It’s a couple days old, but still worth commenting on.  Via CBS 11 News, early Thursday morning the FBI raided a Core IP, a Dallas company providing datacenter services.  However, rather than target certain servers, the feds took all the computers, including machines certainly not pertaining to any investigation.  According to the company’s owner, Matthew Simpson, a former customer of his is the target of investigation, but no longer does business with his company.  He is understandably angry at what is going on:

Currently nearly 50 businesses are completely without access to their email and data.  Citizen access to Emergency 911 services are being affected, as Core IP’s primary client base consists of telephone companies.

Rumors have been abound that the raid is linked to the leaking of the soon to be released X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but there is no evidence of this, only speculation.  In any case, that leak was on bittorrent, making it unlikely that any server at the datacenter was actually hosting the file (Bittorent is decentralized P2P between many computers), though there is precedent for the authorities going after sites that link to illegal Bittorrent downloads.

But one question remains:  Is there precedent for allowing the FBI carrying out entire datacenters worth of computers, thus affecting business for more than just the criminal?  I would say yes.

I have heard of it happening before in hearsay, but I now have a little bit of evidence to back up these stories.  News accounts here and here, albeit on charges of fraud and receiving kickbacks, both show the FBI taking out a lot of computer equipment.  I think the problem before the FBI is that they don’t know exactly where the offending files and/or programs may be, so that they need to scan all the equipment for what their investigation needs.

However, like I said, those are different cases.  Fraud and corruption may have incriminating evidence on multiple computers.  However, assuming that the owner’s story stands up (we still don’t know all the details), one would think the FBI could pinpoint the computers where illegal activity was taking place.  It certainly isn’t that hard to do traceroute, and even if the activity was happening across multiple computers (if the customer had more than one), it would be easy enough to ask where they were located.

I’m skeptical that federal investigation into computer crimes necessitates the removal of more equipment than necessary.  I know it is SOP for law enforcement agencies to not comment on ongoing investigations, but the FBI in Dallas may be wise to explain why they took so much.  At the very least, it would do wonders to combat the image of overstepping bounds that they have now created.

However, the details about this story are still very hazy.  It is unwise for anybody reading about it to assume anything.