[cheald]

It is not reasonable if the FBI does not have a warrant for your servers(/storage space). Instapaper is completely right to call this "theft".

If his servers are included in the warrant because they were suspected of housing whatever it is the FBI was after, and the court granted the FBI the right to seize them, then yeah, it's reasonable.

If he was sharing a physical machine with the bad guys, then yeah, sorry, that's collateral damage. However, if he was on his own separate leased machine, there is absolutely no reason for the FBI to seize it. It'd be like them executing a seizure warrant on one of those self-storage spaces, and seizing the contents of all the adjoining compartments (which the person being investigated would have had no access to) just because.

[pavel_lishin]

Do we know what the warrant stated? If it authorized them to take the rack containing the server they were after, then this is legal, if unfortunate.

If the police have a warrant for my apartment, and you happen to leave your backpack and server, your stuff will most likely be confiscated, along with mine, if it interests the police.

[brown9-2]

No, this does not seem to be public knowledge. For all we know the Instapaper (and pinboard, etc) servers could have been included in the warrant.

[idlewords]

There's a FOIA request out for the warrant. I'll be curious to see it.

http://www.muckrock.com/foi/view/united-states-of-america/wa...

[nkassis]

I'm guessing they could have asked to take the whole rack as to not have to tell the hosting company about the raid and risk alerting the target. They also did the raid in the middle of the night which shows they were probably trying to avoid alerting the target.

They probably didn't have anyway to know which machine it was just which rack it was. They also probably didn't have to tell the hosting company directly just the facility that they were raiding.

[nske]

Even if it was indeed a necessary precaution (for which I have doubts), any innocent parties affected by this should be contacted for arranging a proper reimbursement and be issued an official apology, as soon as the operation was completed, and without them having to pursue it.

[GHFigs]

If he was sharing a physical machine with the bad guys, then yeah, sorry, that's collateral damage. However, if he was on his own separate leased machine, there is absolutely no reason for the FBI to seize it.

The problem is that with blade servers like DigitalOne provided, both of these things can be true at the same time.

[cheald]

Can you elaborate on this? Are there setups where a single virtual machine spans multiple blades?