nanog mailing list archives

Re: Megaupload.com seized


From: Jeroen van Aart <jeroen () mompl net>
Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:17:25 -0800

Steven Bellovin wrote:
Note this from the NY Times article:

The Megaupload case is unusual, said Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University, in that federal prosecutors obtained the private e-mails of Megaupload�s operators in an effort to show they were operating in bad faith.

"The government hopes to use their private words against them," Mr. Kerr said. "This should scare the owners and operators of similar sites."

(I base my rant on the assumption megaupload had outsourced their email to one of those "enterprise level" offerings, such as gmail or yahoo).

If this isn't a convincing argument for using your own physical email servers (with encrypted filesystems and limited log keeping and what have you) and against outsourcing your email, then I don't know.

I understand they can seize your servers and get your email that way if you were not smart enough to delete it and/or use encrypted filesystems.

However it's much much harder to use email against you in preparation of a case when you run your own servers. Because they can't just quietly ask your email provider to hand over the data and forbid them to talk about it...

Besides, running an email server is almost a trivial exercise for any marginally competent IT person. If you can set up a system such as megaupload you for sure can run your own, secure, email servers.

If not ask someone competent enough to do it for you.

Greetings,
Jeroen

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