Didn't There Used To Be Some Amendment Or Something?

We neither know nor care what or who an Instapaper is, but that doesn't mean they're not getting screwed like the rest of us. Except worse, really.

The FBI stole an Instapaper server in an unrelated raid

One of Instapaper’s five leased servers was hosted at DigitalOne, a Swiss hosting company leasing blade servers from a Virginia datacenter. Early Tuesday morning, the FBI raided the datacenter to seize servers used by another DigitalOne customer for fraudulent “scareware” distribution, according to the FBI’s press release, but they seemingly took a lot more servers that happened to be physically near the server(s) they were looking for.

[...]

As far as I know, my single DigitalOne server was among those taken by the FBI (which I’m now calling “stolen” since I assume it was not included in the warrant). I’m assuming this because it became unreachable and stopped sending updates to my internal monitoring system at approximately the time that the FBI raided the datacenter, and has not come online again since then.

"Police culture" here says all that needs to be said.

So the FBI now has illegal possession of nearly all of Instapaper’s data and a moderate portion of its codebase, and as far as I know, this is completely out of my control.

Due to the police culture in the United States, especially at the federal level, I don’t expect to ever get an explanation for this, have the server or its data returned, or be reimbursed for the damage they have illegally caused.

I’m really not sure what to do about this. I’m speaking to my lawyer about it shortly, but as far as I know, there’s nothing I can reasonably do without spending more money, time, and stress than I can afford on a path that would likely lead nowhere productive.

Ground under by the national security state. You have no de facto recourse, sucker.

Moments (or so) after posting: Oh piss. You leave a tab open for six or eight hrs., building the irritation to a point where you might give enough of a shit to type something, & the whole thing, righteous indignation & schadenfreude, falls apart. At least Instapaper is still ticked at host DigitalOne.