FBI shuts down ISP to investigate 1 person

24 Feb 2004

I noticed on Boing Boing Blog a story about the FBI shutting down a whole ISP, shifting its servers to their HQ for data mining purposes in order to investigate a single suspected attack launched from their IRC servers.

This is a truly shocking example of the kind of freedom that Americans really enjoy, the privacy of citizens is non existent if the FBI can just pitch up and copy terabytes of data not belonging to the individual they are pursuing. Read all about it on the poor ISP's News Page. This is the kind of story that a few decades ago would be shoved in your faces as an example of the atrocities of Communism by these very same self righteous Americans.

The FBI executed a search warrant issued by the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio regarding the IRC network that we host. According to the warrant, it appears that the Bureau is investigating whether someone hosted on our network hacked and attacked someone else.

After several hours of attempting to track down, inspect and audit the terabytes of data that we host, the FBI determined that it was more efficient (from their point of view) to remove all of our servers and transport them to the FBI local laboratories for inspection. This was completed at 7:00 pm EST same day.

UPDATE: This is covered here as well, link via slashdot.org

Posted by R.I.Pienaar on Tuesday, February 24, 2004 at 9:03 AM

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