Synopsis: The article discusses the FBI’s seizure of the Mastodon server and emphasizes the need for privacy protection in decentralized platforms like the Fediverse. It calls for hosts to implement basic security measures, adopt policies to protect users, and notify them of law enforcement actions. Users are encouraged to evaluate server precautions and voice concerns. Developers should prioritize end-to-end encryption for direct messages. Overall, the Fediverse community must prioritize user privacy and security to create a safer environment for all.
Summary:
Introduction
- We are in an exciting time for users wanting to regain control from major platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
- However, decentralized platforms like the Fediverse and Bluesky must be mindful of user privacy challenges and risks.
- Last May, the Mastodon server Kolektiva.social was compromised when the FBI seized all electronics, including a backup of the instance database, during an unrelated raid on one of the server’s admins.
- This incident serves as a reminder to protect user privacy on decentralized platforms.
A Fediverse Wake-up Call
- The story of equipment seizure echoes past digital rights cases like Steve Jackson Games v. Secret Service, emphasizing the need for more focused seizures.
- Law enforcement must improve its approach to seizing equipment and should only do so when relevant to an investigation.
- Decentralized web hosts need to have their users’ backs and protect their privacy.
Why Protecting the Fediverse Matters
- The Fediverse serves marginalized communities targeted by law enforcement, making user privacy protection crucial.
- The FBI’s seizure of Kolektiva’s database compromised personal information, posts, and interactions from thousands of users, affecting other instances as well.
- Users’ data collected by the government can be used for unrelated investigations, highlighting the importance of strong privacy measures.
What is a decentralized server host to do?
- Basic security practices, such as firewalls and limited user access, should be implemented for servers exposed to the internet.
- Limit data collection and storage to what is necessary and stay informed about security threats in the platform’s code.
- Adopt policies and practices to protect users, including transparency reports about law enforcement attempts and notification to users about any access to their information.
What can users do?
- Evaluate a server’s precautions before joining the Fediverse and raise privacy concerns with admins and users on the instance.
- Encourage servers to include privacy commitments in their terms of service to resist law enforcement demands.
- Users have the freedom to move to another instance if they are dissatisfied with the privacy measures.
What can developers do?
- Implement end-to-end encryption of direct messages to protect sensitive content.
- The Kolektiva raid highlights the need for all decentralized content hosts to prioritize privacy and follow EFF’s recommendations.
Conclusion
- Decentralized platforms offer opportunities for user control, but user privacy protection is vital.
- Hosts, users, and developers must work together to build a more secure and privacy-focused Fediverse.
Original post: https://kolektiva.social/@admin/110637031574056150
Important context missing from the EFF article is that the Mastodon instance wasn’t the target of the raid according to the admins.
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.
Very important context! The US is rapidly turning Christo-Fascist. I hate this country.
it has always been a Christian theocracy and American exceptionalism is just open source fascism.
Nothing new is actually happening.
Yeah, it’s always had something of theocratic leaning. It’s just getting even worse nowadays.
American exceptionalism is just open source fascism.
Great expression! I love it.
Thank you.
Actual context paints a whole different picture compared to the clickbait post.
Are you going to bring these FBI people to court now?
(the ones of you living in this Usa)
The article didn’t mention a protest, but the server being compromised due to some sort of unrelated charges was the main topic for a lot of the article
I actually have a question about this - can’t anyone already see the posts and users’ data? Even a simple user account/script can query most stuff, like posts and comments, and you can indirectly query less easily available things like upvotes by compromising any connected server
Disclaimer: I’ve never run a Mastodon or similar server, so the software may have more privacy built in, but potentially the issue would be account setup information that could be associated with public posts. Email addresses, IP address logs, etc. Those would be critical in matching public “anonymous” speech with real-world identifiable information.
The article also mentions that DM’s were available to the admin.
However it should be assumed that DM’s on lemmy or others are not secure in the first place. If you want secure chat, move to Matrix.
Why should such a think be assumed???
The site tells you that its not secure when you go to send a message.
If there’s no way to verify that they aren’t. You should assume that they are. Basic security 101.
Click a persons account name… then click “send message”
Read the bright yellow notice at the top of the screen.
Warning: Private messages in Lemmy are not secure. Please create an account on Element.io for secure messaging.
Or simply running their own server.
Yes
One way to look at this is to separate the information available into what’s available locally and what’s available across the Lemmyverse (I am not familiar with others). The information that you mentioned probably are available on all the servers that pull the posts/comments from the community in question.
Info that is local only: IP address, email, password, usage information. Info available to the two participants’ servers: DM
I think the mitigations that the EFF article mention mostly protect the locally available information.
BTW passwords shouldn’t be stored anywhere. Best practice since forever is to only store a cryptographic hash of a user’s password.
Passwords also shouldn’t be re-used, in which case if they are stolen it doesn’t matter as much - since whoever stole your password likely doesn’t need it to access your stuff.
Interesting no mention of encryption-at-rest (disk encryption), which is something I’d recommend for servers in general.
I’m curious, how would you do this in such a way that it wouldn’t come at the expense of effecting your high availability?
If the server were on-prem or in the cloud… and the system crashed/rebooted, how would you decrypt (or add the passphrase) to the encrypted drive?.. cause the likehood of the kernel crashing or a reboot after and update is higher than an FBI raid… and it would get tiresome to have the site being down, while we wait for Bob to wake up, log in, and type the passphrase to mount the encrypted hdd.
You could use something like HashiCorp Vault, but it isn’t perfect either. If the server were rebooted, it could talk to Vault and request the passphrase (automatically) , but this also means that the FBI could also “plug in” the server (at their leisure) and have it re-request the passphrase. … and if Vault were restarted there’s quite a process to unseal (unlock) a vault - so, it would be as cumbersome as needing to type in the passphrase on reboot.
My point / question is: yes, encryption (conceptually) is easy, but if you look at “the whole life cycle / workflow” - it’s much more complicated and you (as an administrator) might ask yourself “does this complexity improve anything or actually protect my users?”
Encrypting user data is pretty standard in the industry, and even required by law in the instance of servers hosting medical information in the US. Consumer software for disk encryption like you mentioned is substantially different from usual encryption solutions employed by data centers. Whole disk encryption is commonly done at a firmware or hardware level. For an example, iPhone embedded storage is fully encrypted and tied to the rest of the phone’s hardware. No user input required.
It wouldn’t have mattered if the guy had encryption any way because, as the article mentioned:
To make matters worse, it appears that the admin targeted in the raid was in the middle of maintenance work which left would-be-encrypted material on the server available in unencrypted form at the time of seizure.
Where does HIPA state the medical data must be encrypted on the machine? I am not an expert on HIPA put don’t remember seeing that when looking at it before.
If you’ve got proper HA, then your secondary could still be up and running just but not receiving connections or running certain services (assuming a standard active/passive). Yes, one could still have a passphrase on encrypted boot and enter that via RA (DRAC,ILO, SSH preboot), or the credentials could be in a TPM etc.
None of those are foolproof, but protecting users’ data isn’t just about FBI raids, and disk encryption in general should still be part of the security toolkit because stuff like lost drives or improper disposal still happens.
There are several methods available for encrypting server disks without compromising availability but the best I’ve used is Network Bound Disk Encryption in the form of tang and clevis utilities. The encrypted server consults a tang server (or multiple servers using Shamir’s Secret Sharing) for the decryption key and then boots without user intervention. You can put a range of controls and redundancies around tang servers but the idea is they are only available on the local network.
Before you say there’s no point encrypting a disk and then automatically decrypting it, think about the use case. The encrypted server will auto decrypt if everything is fine, but remain protected if that server is stolen or the decryption servers are shutdown or modified. It provides convenience while maintaining a level of protection. It also ensures disks are preemptively encrypted if they ever need to be returned for a warranty claim, which is a much more likely event.
Encryption at rest only protects you if the system is off and someone takes the physical drive or disk file. Once the system is running the data is unencrypted.
A cloud host can just take a life snapshot which defeats this
Well yeah, with a cloud host your data is on call l somebody else’s hardware. The cloud host themselves do implement some form of encryption closer to said hardware (i.e. for the SAN arrays) so that a lost disk doesn’t mean exposed data.
great info! question: how can users, “Evaluate a server’s precautions before joining the Fediverse”? ELI5 please.
That’s a great question. The EFF article gives answers that I find somewhat unsatisfactory (but may be possible solutions given what’re there at the moment):
For users joining the fediverse, you should evaluate the about page for a given server, to see what precautions (if any) they outline. Once you’ve joined, you can take advantage of the smaller scale of community on the platform, and raise these issues directly with admin and other users on your instance. Insist that the obligations from Who has Your Back, including to notify you and to resist law enforcement demands where possible, be included in the instance information and terms of service. Making these commitments binding in the terms of service is not only a good idea, it can help the host fight back against overbroad law enforcement requests and can support later motions by defendants to exclude the evidence.
Another benefit of the fediverse, unlike the major lock-in platforms, is that if you don’t like their answer, you can easily find and move to a new instance. However, since most servers in this new decentralized social web are hosted by enthusiasts, users should approach these networks mindful of privacy and security concerns. This means not using these services for sensitive communications, being aware of the risks of social network mapping, and taking some additional precautions when necessary like using a VPN or Tor, and a temporary email address.
Well, you could determine what jurisdiction the server is physically located in, to determine what law enforcement agencies will be targeting it. For example, a community focused on abortion rights is going to attract users who have had abortions. It would be a tremendously bad idea for such a community to be hosted in Texas, where law enforcement agencies would be directed to target it for harassment. California would be a better option, but that still leaves the server under the jurisdiction of US courts, who may direct the server owner to provide user data to Texas.
Pirates would want to avoid a physical presence in copyright-unfriendly jurisdictions. Potheads would want to avoid weed-hating jurisdictions.
Most “servers” now are virtual machines. Police don’t seize VMs. Police seize the physical hardware running the VM. When they target a torrent seedbox VM running on the same physical server as a Lemmy VM instance, they have access to everything on the Lemmy site as well. It would be useful, from a risk assessment profile, to know what else is attracting attention.
People also need to factor in their choice of platform. Things like kbin and Lemmy are always being worked on and improved, but like any software there’s definitely going to be bugs, blindspots and issues. I’ve found a lot of these fediverse systems are being made as best as they can but they don’t have the resources like a full on commercial funded endeavor will have (with a dedicated security team etc)
Being open source is a huge advantage though. Plenty of commercial proprietary systems have failed terribly because they only had their own security eyes on things. Just pointing how many separate large companies have had client info and passwords stored in plain text on servers. Anyone in IT knows better, and yet… But also open source is as good as the number of people reviewing it though, so it’s potential, not guarantee.
I would love defederated identity management in the Fediverse that came with direct and encrypted DM capabilities too. I don’t use DMs but there’s no need for an admin or anyone else to see what’s in them either.
OpenPGP still exists. I’ve been saying this forever
haha yeah, for 26 years now. year of the OpenPGP any day now.
I agree with you, but the vast majority of people will always sell themselves out for convenience. If PGP caught on, you’d have iPhones with a built-in PGP messaging feature that sends everything unencrypted straight to apple before it sends the encrypted version.
And it’s the year of the Linux desktop 🤦♂️
You aren’t making any relevant point. Just showing how incompetent oss designers and the Linux desktop teams really are.
Stop trying to make PGP happen. It’s not going to happen.
Why the state seize mastodon/exit nodes/megaupload/private servers and NEVER amazon/apple/facebook/twitter/google servers? The law is different if you are a zuckemberg?
The reason we don’t see seizure of those servers is that those services have established working relationships with law enforcement, so there’s no need to physically seize the servers.
It’s worth noting that while various CEOs claim not to cooperate with law enforcement, the Patriot Act created provisions for establishing that cooperation without CEO permission or awareness.
It is, sadly, like to say in the 1800: if your newspaper cooperates with government it is not closed, otherwise we can close it at will. A lot of established freedom of press laws now will never had passed.
In the case of Meta and the Muskverse, it’s because they regard themselves as a third party and cooperate with law enforcement in disclosing everything about you on request. As per MEGAupload and Backpage (and presently TikTok) this tactic doesn’t always work.
Google used to claim that they would demand warrants, and then run them past their blue-haired lawyers to make sure all the jots and tittles were in place before releasing data, but that was back in the aughts and early 2010s. I don’t know what Google’s relationships is to law enforcement today.
Amazon will also totally snitch on you, as will all the telecommunications services (Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, T-Mobile, Astound, etc.) It’s one of the reasons you want to get a VPN service that actively deletes its records, and law enforcement doesn’t like very much.
Once US law enforcement wants to get you, do not expect your civil rights to protect you. And don’t talk to law enforcement. Wait for council and get a lawyer, because they will try to nail you for CFAA violations which can land you 25 years (which is more than some murder).
deleting, see other replies
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Who can say if an instance of lemmy / kabob sells the data or the users …
I mean, given there are companies that scrape user data and sell them to interested parties including governments, it’s seems highly likely that there will be entities that create instances just to collect people’s data in the fediverse.
Fediverse sounds like a gold mine for big data collectors .
Maybe thats why Meta wants in
nearly all your data is public, so there’s no need for anyone to pay for it. this is a public platform where everything is relayed unencrypted to other activitypub nodes. If I click your name here and try to DM you I even see this warning: “Warning: Private messages in Lemmy are not secure. Please create an account on Element.io for secure messaging.”
To look at the bright side (or less horribly depressing side, anyway) it’s good that this happened now, while the fediverse is relatively young. Making the necessary changes won’t be quite as complicated.
No it’s not, stop posting this sensational bullshit. Or did you guys forget websites and http are also decentralized with the same issues?
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EDIT: I’m just going to note that kolektiva was an anarchist collective. Doesn’t sound quite as trivial as before.
This says that the server was grabbed during an unrelated raid?
How is that even legal. You can just get seized because your neighbor in the server rack is doing something? I feel like that should be a lawsuit for taking down someone’s business essentially. I’ll be real with you it doesn’t matter if the shits encrypted or not - in 15-20 years if Feds hold onto your messages trivial or not, with their budget and resources they can probably crack hashed data, if Quantum computing comes online especially, where quantum was stuck in a state of laughable doubt just like ML or AI was eight years back.
Law enforcement in the US, including the FBI has long since abandoned the doctrine of staying within the threshold of legality, and the court system, right up to SCOTUS has defended them. Since the 9/11 attacks, the PATRIOT act and the creation of Homeland Security, the US Supreme Court has been chipping away at the protections established in the Fourth and Fifth amendments to the Constitution of the United States.
So, the question is not whether a given action (illegal seizure of property and the illegal search thereof) is legal rather if it’ll be upheld.
SCOTUS has already established if a crime is severe enough, that the evidence from an illegal search can be admitted anyway. And they’re talking about drug possession, not finding the leg of a child in the back of a van.
When police seize your computer arbitrarily, there is a risk that a judge will not accept it as a legal search, such as if a warrant wasn’t sufficiently specific, or if probable cause wasn’t sufficiently established. But in the majority of cases, judges side with law enforcement regardless in the US. (YMMV depending on what county you’re in. Portland, OR is better about constitutional rights than Oakland, CA).
That said, the FBI is no longer law enforcement but its mission was changed to National Security by James Comey when he was director (it improved his budget to do so, and gave the FBI more latitude regarding operations). I’m tempted to say the FBI acts less as law enforcement and more like the secret police of the US (that is, hunts and investigates enemies of the current administration and those who might bring embarrassment to officials or the US state). So it’ll seize what it wants, and aim to extract intel from what it gets while you fight in the courts to get your stuff back.
That said, if you’re doing anything of interest to the FBI it’s best to encrypt the snot out of it, including having alternate accounts filled with images of furry porn and victims of police violence. And yes, if you’re plotting or signalling on the fediverse, do so in code.
Take this with a grain of salt but what if the unrelated server raid was an excuse
There’s plenty of right wing bigots in the US government that would take the chance to take down anything they don’t agree with
Because of the nature of the fediverse, this also implicates user messages and posts from other instances.
When they say ‘messages and posts’, the posts are publicly available, by messages do they mean comments?.. or is this saying that private messages between users are also in this data?
I guess I’m still ignorant about parts of how the fediverse works. If I private message someone on our .world instance, that data is stored on Ruud’s server only, correct? But if I private message someone on another instance, that data is stored on both servers?
edit I just read the mastodon post, it says:
- All your posts: public, unlisted, followers-only, and direct (“DMs”)
Shit.
Lemmy DMs are not private and the software even tells you to use matrix.
They’re semi-private, in that users can’t just see other user’s DMs. However instance admin have the capability - the instance admin can see everything in their instance.
because of kolektiva the FBI has my nudes saved on a hardrive somewhere 💀
If you posted them on the Internet, the NSA already had them.
i suddenly want to join the FBI
I think this is a good discussion to link this: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/user-generated-content-and-fediverse-legal-primer
That’d be funny if a random sends me a private message, like
"Hey, nice cock.
Love, FBI"
That’d make my day ngl
