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Comment by pbz | Hacker News Reader

Please tell me this is illegal and FBI will be sued over this...

For what?

If the warrant is valid, I don’t see how anyone affected by the raid has a case. If the police serve a warrant on the house next door to you, and your street gets blocked off while they go over the building with a fine-toothed comb and carry off evidence, it will be damn inconvenient for you, but I don’t know of any law preventing them from doing it.

Yes, but if in searching my neighbor's property they were poking in my living room that would be an illegal search of my property. I'm not sure which metaphor is stronger, but it's certainly not a clear case either wya.

If the warrant includes your living room (because the police have probable cause to believe that there is physical evidence in your living room that would link your neighbor to the crime), then they can search your living room.

In the case of a shared server, I don’t see how you can do a good forensic search of the affected server without having the physical box in your possession.

But they took an entire rack enclosure (i.e., multiple servers) not just server in question.

If the system in question has RAID disks, it should be sufficient to grab one drive (depending on the RAID configuration) from the array. The FBI could take that home and examine it, while everything actually running on the server remains uninterrupted.

One wonders whether their actual goal is not to gather evidence, but to actually interrupt the service.

This is more like they have a warrant for one house so they seize the entire street or neighborhood simply because they can't make the distinction on the field between one and the other. In doing so they're causing harm to businesses, only because they happened to be in the same area code as some alleged criminal. They're not just intruding and looking around, they shut down the business, for days if not weeks.

It's more like a large mall and they shut down access to an entire wing of a large mall while they search through to find what they're looking for.

Oh yeah, and they're searching through your store as they make their way to the location on the warrant.

It's more like they shut down a wing of a mall and relocated it to another place.

Good luck!

That's not a very good analogy. I mean, when they do that they are not seizing the items in other stores and keeping them.

If you are small enough to have to colo, you probably can't afford to sue the FBI.

Couldn’t the web host sue?

small enough to colo? what world do you live in?

He is <24 years old and his primary world view has been formed whilst "cloud" was the pinnacle of technical obviousness.

>40 and primary world view formed working in fortune 100 corporate environment. Basically, every company I have ever worked for has had it's own multiple large data centers. I guess the point I didn't try very hard to make was, do you think a company the size of pinboard has the financial resources to engage in a prolonged legal battle with the FBI? I'm thinking not, but I could be wrong.

The US court system is not nearly as utterly corrupt as you seem to think. Even individual people often fight law enforcement agencies in court there, and win. Certainly a Fortune 100 company would stand a better chance. (Maciej might be at a bit of a disadvantage, being a foreigner, and one who's written publicly about a run-in with law enforcement in China, at that.)

There's a pretty large range between Pinboard (10 000 customers, maybe? Two employees? Annual revenue in the range of $100k? I'm guessing here) and Rite Aid (109000 "associates", maybe 20 million customers, $26 billion revenue). More than five orders of magnitude, actually.

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