An anarchist-oriented Mastodon server has seen one of its admins raided by the FBI. The admin in question was working with an unencrypted backup of the Mastodon server, which was also seized.
  • maegul@lemmy.ml
    2·
    1 year ago

    Ok … so I think false preconceptions are polluting this topic. Apart from the passwords, nothing serious has happened here for your data. As for the DMs … yea there aren’t DMs with any real privacy on the fediverse, they don’t exist … you should presume DMs are public.

    Because the fediverse is not in any way private. See for a good treatment of this: https://blog.bloonface.com/2023/07/04/the-fediverse-is-a-privacy-nightmare/

    The basic story is that the fediverse is all about duplicating what we post all over the place … essentially to anyone who decides to run a server on the fediverse. The FBI could (and probably do?) have a server scooping up all sorts of stuff onto their server and you wouldn’t know about and probably couldn’t do much about it. Google is scraping mastodon (and probably lemmy?) … try a google search for mastoodn content.

    This is all public internet stuff, you’re basically running a public blog that happens to be well connected to lots of other public blogs.

    As nice as the fediverse is as a nice anti-capitalist-big-corp monopolisation of our social online lives … it is very much born out of the web2.0 era and doesn’t have any of the privacy concerns many of us would now hope for from technologies.

    I’ve argued this elsewhere … I like the fediverse and am here out of principle … but in many ways it highlights some of the failings of our world at this time … because it’s about 10 years too late and the future is coming in hot and fast … in retrospect I wouldn’t be surprised if it will make a lot of sense to look back on the fediverse and think that it was effectively redundant at just about the time it gained popularity. An AI dominated internet with massive privacy concerns is here very soon, and the fediverse isn’t ready IMO, it’s still trying to catch up to web2.0 big social circa 2010.

    • sub_ubi@lemmy.ml
      1·
      1 year ago

      What about 2013 seemed more favorable to the fediverse than now? Twitter, reddit and Facebook were pretty useful at that time - I don’t think I’d have left.

      • maegul@lemmy.ml
        1·
        1 year ago

        Principles. That the whole internet and all of the freedom and diversity it can harbour was being monopolised by big giant corporations that had no interest in embracing an open web. Instead, they were convincing the world, especially those growing up in that/this era that the internet had to be constrained to the few walled gardens of big platforms.

        These principles were as obvious and relevant then as they are now. Unfortunately convenience is a helluva drug. And, in the “Google” era of the internet (~2005-2020 ?), there was a certain naive optimism about big-tech and the internet, which no doubt lulled us in by its being “free”.

        In reality, we all really thought that good and useful world-changing stuff was just going to be made for us for free. That the internet was going to inexorably make the world a better place. It was dumb and naive IMO and marks very well the failings of the Millennial generation (to which I belong FWIW). Unfortunately, it’s a lesson we had to learn the hardway. There were probably only a handful of people in the world that understood what the new industry was actually doing and was actually about and that had the philosophical will and ability to think it through and communicate to the masses what the choices we were actually making.

    • The Doctor@beehaw.org
      0·
      1 year ago

      As far as I know (which isn’t too far, because I’m not a Beltway bandit anymore), the Fediverse isn’t on the FBI’s radar in any meaningful way. It /might/ be on the radar of the information contractors they hire for bulk data gathering and analysis (Palantir, ZeroFox, Dataminr, probably others these days) but none of me have heard anything specific.

    • CuckyMcCuckyFace@lemmy.ml
      01·
      1 year ago

      Does anyone have a eli5 explanation/read/video of being federated? When I joined lemmy i thought it was lemmy exclusive thing, but now it seems being federated is a copy of your data shared among servers that multiple communities/applications use including outside entities, such as lemmy communicating w/ mastodon? Or am I way off? Any explanation would be greatly appreciated help me get up to speed.

  • k_o_t@lemmy.ml
    1·
    1 year ago

    mfs doing stuff like this really need to stop living in america bruh 💀

  • DeadGemini@waveform.socialEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    […] This is exactly what the admins over at Kolektiva.social have done and now one of them has been raided and charged by the FBI for activities unrelated to Mastodon

    Clickbait.

      • DeadGemini@waveform.socialEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Yes, but the title makes it sound like it was because he was running an anarchist Mastodon instance. That’s not why, he just happened to be doing a backup when he was raided, the backup was unencrypted, and they seized it. Has nothing to do with him running an anarchist instance from what I can tell.

  • nostalgicgamerz@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 year ago

    FBI needs to go after the actual “domestic terrorists” The one wrapping fascism with a cross and holding a bible

    • SkyNTP@lemmy.ml
      0·
      1 year ago

      Probably the same. This bears repeating: All your information online is and always has been available for others to collect and see, from FBI to advertisers. If you want any amount of protection, it must be with E2E encryption for which you own the keys.

      We taught online safety in the 90s. Did we all just collectively forget this in the last two decades?

      • MadgePickles@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        01·
        1 year ago

        They stopped teaching about computers. I tutored high schoolers about 10 years ago and they didn’t know how to use computers fluently. It moved to the realm of expecting parents to teach to their kids along with taxes and career planning.

        Speaking of which, I grew up in the 90s pre Internet, and started using the Internet in middle school. Definitely never got any official Internet safety lessons. Maybe I was a little too early? Idk. But by the time I was 30 schools were not teaching this at least from what I saw

        • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
          0·
          1 year ago

          The other day, I spoke to an 18 year old who didn’t know the difference between “copy and paste” and “cut and paste”. I want to know what the hell they’re doing in IT classes. Do they just assume that kids these days are good at tech because it’s so ubiquitous? Because that’s a dangerous assumption

      • sub_ubi@lemmy.ml
        0·
        1 year ago

        Unfortunately, at the time of the raid, our admin was troubleshooting an issue and working with a backup copy of the Kolektiva.social database. This backup, dated from the first week of May 2023, was in an unencrypted state when the raid occurred and it was seized, along with everything else.

        Oh the FBI just happened to visit when they unencrypted the database? How convenient!

        • The Doctor@beehaw.org
          1·
          1 year ago

          The FBI surveils targets prior to executing raids. It’s possible they deduced that there was some useful information available on the target’s laptop and acted in such a way to capture it easily.

  • sub_ubi@lemmy.ml
    0·
    1 year ago

    FBI claiming it’s for non-Mastodon related reasons, but that could be a cover. https://kolektiva.social is still up

    Regardless, I don’t think they even have to ask to get this sort of data from any of the big platforms.

    • nodsocket@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 year ago

      I don’t think it was a cover. They could have just sent a subpoena for the data if it was hosted in the US.