Comments on: FBI seizures highlight law as cloud impediment

Last week's raids by FBI agents of at least two data centers in Texas are yet another example of how US public policy is often at odds with running a business in the cloud.

[scottmace]

I can't say I'm surprised at law enforcement's overbearing actions in this case. But how easy do we make it for them to seize certain elements of a data center and not others? Law enforcement wants to act swiftly in these cases. Do they need to have a schematic of each data center ahead of time, much like fire departments have schematics of buildings? But handing data schematics over to police ahead of time is not only impractical, it carries vast privacy implications. This issue won't be solved overnight.

[umbrae]

This is why I do not do ANY "cloud" computing, and exactly why it will never be viable for enterprises. The FBI, RIAA, MPAA and others have been working together to control the ability to take down people. The people could be criminals or competitors or any other person they don't like. In the end, innocent people ALWAYS get hurt.

What you don't hear about? If a person who uses your ISP is involved in crime and investigated by the FBI they will monitor ALL traffic for the ISP. Haven't heard about Carnivore for a while, but its still out there in one form or another. I worked for an ISP and I can tell you that if you do not run your own mail server or encrypt your mail the FBI is probably collecting it and placing it into a searchable database.

[Web-JIVE]

Supposedly it was due to wire-fraud charges pending from the way the contract were setup between these companies and VZ/AT&T.

What scares me is the ability to sweep up companies servers with no connection to the injustice just because it's in the same building. The reasoning by the FBI was that these other servers could have been hosting some of that data. I own my servers and would know if someone else was hosting data on my server.

If that were truly the case, then every server in the US should be swept up because the internet is the cloud now and that data could have been seamlessly stored anywhere, not just in that room on another server.

If this happened to my business, it would have put me out of business even though we only host sites we develop for small clients. The question is, where does the good of the public start and the long arm of the law stop?

IMHO this was too broad of a stroke and the Dallas Judge should have said NO to the warrant since it didn't identify specific servers. Sometimes judges ability to understand technology enables law enforcement to take the easy approach instead of doing their homework before the raid.

I also subscribe to the "catch the bad guys" mentality but not when that many innocent businesses were affected.

[Dalkorian]

Isn't the road to hell always paved with good intentions?

[Viio]

A great piece that points out the issues without over painting the fear. This piece is now printed out and filed so I can reuse as an example during company conversations. Thanks.

[Pete Bardo]

'And sometimes innocent people get hurt." You know, that's just not right. We all have rights, and I'm not willing to give any of them in order to "catch the bad guys". The reason we have a Bill of Rights is to prevent (or at least try) the innocent from being hurt. When innocent people are hurt by law enforcement people, we need the ability to strike back at them. Infringe on my rights and go to jail--or at least on vacation, unpaid!