It says he was arrested for activities unrelated to Mastodon, just happened to be working on an unencrypted backup which was also seized. No clue why he was arrested.
In mid-May 2023, the home of one of Kolektiva.social’s admins was raided, and all their electronics were seized by the FBI. The raid was part of an investigation into a local protest. Kolektiva was neither a subject nor target of this investigation. Today, that admin was charged in relation to their alleged participation in this protest.
If you want to go out and stand on the side of the road with a sign there’s no problem.
If you block people from going to work or going home then you start to gather a little bit of attention
There have been an increasing number of protests where people have damaged power substations, Shot up public places and driven through crowds of people.
The FBI doesn’t have time or manpower to screw around. They’re not raiding someone’s house because some people are noisy about government. By the time they’re Knocking on your door they already have some substantial proof of wrongdoing.
Screw the FBI. As long as the admin in their activism wasnt breaking the NAP i see no problems. “Anarchists” are not for chaos, they just want no governmyth
[…] 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
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.
Evidence was seized. I’m quite sure they already had people all over the server looking for probable cause. They seized the proof so they can take the people to court.
Holy fuck that article is tendentious as fuck. I'm not too fond of anarchists politically but I trust them with my data far more than I trust Mr Zuck or Mr Musk
Most websites track IP addresses, keep them in a database, and use them for various things. You can find a lot of information on this online, however in the case of non-profit social media like Mastodon, it can be useful for tracking bad actors and blocking them from access. Most of the time they are used for commercial purposes.
Moral of the story: do not use social app for private direct messaging - this is the only not assumed to be public data (besides IP) which was “stolen”.
Goes to show the system is insidious and will stop anything it deems a threat. It would have to be completely destroyed to be stopped and its horrifying.
According to the article, the FBI has access to:
"User account information like the e-mail address associated with your account, your followers and follows, etc.
All your posts: public, unlisted, followers-only, and direct ("DMs"). Possibly IP addresses associated with your account - IP addresses on Kolektiva.social are logged for 3 days and then deleted, so IP addresses from any logins in the 3 days prior to the database backup date would be included.
A hashed ... version of your password."
That last sentence is a bit annoying. Why wouldn’t I trust anarchists with data? Did they just pull up a definition of kolektiva without actually understanding what anarchism is? The last sentence really implies they’re using the incorrect but common definition of anarchism meaning “no rules” instead of the actual definition “no unjust hierarchies”
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