Tim Cook <z99### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> Took me a while to get around to checking back in here.  Not that anyone was 
> probably wondering/caring, but I'm still around.  Guy I was renting from got 
> arrested for CP posession on 17 Jun, my computers got hauled in along with 
> his.  No idea if/when I'll get my stuff back.

  I will never understand the obsession the police has with confiscating
computer equipment. It's never enough to catch the suspect and stop what
he is doing (or suspected to be doing), the computer *always* has to be
confiscated if it had anything to do with the suspected crime, regardless
of whether that makes the least amount of sense or not.

  Like this teenager chatting online with his xbox, and I don't remember
exactly what the chat was about, maybe something about bomb threats or
whatever, and the police goes and takes the kid for questioning and
confiscates his xbox. Now, mind you, the program/game he was using does
not log any conversations anywhere. The xbox was in no way any kind of
evidence. It's like if you made a threatening phone call, via a landline
phone, to someone and they confiscated your phone. It makes no sense.

  Or how about the Pirate Bay fiasco in Sweden. The Swedish police raided
the Pirate Bay servers and confiscated all of them. You know, because it
was not enough to stop what they were doing. Because of the obsession of
the police, they had to physically confiscate the server hardware and
remove it from their location. Without even asking if maybe, just maybe
those servers might have been used by someone else.

  And it resulted that the servers *were* used by someone else. A dozen
or so companies which used them as their main website and development
servers. The confiscation costed them quite sizeable amounts of money
in lost revenue and work hours because suddenly all their websites and
development servers were inaccessible. Physically removed from where
they were.

  These companies sued the Swedish government for this.

  The irony? Pirate Bay was *not* convicted, and they are still doing what
they did before, completely unhindered. Because of the obsession the police
has with confiscating everything, the Swedish government had to pay to the
companies which lost money because of it.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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