I do not understand the sledgehammer approach the FBI 'cybercrimes' division deals with things with.<p>The FBI are not police, are not detectives, and are not competent in these matters. I'm sorry but covert monitoring of a server is going to be vastly more beneficial for an operation than taking the server and is going to net more targets and more evidence.<p>I remember stories of the FBI sitting on a known front for organized crime and waiting until they got someone worth catching before making a move.<p>It's a universal truth that any action has a reaction. If the FBI shut down a money laundering front, then the Mob would get wise and get more sophisticated and you won't hurt their operation. If you wait until you can link someone important to the Mob infrastructure and <i>then</i> make a move, then you've seriously effected crime in a city.<p>The FBI does shit like this and Megaupload before they appear to have their ducks in a row. They don't know what they're doing, and don't know what they're looking for so they consistently appear to jump the gun.<p>My only thoughts with this are that someone with a lot of power and influence is making this happen. What I wonder is what politician or presidential candidate/whatever has a lot vested and a lot to lose from someone finding out they/their kids/their family is pirating, or running anonymous operations, etc. Seriously, it's the only reason I can think of other than incompetency as to why the FBI is consistently jumping the gun.
I have friends involved in Riseup, and I know they do good work. Software projects like monkeysphere and backupninja. Didn't realize they hosted so many mailing lists, apparently 14,000.<p>This is a good time to <a href="https://help.riseup.net/en/donate" rel="nofollow">https://help.riseup.net/en/donate</a>
.. lots of options, including bitcoin and flattr.
With this rash of seize-servers-first-ask-questions-later, sounds like we're heading for a reprise of the glorious Steve Jackson Games era of blunt-weapon policing tactics when it comes to technology.
So if riseup.net had been hosted on, say, EC2, what would the FBI have seized? The server hosting the VM and many other completely unrelated VMs? Scary thought.<p>Also, if you haven't done so already I encourage you to read the FAQ at the end of the page. It has one of the best answers to "Doesn’t Mixmaster/anonymous remailers enable criminals to do bad things?" I've ever seen.
This seems like a no-brainer to me. The FBI has the duty to find the Pitt bomb threatener. Perhaps Mixmaster truly does make the email untraceable, but it's the FBI's duty to try tracing it - not to take the Mixmaster claims as fact. If the FBI has evidence that criminal emails passed through that server, I absolutely want the FBI to be able to obtain and execute a warrant to seize it and search it for evidence.<p>Analogy: the cops need to look at a gun store's records to track down a criminal shooter. The cops have reason to believe people with access to the gun store might go in and destroy those records. Should they be able to shut down the gun store (temporarily) and block access to it while they execute a legal search warrant on it?
The building I work in and practically live in as student was evacuated two hours ago due to a bomb threat, and as of today 11 bomb threats have been made across campus. The total of bomb threats made is now 126. It is ridiculous.<p>I do not agree with the FBI confiscating servers to figure out where the anonymous bomb threats have been coming from, but I'm kind of glad they are and feel bad for that.
I met Jamie and some others associated with May First/People Link while volunteering to support the first US Social Forum. I was really impressed with their ideals and how they applied them to their work as technologists. I hope everything works out well for them and that this seizure brings more attention to what they are doing.
<i>In total, over 300 email accounts, between 50-80 email lists, and several other websites have been taken off the Internet by this action.</i><p>I hope Riseup posts a list of those 300 e-mail accounts that were taken offline, so the owners know that they are now on an FBI watch list.
Learn from the pirate bay. It's no longer a matter of protecting your business from hackers, but also from corrupt governments. When you start a business you better have contingencies in place to switch domain, server, country, etc seamlessly.
FBI actually has some good agents, but the only ones I've met were on counterterrorism, either in the us or overseas trying to find foreign links to us terrorism. I know most of the other law enforcement funding got repriorirized after 9-11, and I could imagine it is still attracting the better agents. Most of the really stupid FBI stuff originates from their bush league regional offices or is pushed by idiot US Attorneys in those places (e-gold, mmj raids, etc). The Secret Service, at least on computer crime, is far more uniformly competent.
The American version of SOPA already passed in 2008. It's called the Pro IP Act. That's how they are able to seize "local" domains like .com and .net, and I think .org, too.
I can understand the need to stop the bomb threats, but the FBI also should have respected the other users of the seized server and not removed it. And besides, nothing is stoping the person from using other anonymous email hosts.
There are a lot of comments here, but I don't see anybody asking one particularly important question (and please forgive my ignorance of Riseup.net). Why did removing one server cause so much disruption? Do they not have back-ups? Redundant servers?<p>If this stuff is so gosh-darn important, I feel these users have put their faith in the wrong hosting organization...
What recourse do the people have when voter fraud occurs? How much monitoring is done through those channels?<p>*I know it is not a react quickly because human lives could be at stake - but considering anything tied to a presidential election could lead to a person voted to office that could jeopordize a nation.
> "In total, over 300 email accounts, between 50-80 email lists, and several other websites have been taken off the Internet by this action."<p>Dramatic description aside, I really hope that what they mean is - lost one copy of it, waiting for DNS change to propagate... Am I hoping for too much?
This is a testament to why you would want to use AWS virtual instances and never have "a server" - point your domain at a new instance should one machine get ordered off by the FBI.