Quote from the Article said:
"This case illustrates the problem with having your servers in the US even if your doing nothing wrong."
Although the US raids are getting a lot of media focus, i think they are also doing the same thing in China and Russia, and as i have read in the newspapers also some countries in the Middle East.
Maybe people are just equating their notion of America as the "land of the free"... and then their servers get raided without prior notice. So they are shocked by the irony.
Quote from the Article said:
"I think its fair to say that the US through server seizures, domain seizures and other means has gotten more aggressive than any western country in taking sites down, without notice and without a right to a prior hearing."
The article did not mention if the servers were seized using a Search Warrant. In that case, there was prior hearing between the Feds and the Judge to obtain that warrant.
And also, i'm not sure if the US has some kind of Post-9-11 policy that they can seize private property without any warrant if it's a threat to national security?
In any case, i don't think holding a hearing with the owner of the servers before making the seizure is a wise thing to do for law enforcement. Holding a hearing will squash the element of surprise, and would have probably tipped-off the suspects.
Quote from the Article said:
"In the process of these domain name seizures and now server seizures a lot of innocent sites have gotten mixed up in the mess and take down along with."
This is a natural and understandable consequence, especially for shared servers. It's like being on the same plane as a drunk passenger who tried to assault the cabin crew. Plane is sent back to the airport along with the rest of the passengers.
Quote from the Article said:
"There are other hosting facilities located offshore in the Bahamas and elsewhere to avoid this police state mentality that the US has seemed to adopted."
Unless it is YOU who is being targetted by the Feds, perhaps a less drastic "redundancy" approach is to simply pay for another webhosting service that will act as a stand-by server. If your primary servers go down (struck by a tornado, or by the FBI), then simply upload a backup copy of your site to your redundant server elsewhere and point your domain there.
Which is also a reminder of the cardinal rule: Don't buy a hosting service with the same company where your domain is also registered. You should always keep them apart.
Quote from the Article said:
"because this has nothing to do with the hardware and they could have merely copied the hard drives of all the computers instead of taking anything at all"
I probably would agree with the Feds to take away the machine... as in physically.
If you do a hardisk copy, anything you do on that machine could send a trigger alert to the suspects, and they will start ERASING evidence on that machine. If the crooks are really smart, they must have had an emergency script somewhere that will run some kind of self-destruct as soon as something alerts them of trouble. Think of Gene Hackman in "Enemy Of The State"... his whole house was rigged with explosives. In the first sign of trouble, you blow that thing up.
So i won't blame the Feds if they swoop in there by surprise and unplug the machine from The Matrix.
