furry porn and victims of police violence. And yes, if you’re plotting or signalling on the fediverse, do so in code.

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