The person referenced in the article was raided for completely unrelated charges. It just happened they took the server and backups as part of the raid. Had they hosted off-site or kept the backups off-site, the damage would have been minimal. This article brings up a good point, but it’s not the nefariousness that the title implies.
Cops took what wasn’t needed and haven’t returned it (that we know of).
I’d say that’s about as nefarious as it gets.
Any time they take all electronics, there’s bound to be something there that wasn’t needed. It’s overly broad.
How do you know that it was? Were you involved in this case enough to know something the rest of us dont? Or are you just a bystander playing devil’s advocate?
EDIT: since I apparently cant reply to your comment below, you cant just claim that the hardware was involved in a crime by “just asking questions” then accuse me of “stirring up shit” after calling you out on making unsubstantiated claims. If you make a claim it is YOUR job to defend that claim. Not everyone elses’ job to disprove your assertion.
From what I read, it looks like they were hosting off-site, but had an unencrypted backup of the database locally at the time of the raid.
But this is the strength of federation. One tiny bit of the fediverse was taken down. This did not affect the rest of it. There will always be bad actors, whether the cops, the administrators of a particular instance or the owners of a mega-forum like twitter or reddit. With a decentralized system the damage is localized and minimized.
It wasn’t even taken down. The dude was raided probably because of some electronic crime, they took his electronics to get evidence. Completely reasonable.
On their backup hard drive happened to be a backup a mastodon instance, so by extension they got that too. The backed up data, not the server.
It’s not some nefarious collusion, it’s completely reasonable actions.
Now whether the backup should have been stored unencrypted on a hard drive at their house? Well that’s a server admin problem not an FBI issue, but the comments here come across like the FBI shouldn’t have done what they did.
But I’d argue that you should not store anything on Mastodon where it would be an issue if it became public. It’s basic 90s internet safety. We know that the data isn’t encrypted (the same for Lemmy), don’t go sharing passwords on a site designed for public sharing.
