Trojan HamFBI Seizure of Mastodon Server is a Wakeup Call to Fediverse Users and Hosts to Protect their Users
Repossess6855The US again continuing to flex its muscles that it truly does own and control half the world, as it so affectionately reminds us daily.
It is absolutely hysterical how bad authoritarianism has engulfed all modern governments. This isn’t remotely a left vs right thing or a US thing, almost all modern governments have become this way.
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.
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.
DaveIt 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.
Arael15thBut I’d argue that you should not store anything on Mastodon where it would be an issue if it became public.
One of the first things new fediverse users should be told is that the fediverse is not the darknet.