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dcss_gardener • yesterday at 2:29 PM • 6 replies • view on HN

Well, and what are you concretely suggesting here? Having my own door kicked down and my dog shot so they can get at my personal home server? Buying hardware and colocating it then getting permanently blacklisted from every datacenter when they get raided?

The problem here is the cops not where the computer sits.


Replies

omgwtfbyobbq • yesterday at 3:31 PM

Your own property/server has 4th amendment protections, especially if it's in your house. Your use of someone else's machine doesn't, especially when they voluntarily give up your info.

You can also use proxys and/or tor to create external accounts/upload stuff.

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xoa • yesterday at 3:24 PM

>Well, and what are you concretely suggesting here?

Having your own server and infra, at least in part.

>Having my own door kicked down and my dog shot so they can get at my personal home server?

The government doesn't have infinite resources, nor is it immune to political considerations (obviously, that's the problem here!). There is an enormous, qualitative and quantitative difference between:

  1) we must get an actual warrant in a lot of different physical jurisdictions across the country all with different judges and then spend the money and availability to send physical meat agents to said locations, often rural and remote, across the country to an unknown physical situation with at least some areas where people might shoot at us, and all equipment needed for that, and will by definition have to disclose everything to our targets
vs

  2) an agent can comfortably from their central office chair use a preexisting automated system to a central cloud portal to demand info secretly from companies that will just comply without any question
Scale is inherent in the topic here. It's not just "why", "HOW" is "ICE running one of the largest anti-left surveillance ops"? Well, in part because they can do so so cheaply, efficiently, and stealthily via purely electronic means. They aren't kicking down ten million doors and shooting ten million dogs, and indeed they CAN'T do that, not because they wouldn't like to but because it's physically impossible with their resources and would provoke furious (undoubtedly including some lethal) pushback.

And again, even if absolutely nothing else, it means something to know they're after you. Nothing stops you from immediately surrendering your server when asked, but you can then also instantly get a lawyer/support and push back right then and there. You can't adapt to what you either never even realize happened or only realized too late.

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cowlevel • yesterday at 10:33 PM

This happens sometimes, but rarely, and if it does happen, chances are you'll be fine, apart from downtime and having to buy a new server, as long as your disks are encrypted.

You're treating this as if the worst thing that can happen will happen, when it's more of a numbers game. They do these raids occasionally on one or two people in order to scare tens of thousands of other people away from participating.

DCs also get bullshit raids sometimes and have processes that don't involve an immediate permanent blacklist.

You have to realise it's a move of desperation by the attackers. If they are seizing a server, it means they don't have anything and they're hoping beyond hope they can get something, anything, from that server.

trvz • yesterday at 3:00 PM

Fix your country.

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zug_zug • yesterday at 2:49 PM

probably use tor and nothing tied to your identity

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veidr • yesterday at 2:40 PM

I'm not saying it's easy, but the straightforward solution is to move

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