The authorities apparently got tired of asking and just went in themselves.
Canada-based Windscribe, a VPN provider, just said that one of its European servers has been allegedly seized by Dutch authorities without a warrant. According to the company’s post on X, law enforcement said that they will return it to the service provider after they “fully analyze it.” It’s unclear why law enforcement impounded just a single rack from Windscribe’s cabinet, but the VPN provider said that it only uses RAM disk servers, meaning anyone who would look through the installed SSDs would only find a stock Ubuntu install on it, so the servers shouldn’t hold any trackable data.
Too sumarize the article:
US clickbait and ad infested news website directly quotes “trust me bro” Twitter post + describes in 2 sentences what a ramdisk is and does zero real “journalism” like maybe contacting mentioned dutch authorities or Windscribe themselfs.
Once again: Ban Tom’s Slopware. Post the original source instead.
Whatever they find is inadmissible, if there truly wasn’t a warrant.
Doesn’t mean they can’t use it for parallel construction
Does Dutch/EU law have that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
It’s not a law but a practice that cops do in order to use dubiously acquired evidence to build a case against someone.
Yes but that doesn’t answer the question of whether it’s an accepted practice in the EU. I’m also not so sure it isn’t somehow codified into law, in the US there’s precedents supporting it but IDK about other countries.
The point is that it skirts the law. You can’t really make it illegal because it is a way of subverting legality. If they legally obtain the evidence then it’s legally obtained. If they happened to get to that point through extra-legal means that doesn’t really matter, as long as the end result is legal. Maybe you could argue in court that they only got there because of extra-legal actions, but they can argue the opposite. If this helps them look in the right spot for illegal actions, who’s to say that them looking there couldn’t have happened purely by chance?
You really can make it illegal if there’s the political will to do so, but it’s a hot potato, so the likelihood of of the practice being formally reigned in is unlikely. You make fruit of the poisonous tree absolute and create laws that make illegal search or seizure kill investigations without the possibility of future charges for a given criminal act.
Obviously that would also have practical drawbacks as well, but it is certainly legally possible.
It basically means dodging legal restrictions on investigation by using illegal (or at least inadmissible) means to obtain evidence, and once the police have it, they look for legal ways to get that same information.
So everywhere “has it”, the question is whether they use it. I don’t know if there’s reason to believe that EU police forces use such methods more or less than their US counterparts.
I know what it is, but that doesn’t mean it’s an accepted practice in the EU. I don;t really know much about how their law works, which is why I asked about it.
It’s not an acceptable practice anywhere, but it happens all the time
It definitely is a legally acceptable practice in the US, but I can’t speak to other countries.
this isn’t in US
Laws exist outside of that country.
What authorities exactly? How did they get their hands on these servers without being let in? Do they have a response to this all being put on twitter? Even the article doesn’t mention reaching out to “Dutch authorities” for comment, in a great journalistic failure to clarify anything.
Free advertising for Windscribe if their claims are true. Also a lot of people in the thread spreading fud about it without any real evidence. I know because I actually tried to search for it. They are based in Canada and as such part of the Nine Eyes group, but they have a heavy no-logs focus towards privacy. What was seized was one of their Dutch proxies running on ram drives. They could put all the effort they want into preserving power, it doesn’t mean much if all they don’t have any logs except the vaguest of statistics. It doesn’t matter how mature they are if the privacy practices are there.
There’s that legal jargon that comes to mind, fishing expedition
Got it, do not use IT services in
DenmarkNetherlands.Dutch is not Denmark. Dutch is Netherlands
“Oh you’re Danish! You should meet my friend Geert Van den Berg, he’s also from Dutchland!”
If I had a penny for every time, I’d have at least three fiddy.
Goddamn it Loch ness Monster…
Right? I use lemmy to avoid dinosaurs from the Paleozoic era, not to interact with them!
Look, I know I am no longer young and hip but calling me a dinosaur hurts my feelings…
Tree-fiddy.
Also, turns out Geert is from Germany and not the Netherlands.
Cries in European.
I have a friend from swederland
Oh, I love swiss cheese!
An important distinction lol
This is probably my favorite cold open in one of my favorite shows of all time. 😂
Police have UPS-like devices which splice into existing mains cables to keep machines alive on the way into the forensics lab. Presumably it’s standard practice to use those.
Of course, the server could be configured to wipe itself if it loses connectivity for more than a few seconds, or its routing changes. The police would need devices that route Ethernet traffic over 5G, though those would presumably be detectable as bandwidth goes down and latency goes up.
No clue if data centers in other countries are similar to the ones in the US but the handful I’ve been in are basically Faraday cages with zero cellphone service inside so it would be quite the feat keeping any kind of internet connection after the ethernet cable is removed.
Oh no, without a warrant. How could they. How impolite. No, our security is only intended for jurisdictions with law-abiding police.
Fun fact, but you can’t really do much if the police decide to just take your stuff, because they have guns. And likely more than you do.
Yes. They should perhaps dispose of that server when returned, or thoroughly examine all the firmware and such for changes. A hostile party has touched it.
To what end? What authority? At this point it could be you or me in a mask with a body cam, for all the credentials authorities are showing these days.
Spoiler: it was a random thief in need of hardware.
The thief just want to set up their own gaming server; issue is that it’s too expensive to purchase, so it’s easier to steal it.
Good odds that type of thing is happening more than is being told.
Imagine all the €€ worth of ram in there at current prices 😅
Gonna retire to Switzerland when it’s sold 🤑
What’s the point lol? Switzerland is expensive to live. Keep your assets in Switzerland to benefit from Tax haven and retire somewhere where your money goes 5 times as far 😂
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That is why you dont use VPN. See you guys in I2P.
Mullvad is safe. They were raided and the authorities got nothing.
No, this is just why you don’t use Windscribe.
They have a reputation for being in a legislation where they have to save logs. They themselves know that they’re the “black sheep” among VPN providers, which is why they continuously make cheap offers and use raunchy advertising, like this one:
Doesn’t take a genius to figure out that their VPN is likely insecure
