[necessity]

Imagine if this was regular mail.

It's the equivalent of German seizing private mail from EVERYONE that uses the hypothetical Cock Postal Service because one individual used that same service in the US to make a threat.

This is ridiculous. Outright abuse of power and invasion of privacy. Yet another reason to encrypt everything.

[cpncrunch]

It's more like seizing the customer records from Cock Postal Service (presumably operated by James May).

My guess is that the fact this guy ran the operation from his bedroom, and they weren't sure whether he would co-operate or not, was the reason they seized the disk rather than just subpoena him. Presumably if it was hotmail or gmail this wouldn't have happened.

I think it's good that this scumbag cocksucker is going to get his commuppence (I'm talking about the idiot who sent the email, not the guy who runs the cock email service). He's obviously a bit of an idiot to use an email service that says "will report any illegal activity to the relevant authorities" rather than one that is actually properly encrypted (if such a beast even exists at the moment -- they seem to all get DDoSed out of existence by China or similar pretty quickly).

[gruez]

>My guess is that the fact this guy ran the operation from his bedroom, and they weren't sure whether he would co-operate or not, was the reason they seized the disk rather than just subpoena him. Presumably if it was hotmail or gmail this wouldn't have happened.

Is this somehow supposed to be acceptable? "We weren't sure you would come down to the station and answer some questions, so we arrested you (without charge) and held you for a day."

[cpncrunch]

Isn't it normal for police to seize evidence in cases like this? Your comparison doesn't seem very helpful, as there is a big difference between holding someone at a police station vs seizing evidence.

[gruez]

I admit there is a big difference between someone's property and someone's liberty. However I still don't feel it's justified to potentially invade thousands of other user's privacy in order to gather evidence, especially since they could have subpoenaed him and he has a history of complying with such requests.

[striking]

I think it sucks that all ~65,000 other people have their data seized because of him, though.

The fellow running the service ran it on a German hosting service (https://www.hetzner.de), and not his bedroom. Full cooperation was provided by everyone, following in the letter and spirit of the law.

It just really sucks that the German authorities took it upon themselves to take the entire thing.

[cpncrunch]

He managed it from his bedroom.

[jlappi]

If I telecommute, I manage hundreds of servers from my bedroom. I don't see the issue here.

[cpncrunch]

I also manage servers from my bedroom. If I set up a cock-based email service from my bedroom, I wouldn't expect to receive the same credibility as the likes of gmail or hotmail.