If you posted them on the Internet, the NSA already had them.

i suddenly want to join the FBI

The reason we don't see seizure of those servers is that those services have established working relationships with law enforcement, so there's no need to physically seize the servers.

It's worth noting that while various CEOs claim not to cooperate with law enforcement, the Patriot Act created provisions for establishing that cooperation without CEO permission or awareness.

In the case of Meta and the Muskverse, it's because they regard themselves as a third party and cooperate with law enforcement in disclosing everything about you on request. As per MEGAupload and Backpage (and presently TikTok) this tactic doesn't always work.

Google used to claim that they would demand warrants, and then run them past their blue-haired lawyers to make sure all the jots and tittles were in place before releasing data, but that was back in the aughts and early 2010s. I don't know what Google's relationships is to law enforcement today.

Amazon will also totally snitch on you, as will all the telecommunications services (Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, T-Mobile, Astound, etc.) It's one of the reasons you want to get a VPN service that actively deletes its records, and law enforcement doesn't like very much.

Once US law enforcement wants to get you, do not expect your civil rights to protect you. And don't talk to law enforcement. Wait for council and get a lawyer, because they will try to nail you for CFAA violations which can land you 25 years (which is more than some murder).

Thank you.

Actual context paints a whole different picture compared to the clickbait post.

Very important context! The US is rapidly turning Christo-Fascist. I hate this country.

You bring up valid points, but you are being very antagonistic towards server admins in the process. I get that you're frustrated by being dismissed all the time

Yea, you could have served your points in a less agressiv mana

Enterprise starts at 20k a year before traffic

My Mastodon server has just under 1.5k MAUs and has raised $4k so far this year. We've only been open for six months. This is not hard money to raise.

You have great points, I agree, and it's why I donate to support lemmy.world. I'm hoping that enough people will donate small funds that it will cumulatively enable the server admins to better protect the instance. Basically like Wikipedia's funding model.

Maybe it's not realistic, but I'm hoping that the fact that we all gave enough of a shit to start anew on lemmy, a decent percentage of the userbase may be more likely to donate than typically the case in online platforms.

I guess time will tell the future of lemmy and the main instances.

Edit: Here are the donation pages:

• https://opencollective.com/mastodonworld
• https://patreon.com/mastodonworld

Cloud flare's business is protecting small websites as well as large across the world from DDOS attacks. You don't think there's a tier somewhere between "free" and "enterprise 20k base"? DDOS mitigation techniques have gotten pretty advanced and are no longer the sole domain of large companies.

The history of piratebay proves that you can host a website (or instance in this case) and have it be incredibly resilient, out of reach for US/EU law enforcement as long as you have the knowledge and energy to do so. How many millions of hollywood-dollars have been spent on taking it down, vs how many days has it actually been down since it's creation?

I like the idea of it, but you're right. It's not going to scale because at some point, somebody has to pay for it. And most users, myself included, seem unwilling to dip into our own pockets to satisfy our crippling addiction to cat pictures and world weary cynicism.

In the old days we had Usenet newsgroups, hosted by ISPs, just like most of them still do with email. It's the ideal place for hosting a fediverse, maybe not necessarily this one. They already scale their stuff with the number of users. We already pay them. And it decentralises power away from a handful of tech billionaires.

Would they do it? Who knows. They're certainly best placed for it, but would they want the unenviable job of identifying and blocking kiddy porn and cartel torture videos? I know I wouldn't want to be looking at that shit all day. The big networks obviously have a solution for that, but automated AI image recognition stuff only goes so far. At some point there's a poor minimum wage worker looking at it in a third world country.

I think part of the problem is that laws in the developed world essentially make in extremely expensive to run one of these services if you have a lot of users per month.

Te heart of the issue is that at some point it becomes more useful for mega-corporations to have a cozy relationship with the government than with you. It used to be that if a service found that there was child porn on their service, the law simply required them to remove it and report it to the police. Very reasonable.

The thing is though, if that is all the compliance one needs to follow, then the creation of new firms and services is quite easy. Mega-corporations don't like this. They want to slow the creation of new services and firms because this slows the appearance of new competition. Hence they become pro-regulation, and, I'd argue, attempt to shift the entire culture towards paranoia and a demand for more regulation.

Perhaps the only defense is to stay small. Obviously don't allow any abusive or illegal content. But stay small so that you can skirt by without having to deal with compliance with the big-boy regulations.

If we want the ecosystem to be resilient, we need to migrate to a model where:

1. The data is redundant, in a way it matters. Yes, I know the posts are currently replicated, but if the primary replica is gone, the usefulness of the copies is limited.
2. The identities are not tied to a provider

NOSTR does this, AND provides an incentive for keeping the content online - you simply pay one, or even multiple relay operators, for keeping your data online. However:

1. NOSTR client UX currently sucks even more than lemmy/mastodon
2. There is no useful content whatsoever. They're in the "only political extremists use this" phase at the moment.

You have good points, and yeah, I too want data privacy and everything, but the Fediverse in general always was a niche place. I mean, people only got to know this because the mainstream social media fucked up badly this time (and keeps doing it very well). Now we have thousands of new instances, users and everything, but no one was prepared for it.

My point is: your proposals are totally valid, but there was no need for this level of security until yesterday, since this was just a niche place with a couple hundreds of users. Give it a few months and we might get some updates on instance infrastructure and the ActivityPub protocol itself to make it safer.

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.

Kollektiva.social

It's https://kolektiva.social (one L in kolectiva) and the site is still up, and their admin gave this comment on the raid.

Disclaimer: I've never run a Mastodon or similar server, so the software may have more privacy built in, but potentially the issue would be account setup information that could be associated with public posts. Email addresses, IP address logs, etc. Those would be critical in matching public "anonymous" speech with real-world identifiable information.

If you federate with other instances they have a copy of your public facing account data. That's how ActivityPub works and it's very far from ideal.