Synopsis: The article discusses the FBI’s seizure of the Mastodon server and emphasizes the need for privacy protection in decentralized platforms like the Fediverse. It calls for hosts to implement basic security measures, adopt policies to protect users, and notify them of law enforcement actions. Users are encouraged to evaluate server precautions and voice concerns. Developers should prioritize end-to-end encryption for direct messages. Overall, the Fediverse community must prioritize user privacy and security to create a safer environment for all.
Summary:
Introduction
- We are in an exciting time for users wanting to regain control from major platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
- However, decentralized platforms like the Fediverse and Bluesky must be mindful of user privacy challenges and risks.
- Last May, the Mastodon server Kolektiva.social was compromised when the FBI seized all electronics, including a backup of the instance database, during an unrelated raid on one of the server’s admins.
- This incident serves as a reminder to protect user privacy on decentralized platforms.
A Fediverse Wake-up Call
- The story of equipment seizure echoes past digital rights cases like Steve Jackson Games v. Secret Service, emphasizing the need for more focused seizures.
- Law enforcement must improve its approach to seizing equipment and should only do so when relevant to an investigation.
- Decentralized web hosts need to have their users’ backs and protect their privacy.
Why Protecting the Fediverse Matters
- The Fediverse serves marginalized communities targeted by law enforcement, making user privacy protection crucial.
- The FBI’s seizure of Kolektiva’s database compromised personal information, posts, and interactions from thousands of users, affecting other instances as well.
- Users’ data collected by the government can be used for unrelated investigations, highlighting the importance of strong privacy measures.
What is a decentralized server host to do?
- Basic security practices, such as firewalls and limited user access, should be implemented for servers exposed to the internet.
- Limit data collection and storage to what is necessary and stay informed about security threats in the platform’s code.
- Adopt policies and practices to protect users, including transparency reports about law enforcement attempts and notification to users about any access to their information.
What can users do?
- Evaluate a server’s precautions before joining the Fediverse and raise privacy concerns with admins and users on the instance.
- Encourage servers to include privacy commitments in their terms of service to resist law enforcement demands.
- Users have the freedom to move to another instance if they are dissatisfied with the privacy measures.
What can developers do?
- Implement end-to-end encryption of direct messages to protect sensitive content.
- The Kolektiva raid highlights the need for all decentralized content hosts to prioritize privacy and follow EFF’s recommendations.
Conclusion
- Decentralized platforms offer opportunities for user control, but user privacy protection is vital.
- Hosts, users, and developers must work together to build a more secure and privacy-focused Fediverse.
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Original post: https://kolektiva.social/@admin/110637031574056150
Important context missing from the EFF article is that the Mastodon instance wasn’t the target of the raid according to the admins.
In mid-May 2023, the home of one of Kolektiva.social’s admins was raided, and all their electronics were seized by the FBI. The raid was part of an investigation into a local protest. Kolektiva was neither a subject nor target of this investigation. Today, that admin was charged in relation to their alleged participation in this protest.
Thank you.
Actual context paints a whole different picture compared to the clickbait post.
Very important context! The US is rapidly turning Christo-Fascist. I hate this country.
it has always been a Christian theocracy and American exceptionalism is just open source fascism.
Nothing new is actually happening.
Yeah, it’s always had something of theocratic leaning. It’s just getting even worse nowadays.
American exceptionalism is just open source fascism.
Great expression! I love it.
because of kolektiva the FBI has my nudes saved on a hardrive somewhere 💀
If you posted them on the Internet, the NSA already had them.
Why the state seize mastodon/exit nodes/megaupload/private servers and NEVER amazon/apple/facebook/twitter/google servers? The law is different if you are a zuckemberg?
The reason we don’t see seizure of those servers is that those services have established working relationships with law enforcement, so there’s no need to physically seize the servers.
It’s worth noting that while various CEOs claim not to cooperate with law enforcement, the Patriot Act created provisions for establishing that cooperation without CEO permission or awareness.
It is, sadly, like to say in the 1800: if your newspaper cooperates with government it is not closed, otherwise we can close it at will. A lot of established freedom of press laws now will never had passed.
In the case of Meta and the Muskverse, it’s because they regard themselves as a third party and cooperate with law enforcement in disclosing everything about you on request. As per MEGAupload and Backpage (and presently TikTok) this tactic doesn’t always work.
Google used to claim that they would demand warrants, and then run them past their blue-haired lawyers to make sure all the jots and tittles were in place before releasing data, but that was back in the aughts and early 2010s. I don’t know what Google’s relationships is to law enforcement today.
Amazon will also totally snitch on you, as will all the telecommunications services (Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, T-Mobile, Astound, etc.) It’s one of the reasons you want to get a VPN service that actively deletes its records, and law enforcement doesn’t like very much.
Once US law enforcement wants to get you, do not expect your civil rights to protect you. And don’t talk to law enforcement. Wait for council and get a lawyer, because they will try to nail you for CFAA violations which can land you 25 years (which is more than some murder).
I actually have a question about this - can’t anyone already see the posts and users’ data? Even a simple user account/script can query most stuff, like posts and comments, and you can indirectly query less easily available things like upvotes by compromising any connected server
Disclaimer: I’ve never run a Mastodon or similar server, so the software may have more privacy built in, but potentially the issue would be account setup information that could be associated with public posts. Email addresses, IP address logs, etc. Those would be critical in matching public “anonymous” speech with real-world identifiable information.
The article also mentions that DM’s were available to the admin.
However it should be assumed that DM’s on lemmy or others are not secure in the first place. If you want secure chat, move to Matrix.
Why should such a thing be assumed???
If there’s no way to verify that they aren’t. You should assume that they are. Basic security 101.
The site tells you that its not secure when you go to send a message.
Click a persons account name… then click “send message”
Read the bright yellow notice at the top of the screen.
Warning: Private messages in Lemmy are not secure. Please create an account on Element.io for secure messaging.
One way to look at this is to separate the information available into what’s available locally and what’s available across the Lemmyverse (I am not familiar with others). The information that you mentioned probably are available on all the servers that pull the posts/comments from the community in question.
- Info that is local only: IP address, email, password, usage information.
- Info available to the two participants’ servers: DM
I think the mitigations that the EFF article mention mostly protect the locally available information.
EDIT: I’m just going to note that kolektiva was an anarchist collective. Doesn’t sound quite as trivial as before.
This says that the server was grabbed during an unrelated raid?
How is that even legal. You can just get seized because your neighbor in the server rack is doing something? I feel like that should be a lawsuit for taking down someone’s business essentially. I’ll be real with you it doesn’t matter if the shits encrypted or not - in 15-20 years if Feds hold onto your messages trivial or not, with their budget and resources they can probably crack hashed data, if Quantum computing comes online especially, where quantum was stuck in a state of laughable doubt just like ML or AI was eight years back.
Law enforcement in the US, including the FBI has long since abandoned the doctrine of staying within the threshold of legality, and the court system, right up to SCOTUS has defended them. Since the 9/11 attacks, the PATRIOT act and the creation of Homeland Security, the US Supreme Court has been chipping away at the protections established in the Fourth and Fifth amendments to the Constitution of the United States.
So, the question is not whether a given action (illegal seizure of property and the illegal search thereof) is legal rather if it’ll be upheld.
SCOTUS has already established if a crime is severe enough, that the evidence from an illegal search can be admitted anyway. And they’re talking about drug possession, not finding the leg of a child in the back of a van.
When police seize your computer arbitrarily, there is a risk that a judge will not accept it as a legal search, such as if a warrant wasn’t sufficiently specific, or if probable cause wasn’t sufficiently established. But in the majority of cases, judges side with law enforcement regardless in the US. (YMMV depending on what county you’re in. Portland, OR is better about constitutional rights than Oakland, CA).
That said, the FBI is no longer law enforcement but its mission was changed to National Security by James Comey when he was director (it improved his budget to do so, and gave the FBI more latitude regarding operations). I’m tempted to say the FBI acts less as law enforcement and more like the secret police of the US (that is, hunts and investigates enemies of the current administration and those who might bring embarrassment to officials or the US state). So it’ll seize what it wants, and aim to extract intel from what it gets while you fight in the courts to get your stuff back.
That said, if you’re doing anything of interest to the FBI it’s best to encrypt the snot out of it, including having alternate accounts filled with images of furry porn and victims of police violence. And yes, if you’re plotting or signalling on the fediverse, do so in code.
Take this with a grain of salt but what if the unrelated server raid was an excuse
There’s plenty of right wing bigots in the US government that would take the chance to take down anything they don’t agree with
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I have been laughed at and down voted every single fucking time I point out how woefully unprepared every fucking instance is.
The free model is flawed and will be unsuccessful every fucking time there is any signs popular server. And users aren’t going to tolerate moving fucking servers every month.
You think cloudflare is going to keep on protecting lemmy.world each week on their free/professional their? Enterprise starts at 20k a year before traffic, good luck raising that kind of yearly money on a hobby server.
And then there is GDPR and CCPA all of which are ignored and clearly not being enforced just waiting for a lawsuit.
Oh and I do I need to explain to you people the child porn reporting mechanisms that need to be in place?
The only way if this bullshit is successful it’s if someone starts a no profit e.g Mozilla foundation and acts like a functioning adult running a business vs a 16 year old tinkering with Linux.
Bring on the down votes and compium.
You bring up valid points, but you are being very antagonistic towards server admins in the process. I get that you’re frustrated by being dismissed all the time
Yea, you could have served your points in a less agressiv mana
Given their username, I don’t believe that was a possibility.
I’m out of mana…once again.
Enterprise starts at 20k a year before traffic
My Mastodon server has just under 1.5k MAUs and has raised $4k so far this year. We’ve only been open for six months. This is not hard money to raise.
People are willing to contribute to well run services. Make the contributions manageable for users and they will happy chip in a few dollars here and there.
You have great points, I agree, and it’s why I donate to support lemmy.world. I’m hoping that enough people will donate small funds that it will cumulatively enable the server admins to better protect the instance. Basically like Wikipedia’s funding model.
Maybe it’s not realistic, but I’m hoping that the fact that we all gave enough of a shit to start anew on lemmy, a decent percentage of the userbase may be more likely to donate than typically the case in online platforms.
I guess time will tell the future of lemmy and the main instances.
Edit: Here are the donation pages:
Wikipedia is run by a central NGO which is something I’ve advocated for. What we have now, and what folks are conversing about isn’t a sane model like you propose. People really believe this place isn’t going to have serious child porn, disinformation, and censorship issues without someone competent taking over the main policing and privacy concerns.
I think part of the problem is that laws in the developed world essentially make in extremely expensive to run one of these services if you have a lot of users per month.
Te heart of the issue is that at some point it becomes more useful for mega-corporations to have a cozy relationship with the government than with you. It used to be that if a service found that there was child porn on their service, the law simply required them to remove it and report it to the police. Very reasonable.
The thing is though, if that is all the compliance one needs to follow, then the creation of new firms and services is quite easy. Mega-corporations don’t like this. They want to slow the creation of new services and firms because this slows the appearance of new competition. Hence they become pro-regulation, and, I’d argue, attempt to shift the entire culture towards paranoia and a demand for more regulation.
Perhaps the only defense is to stay small. Obviously don’t allow any abusive or illegal content. But stay small so that you can skirt by without having to deal with compliance with the big-boy regulations.
Laws + costs of a server. Cloudflare is 100% in talks warning lemmy.world they aren’t going to support them for free/$20/month.
I love how you dismiss the compliance as all you need. As if it isn’t a crazy topic that requires a lawyer every other day plus hiring a team and creating a process to deal with child porn shit.
None of you know half the reality of running successful digital services.
I love how you’re an asshole for no apparent reason. We both like this place and are on the same team, even if we disagree about some things.
But, in all seriousness, I really have the feeling that you are approaching this from the standpoint of a lawyer or someone on the marketing team of a large corporation. Of course a service like lemmy.world, or any of the larger instances, should consult with a lawyer at some point if they haven’t already. But this is not a mega-corporation, and I don’t think many people in Lemmy apart from you have any intention of running it like one.
Of course these services cost money to run and protect. No one is saying it’s free. To give a similar example, some of the largest Invidious instances blow though several terabytes a day. So they are very much dependent on donations. We should all try and chip in if we are able.
This person honestly just sounds frustrated with the idealism of a not-for-profit social media alternative. Their concerns have some validity, but to suggest that it can’t work without following a paid or ad-supported model is a little dogmatic in my view.
You seem to be collecting downvotes because you generally have bad takes. Why be here if you’re angry at the existence of servers run as a hobby? Which instance are you on?
Yeah, there’s a ton more work that needs to be done, and the first professionally operated instance is likely to become extremely successful. But literally zero of the other web properties started with any of the controls or funding you’re angry about. Shit, Twitter has disbanded most of the departments responsible for compliance.
Be less angry about it. It’s not life or death, it’s bullshitting with strangers online.
You have good points, and yeah, I too want data privacy and everything, but the Fediverse in general always was a niche place. I mean, people only got to know this because the mainstream social media fucked up badly this time (and keeps doing it very well). Now we have thousands of new instances, users and everything, but no one was prepared for it.
My point is: your proposals are totally valid, but there was no need for this level of security until yesterday, since this was just a niche place with a couple hundreds of users. Give it a few months and we might get some updates on instance infrastructure and the ActivityPub protocol itself to make it safer.
If we want the ecosystem to be resilient, we need to migrate to a model where:
- The data is redundant, in a way it matters. Yes, I know the posts are currently replicated, but if the primary replica is gone, the usefulness of the copies is limited.
- The identities are not tied to a provider
NOSTR does this, AND provides an incentive for keeping the content online - you simply pay one, or even multiple relay operators, for keeping your data online. However:
- NOSTR client UX currently sucks even more than lemmy/mastodon
- There is no useful content whatsoever. They’re in the “only political extremists use this” phase at the moment.
Naw it doesn’t cost money to run anything. You don’t understand it all just there in the cloud /s.
The admins just write it off!
The funny thing is I manage the NIST/ISO/GDPR for our company. I would have been coding slinging yaml and terraform just a few years ago. I literally have experience managing 75M of resources in such systems and have in depth discussions with my lawyer about this fascinating time bomb.
At some point a while back I just gave up having educated conversations over SM. For every one you’ll have 10 jackasses who have been widely unsuccessful in their career bitching in anti work how you doing know Jack shit. I stated my first two responses responses to incorrect or uneducated information and was immediately attacked as usual. It’s a race to the bottom that everyone is getting tired of.
I’m not disagreeing with your points on running an online service, I just have to point out that you seem like an asshole of a person.
Take a damn chill pill
Cloud flare’s business is protecting small websites as well as large across the world from DDOS attacks. You don’t think there’s a tier somewhere between “free” and “enterprise 20k base”? DDOS mitigation techniques have gotten pretty advanced and are no longer the sole domain of large companies.
I like the idea of it, but you’re right. It’s not going to scale because at some point, somebody has to pay for it. And most users, myself included, seem unwilling to dip into our own pockets to satisfy our crippling addiction to cat pictures and world weary cynicism.
In the old days we had Usenet newsgroups, hosted by ISPs, just like most of them still do with email. It’s the ideal place for hosting a fediverse, maybe not necessarily this one. They already scale their stuff with the number of users. We already pay them. And it decentralises power away from a handful of tech billionaires.
Would they do it? Who knows. They’re certainly best placed for it, but would they want the unenviable job of identifying and blocking kiddy porn and cartel torture videos? I know I wouldn’t want to be looking at that shit all day. The big networks obviously have a solution for that, but automated AI image recognition stuff only goes so far. At some point there’s a poor minimum wage worker looking at it in a third world country.
In the old days we had Usenet newsgroups, hosted by ISPs … it decentralises power away from a handful of tech billionaires.
And into the hands of the ISPs, which are also owned by billionaires.
I’m a bit unconvinced that we would want to scale. Why is growth necessarily good? We’d end up looking much like mainstream social media by that point. A lot of regulatory compliance, a lot of normie BS on the platform, etc. There is still probably some room to grow before that becomes a reality though.
I think it’s a fine line to walk, but being and staying a bit niche isn’t such a bad thing.
Because otherwise Lemmy will die from lack of interest, it’s too small at the moment.
The history of piratebay proves that you can host a website (or instance in this case) and have it be incredibly resilient, out of reach for US/EU law enforcement as long as you have the knowledge and energy to do so. How many millions of hollywood-dollars have been spent on taking it down, vs how many days has it actually been down since it’s creation?
The history of piratebay also proves that you have to be ready to face the consequences, and run to Cambodia if needed. Not many operators would do that for their users.
You’re right, but I highly doubt that anyone will throw enough money on influencing a foreign country enough to prosecute a Lemmy admin under US law with a Hollywood chosen judge that has ties to MGM, Warner Bros, and Sony, as Hollywood did with Gottfrid (co-creator of piratebay) in Sweden, leading him to seek shelter in Cambodia.
Edit: Spelling
Interesting no mention of encryption-at-rest (disk encryption), which is something I’d recommend for servers in general.
A cloud host can just take a live snapshot which defeats this
I’m curious, how would you do this in such a way that it wouldn’t come at the expense of effecting your high availability?
If the server were on-prem or in the cloud… and the system crashed/rebooted, how would you decrypt (or add the passphrase) to the encrypted drive?.. cause the likehood of the kernel crashing or a reboot after and update is higher than an FBI raid… and it would get tiresome to have the site being down, while we wait for Bob to wake up, log in, and type the passphrase to mount the encrypted hdd.
You could use something like HashiCorp Vault, but it isn’t perfect either. If the server were rebooted, it could talk to Vault and request the passphrase (automatically) , but this also means that the FBI could also “plug in” the server (at their leisure) and have it re-request the passphrase. … and if Vault were restarted there’s quite a process to unseal (unlock) a vault - so, it would be as cumbersome as needing to type in the passphrase on reboot.
My point / question is: yes, encryption (conceptually) is easy, but if you look at “the whole life cycle / workflow” - it’s much more complicated and you (as an administrator) might ask yourself “does this complexity improve anything or actually protect my users?”
Encrypting user data is pretty standard in the industry, and even required by law in the instance of servers hosting medical information in the US. Consumer software for disk encryption like you mentioned is substantially different from usual encryption solutions employed by data centers. Whole disk encryption is commonly done at a firmware or hardware level. For an example, iPhone embedded storage is fully encrypted and tied to the rest of the phone’s hardware. No user input required.
It wouldn’t have mattered if the guy had encryption any way because, as the article mentioned:
To make matters worse, it appears that the admin targeted in the raid was in the middle of maintenance work which left would-be-encrypted material on the server available in unencrypted form at the time of seizure.
Where does HIPA state the medical data must be encrypted on the machine? I am not an expert on HIPA put don’t remember seeing that when looking at it before.
This is why I joined a Swiss server
If you federate with other instances they have a copy of your public facing account data. That’s how ActivityPub works and it’s very far from ideal.
But if it’s public law enforcement agencies can just browse/scrape the website to collect the data, or am I missing something?
Things like PMs, your subscription lists,and upvote/downvotes aren’t possible (or are difficult?) to scrape, but are shared across federated instances. Those things were considered private on Reddit, so a lot of folks might assume they are also private on Lemmy.
https://mylemmy.win/post/89871
Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see.
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I would love defederated identity management in the Fediverse that came with direct and encrypted DM capabilities too. I don’t use DMs but there’s no need for an admin or anyone else to see what’s in them either.
OpenPGP still exists. I’ve been saying this forever
And it’s the year of the Linux desktop 🤦♂️
You aren’t making any relevant point. Just showing how incompetent oss designers and the Linux desktop teams really are.
Stop trying to make PGP happen. It’s not going to happen.
Damn Kollektiva.social got raided?? Do they no longer exist because the feds took all their shit?
Kollektiva.social
It’s https://kolektiva.social (one L in kolectiva) and the site is still up, and their admin gave this comment on the raid.
“The raid was part of an investigation into a local protest.”
I just think the fediverse should start storing hashed and salted passwords instead of plaintext as a start
Now it’s stored without any hashing, really ?
I can only assume as I haven’t checked and I’m not sure anyone else reading this has checked either.
Oh do you’re just making shit up and passing misinformation then… Got it
Where is the source…
Imagine making a serious claim like this based off hearsay
