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>What can the Feds/providers do differently to prevent this from happening so often? The feds could do plenty, but won't. The legal system is slow to react, an
by owenmarshall 15y ago
>What can the Feds/providers do differently to prevent this from happening so often?
The feds could do plenty, but won't. The legal system is slow to react, and the feds likely fear that just taking virtual disks would lead to evidentiary issues at trial.
Hosting providers might be able to provision in a way that the servers hosting evil.site could be taken by the feds but backups existed of the other sites, but it would be an extremely hard -- if not impossible -- task.
In the end, cloud computing doesn't change the rules of safely deploying your site to the world -- if you care about uptime & your data, your site must be running on at least two different hosts.
- SoftwareMaven 15y agoTwo different hosts separated by a distance.
- jacques_chester 15y agoTwo different hosts separated by a border would be better.
- seabee 15y ago> and the feds likely fear that just taking virtual disks would lead to evidentiary issues at trial. Honest question: why are physical hard disks more valid as evidence than virtual ones? Aren't they equally easy to tamper with?
- wmf 15y agoYou probably can't take a virtual disk; you could copy it, which answers your question: a copy is considered less valid than the original.
- seabee 15y agoI don't think it does answer the question, though. The data is the evidence rather than the medium it exists on. What guarantee is made that the disk wasn't tampered with that cannot be made by a cryptographic signature... ...or is the answer that the law has no adequate treatment of abstract evidence?
- owenmarshall 15y agoWell, sure. But the police have a well designed chain of custody system to at least reduce the possibility of tampering. Not everybody in the office can tamper with evidence behind lock and key with seals -- of course it still happens, but the goal is to reduce the possibility. This falls apart when the evidence in question is data that can be copied, altered, etc. And of course we can likely come up with clever cryptographic answers to this problem, but in the end, it's far easier and a more understood procedure for the police just to grab hardware and seal it up.
- jleader 15y agoKeep in mind that ultimately the chain of custody must be explained to a jury, to convince them that what they're being shown actually comes from the defendant's computer, while a defense attorney does his best to sow doubt in the jury's minds. Do you want to explain to 12 randomly selected people how virtual disks work, and the cryptographic algorithms you used to ensure that the data you're showing them is identical to the data the defendant had on their system? Could you explain it so well that a reasonably skilled defense attorney couldn't confuse them enough to produce reasonable doubt?