The New York Times broke the story yesterday that the FBI had seized a number of servers from a datacenter located in Reston, Virginai, owned by web hosting provider DigitalOne (offline at press time). According to the New York Times story, the FBI reportedly had information that some of the servers at DigitalOne were used by the hacker group LulzSec, so the agency raided the facility in the early morning hours of Tuesday, June 21st.
I find this news interesting for three reasons: To begin with, this raid signifies that LulzSec has managed to finally draw the ire of the likes of the FBI, CIA, Britain's Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA), and a number of other government agencies throughout Europe. All the aforementioned groups are reportedly working together to bring down LulzSec.
Secondly, initial reports surfacing about the DigitalOne raid raises some disturbing questions about the apparently destructive methods used by the FBI to confiscate servers used by LulzSec. While the data and information the FBI sought was located on a specific server, the agents involved reportedly pulled three entire enclosures of hardware from the data center, impacting dozens of DigitalOne clients who are unaffiliated with LulzSec and innocent of any wrongdoing.
Finally, that overly aggressive seizure of datacenter hardware by the FBI begins to cast further doubt on companies that are considering moving parts of their IT infrastructure into the cloud. What happens if you have critical business information co-located at a hosting provider, and the FBI or other government agency decides to seize the hardware? Windows IT Pro contributor David Chernicoff has a excellent post on this topic over at ZDNet, and any IT administrator considering the cloud for their IT resources would be wise to read it.
So what are your thoughts on the FBI raid of DigitalOne? Does the FBI's desire to stop LulzSec trump the rights of innocent parties who suffered due to their seizure of DigitalOne hardware? And what does this mean for cloud computing adoption? Let me know what you think by adding a comment to this blog post or by starting up a conversation on Twitter.
