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Comment by iSnow | Hacker News Reader

Since the Silk Road bust we know the US LE is able to convince or force colocation providers to provide them with an image of a server. After that, pretty much any communication can be considered open to the NSA. I am not surprised that he does not clearly mentions this.

So FM should move their servers out of the US even if that's inconvenient.

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Actually we did clearly mention it:

  "Our colocation providers could be compelled to give physical access to our servers."

But in the very next paragraph:

    "These are not things we can protect against directly but again, we can make it extremely difficult for these things to occur by using strong encryption and careful systems monitoring. Were anything like this ever to happen we would be talking about it very publically. Such an action would not remain secret for long."

Its not hard for a skilled sysadmin to take an image of a running server. Its extremely difficult to do it without administrative access to the machine AND to do it without anyone noticing.

You could move the servers to a country with more respect for rule of law. That would be awesome!

Silk Road wasn't hosted in the US, in the documents it says they got the server image from another country.

What we also know from that is that it doesn't really matter where your servers are physically located.

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