Instapaper FBI Server Theft is Theft

Earlier this week, the government came in hot and swooped into a data center and grabbed a bunch of servers — rather indiscriminately! This was part of Operation Trident Tribunal, which, wow. Operation Trident Tribunal will just come and take whatever it wants, whenever it wants. The proprietor of Instapaper writes today, of his stolen server: “The FBI has only stolen my time and a partial month of hosting fees, not any physical property of mine…. Possibly most importantly, though, the FBI is now presumably in possession of a complete copy of the Instapaper database as it stood on Tuesday morning, including the complete list of users and any non-deleted bookmarks…. The server also contained a complete copy of the Instapaper website codebase, but not the codebase of the iOS app. Due to the police culture in the United States, especially at the federal level, I don’t expect to ever get an explanation for this, have the server or its data returned, or be reimbursed for the damage they have illegally caused.”

(N.B. The Instapaper blog post regarding this ridiculous and totally not okay event is 836 words long, including quotations from other sources, and we have reprinted 116 of them here, including 12 uses of the word “the,” with a link to the original source and named credit.)