Yes. They can be charged with obstruction of justice or interfering with an investigation.

On the contrary, it makes perfect sense. It gives the FBI or any law enforcement agency sufficient leeway to do as they please, which is always the intent of such laws.

> The client is going to figure it out.

The only thing the client knows is that their server isn't working. Not that they are about to be raped by the feds.

2) In this case the Feds had already paid them a visit. If they are trying to run a covert surveillance operation they really suck at it. Even without the FBI visit I am still going to figure out what the hell happened to my server.

Worst wire tap job ever? Helpful FBI agents with experience in network operations want to make up for needlessly inconveniencing someone? Some other three letter agency tells them, "we were using that, could you put it back?" ?

I don't know if these anonymous email threats were unprecedented or not, but they certainly present a huge challenge to law enforcement. What would have happened if the people responsible didn't just stop?

Of course, you could subscribe to the view of the conspiracy theorists among us who feel that the FBI did actually catch the people responsible and are now employing them. :P

From that point of view, this seems like a perfectly fine action to take.

There's certainly an argument to be made in support of your statement. If we were to work in a purely utilitarian manner, there would be little room for argument.

But the design of the structure of civil rights we have in America doesn't work that way. We recognize that people have certain inherent, inalienable right. Even if stripping someone's rights would save tremendous tragedy, our philosophical underpinnings prevent it.

We don't condone torture (unless you're the current President or his predecessor), even when we might be able to extract information that could save many.

We could save many thousand people who are sick, and destined to die, waiting in vain for organ transplants. Just pick somebody's name out of a hat, and divide up his organs -- a liver, a heart, a couple of kidneys. For each life we took, we could save four or more others (not to mention improving others with cornea transplants, etc.). But despite the fact that utilitarian balance says that the net benefit to society would be positive, our system will not even contemplate such an action.

Those examples are extreme, but they illustrate the point that we don't take actions that injure innocent people (and remember, everyone is innocent until proven guilty) even when they can save many others.

In this case, a legal authority made the decision to interrupt a service for a small period of time in order to investigate a terrorist act that was disrupting the lives of thousands of people daily. If this was, say, a service that was providing medical assistance to elderly people, I don't think the same decision would have been made.

yes you can. that's exactly what a right is. a right is the right to do something even when it seems wrong. you don't need a right to do what seems right.

my favourite quote, ever:

At first blush it may be thought surprising that one should have a right to do that which one ought not. Is it not better to confine rights to that which it is right or at least permissible to do? But to say this is to misunderstand the nature of rights. One needs no right to be entitled to do the right thing. That it is right gives one all the title one needs. But one needs a right to be entitled to do that which one should not. It is an essential element of rights to action that they entitle one to do that which one should not. To say this is not, of course, to say that the purpose or justification of rights of action is to increase wrongdoing. Their purpose is to develop and protect the autonomy of the agent. They entitle him to choose for himself rightly or wrongly. But they cannot do that unless they entitle him to choose wrongly. - Joseph Raz, The Authority of Law (p 266)

rights are very special things - they are used to protect a few essential freedoms that are so important they should be protected whatever else.

rights - real rights - are very powerful things. they're the last defense against tyranny. the absolute last thing you want is some dictator saying "well, times are hard, so you can't have free speech right now". that is why rights are absolute.

However, weighing against such a determination is what the OP explained: any competent mail anonymizer is going to be a dead end in the investigation, so the chances of a payoff is small. I'd be curious to see the actual warrant, to see what the judge approved them to look for.

And on the other side of the coin, I expect that the rights of those using the anonymizer (as opposed to those of the company offering the service) were not weighed, because the FBI never inquired as to who would be affected (at least as far as I know).

Those users of the anonymizer are not directly injured, but are collateral damage. However, the same is true of you: you're neither the threat-maker nor the target of the threats, you're just inconvenienced by the actions that the victim was forced to make.

In the case of the service disrupted, that private information on the server could be what's protecting other lives in a country where basic rights are being disputed in blood.

Having more data about more people increases the risks of false positives ("Innocent Bob is a terrorist!") and false negatives ("Terrorist Ann is innocent!"); and raises the risks of faulty data being gathered, processed and entered.

So, having data about innocent people just increases costs and decreases quality.

I'd build a new machine from scratch, at a different datacenter, using pristine code and data from backups.

Once a machine has been in an adversary's possession, not even the data is safe.

That said, the FBI probably just imaged the drives. They're not as clueful/devious as many think they are.

I would agree, but it also doesn't seem like some kind of act of charity that they plugged the thing in and tried to reconnect it and made sure it was apparently working before they left.

It's also possible that there was a Special Agent + Contractor team working.

BTW, they are probably not very happy that video evidence of their activities was captured and published. Don't look for them to make that mistake again.

If you rent an apartment, even though you don't own the building, you have "rights of tenant in possession". Basically the apartment is "yours" and you have rights. If a search warrant is to be served to search your place, it gets served on YOU, not the owner of the buildng.

If you rent server space, like a rack in a datacenter, that space is "yours". So should the search warrant have been honored?

I read the article, they do say "colocation"; besides which, XO Communications does not rent servers as far as I know. So that seems to point that they were renting the physical space that their servers are in.

Would it make a difference if they were just renting a partial rack, or a full rack that goes all the way down to the floor and is enclosed? I don't know ...

The contract I signed, had a clause that said if they had to move me somewhere else, they would pay all costs of doing so. I don't know how standard a clause this is.

I rent a furnished appartment, and while the company that owns it would never touch it without my permission, the contract is very specific about it being this building, they would never say "mind moving next door?" whereas with a rack in a data centre, not only does the contract not specify exactly where the rack is placed, it makes very little difference about it's exact location.

There is no such thing as safe data once the physical server is confiscated, and people shouldnt trust standard encryption algorithms to be safe from backdoors.

Microsoft Windows has had backdoors for a long time I reckon. Some of it are called "bugs" once its discoved and fixed with Windows Updates. Other stuff gets introduced that way as well.

Or they could have port knocking techniques built into the closed source kernel to allow people who know the code to enter the computer without any trace.